seizes the ideas of others and returns | author of the "Histoire de la Poésie change for them." As a specimen of Madame Mohl's style in English, which was said not to equal her writing in French, we give one more quotation from "Madame Récamier, and the History of Society in France." In the latter part of this work she traces the influence of the old ballads and Provençal traditions on chivalry in the eleventh century: That these stories originated in real facts belonging to these localities which the border ballads first commemorated, and by degrees altered, can scarcely be doubted. We find to this day the Brèche de Roland made by the sword Durandal when the hero was dying; the story was recorded in one of the old ballads, and this trace remains of it. It is equally impossible to doubt from the quantity of Provençal romances founded on Charlemagne's passage into Spain, that these traditions delighted both poets and people long before chivalry was thought of; but when the Provençal poets and chivalry did appear, this became their heroic age; they looked back upon it as the Greeks must have looked upon the days of Orpheus and Theseus. Nor was their reverence for it such a mere matter of fancy as might at first sight appear; for out of these mysterious thickets of history a spirit came forth just as spontaneous and fresh as a spring sparkling out of the ground in some deep glen, and like the same little rill after murmuring a long time in dark, solitary woods, it emerged into sight, became broader and deeper, and poured down like a river, bringing to us the majestic civilization that overspread the country. How many curious and active spirits have endeavored to trace a river to its source; but can any stream, however beneficent, be compared to the poetry which was the source of our modern civilization, whose infancy was concealed in these unknown regions of history? It cannot relate its own birth, nor how it was nourished; but when this young muse, all charming with unconsciousness, began to speak, it was in a new tongue, so soft, so full of tenderness and grace, and the sentiments she expressed in this musical Provençal were so refined and enchanting, that all around were enthralled. As Miss Mary Clarke, she was the literary executor of M. Fauriel, the Provençale," etc.; and with fidelity and care she fulfilled the trust - Jules Mohl, who was also Fauriel's friend, generously aiding her in what was a labor of love. Our last interview with her was early in 1870, when, being in Paris for a day or two with my husband on our way to Italy, we went to the Rue du Bac and made an early call. Madame Mohl received us in the traditional dressinggown and curl-papers, the latter of very varied and brilliant hues, being red, green, and blue circulars utilized for this purpose. I imagined that she would make a little apology to my husband for appearing in this costume, as he was a complete stranger to her; but she made no allusion to this, and was quite unconscious of there being anything remarkable in her appearance, she getting as usual to the kernel of the subjects discussed. Her attractive niece, Miss Mohl, who afterwards became Madame Helmholtz, was with her, busily engaged with her painting The use of the circulars as curl-papers was one of the small economies which amused her friends, who knew of her frequent deeds of generosity and benevolence. For example, we read of Madame Mohl running about Paris one morning to induce buyers to go to the forced sale of a poor old friend's furniture, she attending herself and expending nearly two thousand franes in buying out what would be most useful, and presenting the same to the poor widow. Would that we had preserved the quaint little notes that at long intervals were received from her! One only I can find - undated as usual - written from the Deanery of Westminster in June, 1871. It was in reply to an invitation. She was unable to accept it definitely, and said: "If not, I shall certainly go some morning to see you." But we were on the point of leaving London, and saw her face no more. More touching than her own deathbed, as recorded by the biographer, was that of Jules Mohl, whose death took place several years before that of his To her his death was desolation. Faithful friends rallied round her and kept by her to the last, but the aged woman was often found by them in floods of tears, and her only pleasure was in talking of "Mr. Mohl," and in bringing out editions of his translations from Persian and Chinese and other works. Her own summons came when she had attained the age of ninety-two. She used her gifts in brightening the lives of others, and the memory of Mary Mohl will be cherished in many hearts as it is in ours. wife. When power of speech was lost | politician, and hated the English viruto the dying man, and while struggling lently, telling me so with curious cirfor breath, his hand was put out to cumlocutions. He was of opinion, he stroke her poor face a mute expres- said, that though the English were unsion of consciousness that she was by fortunately powerful on the sea, on his side. land his nation was a match for us. As for the English in Africa, he declared the Portuguese able to sweep them into the sea. But though he hated the English, his admiration for Queen Victoria was as unbounded as our own earth-hunger. She was, he told me, entirely on the side of the Portuguese in the sad troubles which English politicians were then causing. He detailed, as particularly as if he had been present, a strange scene reported to have taken place between Soveral, their ambassador, and Lord Salisbury, in which discussion grew heated. It seemed as if they would part in anger. At last Soveral arose and exclaimed with much dignity: "You must now excuse me, my Lord Salisbury, I have to dine with the queen to-night." My Lord Salisbury started, looked incredulous, and said coldly, "You are playing with me. This cannot be." “Indeed," said the ambassador, producing a telegram from Windsor, "it is as I say." And then Salisbury turned pale, fell back in his chair, and gasped for breath. "And after that," said my informant, "things went well." Several people at the table listened to this story and seemed to believe it. With much difficulty I preserved a grave countenance, and congratulated him on the possession of an ambassador who was more than a match for our foreign minister. Before the end of dinner he informed me that the English were as a general rule savages, while the Portuguese were civilized. Having lived in London he knew this to be so. Finding that he knew the East End of our gigantic city, I found it difficult to contradict him. From The Cornhill Magazine. THE Portuguese are not wholly offensive. In politics, or when they hunger after African territory we fancy needed for our own people, they may seem so. When a rebuff excites them against the English, Lisbon may not be pleasant for Englishmen. But in such cases would London commend itself to a triumphant foreigner? For my own part, I found a kind of gentle, unobtrusive politeness even among those Portuguese who knew I was English. Occasionally, on being taken for an American, I did not correct the mistake, for having no quarrel with Americans they sometimes confided to me the bitterness of their hearts against the English. I stayed in Lisbon at the Hotel Universal in the Rua Nova da Almeda, a purely Portuguese house where only stray Englishmen came. At the table d'hôte I one night had a conversation with a mild-mannered Certainly Lisbon, as far as visible Portuguese which showed the curious ignorance and almost childish vanity of the race. I asked him in French if he spoke English. Doing so badly we mingled the two languages and at last talked vivaciously. He was an ardent poverty is concerned, is far better than London. I saw few very miserable people; beggars were not at all numerous. In a week I was only asked twice for alms. One constantly hears that Lisbon is dirty, and as full of foul odors as Coleridge's Cologne. I did mighty parcels upon their heads; men not find it so, and the bright sunshine great baskets. Fish is carried in spreadand the fine color of the houses might ing flat baskets by girls. They look well compensate for some drawbacks. afar off like gigantic hats; further The houses of this regular town are still, like quaint odd toadstools in mowhite, and pale yellow, and fine worn- tion. All household furniture removout pink, with narrow, green painted ing among the poor is done by hand. verandahs which soon lose crudeness Two or four men load up a kind of flat in the intense light. The windows of hand-barrow without wheels till it is the larger blocks are numerous and set pyramidal and colossal with piled gear. in long, regular lines; the streets if Then passing poles through the loop narrow run into open squares blazing of ropes, with a slow effort they raise with white, unsoiled monuments. All it up and advance at a funereal and day long the ways are full of people solemn pace. The slowness with which who are fairly but unostentatiously they move is pathetic. It is suggestive polite. They do not stare one out of of a dead burden or of some street countenance however one may be accident. But of these latter there dressed. In Antwerp a man who ob- must be very few; there is not much jects to being wondered at may not vehicular traffic in Lisbon. It is comwear a light suit. Lisbon is more cos-paratively rare to see anything like mopolitan. But the beauty of the town cruelty to horses. The mules which of Lisbon is not added to by the beauty draw the primitive, ramshackle trams of its inhabitants. The women are have the worst time of it, and are curiously the_reverse of lovely. Only obliged to pull their load every now occasionally I saw a face which was and again off one line on to another, attractive by the odd conjuncture of an being urged thereto with some brutalolive skin and light grey eyes. They ity. But these trams do not run up do not wear mantillas. The lower the very hilly parts of the city; the classes use a shawl. Those who are of the bourgeois class or above it differ little from Londoners. The working or loafing men, for they laugh and loaf, and work and chaff and chatter at every corner, are more distinct in costume, wearing the flat felt sombrero with turned-up edges that one knows from pictures, while the long coat which has displaced the cloak still retains a smack of it in the way they disregard the sleeves and hang it from their shoulders. These men are decidedly not so ugly as the women, and vary wonderfully in size, color, and complexion, though a big Portuguese is a rarity. The strong point in both sexes is their natural gift for wearing color, for choosing and blending or matching tints. These Portuguese men and women work hard when they do not loaf and chatter. The porters, who stand in knots with cords upon their shoulders, bear huge loads; a characteristic of the place is this load-bearing and the size of the burdens. Women carry main lines run along the Tagus east and west of the great Square of the Black Horse. And by the river the city is flat. Only a little way up, in my street for instance, it rapidly becomes hilly. On entering the hotel, to my surprise I went down-stairs to my bedroom. On looking out of the window a street was even then sixty feet below me. The floor underneath me did not make part of the hotel, but was a portion of a great building occupied by the poorer people and let out in flats. During the day, as I sat by the window working, the noise was not intolerable, but at night when the Lisbonensians took to amusing themselves they roused me from a well-earned sleep. They shouted and sang and made mingled and indistinguishable uproars which rose wildly through the narrow, deep space and burst into my open window. After long endurance I rose and shut it, preferring heat to insomnia. But in the day, after that discord, I always had the harmonious compensations of true Though little apt to do what is supposed to be a traveller's duty in visiting certain obvious places of interest, I one color. Even when the sun shone bril- | are always children and are not somliantly I could not distinguish the grey bre. Only in their graveyards stand blue of the deep shadows, so much solemn cypresses which rise darkly on blue was in the painted or distempered the hillside where they bury their outer walls. It was in Lisbon that I dead; but in life they laugh and are first began to discern the mental effect merry even after they have children of of color, and to see that it comes truly their own. and of necessity from a people's temperament. Can a busy race be true colorists? In some parts of the town, the east-day hunted for the English cemetery in ern quarters, one cannot help notic- which Fielding lies buried, and found ing the still remaining influence of the it at last just at the back of a little open Moors. There are even some true rel- park or garden where children were ics; but certainly the influence sur- playing. On going in I found myself vives in flat-sided houses with small alone save for a gardener who was cutwindows and Moorish ornament high ting down some rank grass with a up just under the edge of the flat scythe. This cemetery is the quietest roof. One day being tired of the more and most beautiful I ever saw. One noisy western town, I went east and might imagine the dead were all climbed up and up and turned round friends. They are at any rate stranby a barrack, where some soldiers eyed me as a possible Englishman, being alternately in deep shadow and burning sunlight. I hoped to see the Tagus at last, for here the houses are not so lofty, and presently, being on very high ground, I caught a view of it darkly dotted with steamers over some flat roofs. Towards the sea it narrows, but above Lisbon it widens out like a lake. On the far side was a white town, beyond that again hills blue with lucid atmosphere. At my feet (I leant against a low wall) was a terraced garden with a big vine spread on a trellis, making or promising to make in the later spring a long, shady arbor, for as yet the leaves were scanty and freshly green. Every house was faint blue, or varied pink, or worn-out, washed-out, sun-dried green. All the tones were beautiful and modest, fitting the sun yet not competing with it. In London the color would break the level of dull tints and angrily protest, growing scarlet and vivid and wrathful. And just as I looked away from the river and the vine-clad terrace there was a scurrying rush of little schoolboys from a steep side street. They ran down the slope, and passed me, going quickly like black blots on the road, yet their laughter was sunlight on the ripple of waters. The Portuguese gers in a far land, an English party with one great man among them. I found his tomb easily, for it is made of massive blocks of stone. Having brought from home his little "Voyage to Lisbon," written just before he died, I took it out, sat down on the stone, and read a page or two. He says farewell at the very end. As I sat the strange and melancholy suggestion of the dead man speaking out of that great kind heart of his, now dust, the strong contrast between the brilliant sunlight and the heavy sombreness of the cypresses of death, the song of spring birds and the sound of children's voices, were strangely pathetic. I rose up and paced that little deadman's ground which was still and quiet. And on another grave I read but a name, the name of some woman, "Eleanor." After life, and work, and love, this is the end. Yet we do remember Fielding. On the following day I went to Cintra out of sheer ennui, for my inability to talk Portuguese made me silent and solitary perforce. And at Cintra I evaded my obvious duty, and only looked at the lofty rock on which the Moorish castle stands. For one thing the hill was swathed in mists, it rained at intervals, a kind of bitter tramontana was blowing. And after running the gauntlet of a crowd of vociferous don women seemed black against white. Inside, in a half shade under glass, a dense crowd moved and chattered and stirred to and fro. The women wore all the colors of flowers and fruit, but chiefly orange. And on the stone floor great flat baskets of oranges, each with a leaf of green attached to it, shone like pure gold. Then there were red apples, and red handkerchiefs twisted over dark hair. Milder looking in tint was the pale Japanese apple, with an artistic refinement of paler color. The crowd, the good humor, the noise, even the odor, which was not so offensive as in our English Covent Garden, made a striking and brilliant impression. Returning to the hotel, I was met by a scarlet procession of priests and acolytes who bore the Host. The passers-by mostly bared their heads. Perhaps but a little while ago every one might have been worldly wise to follow their example, for the Inquisition lasted till 1808 in Spain. key-boys I was anxious to get out of clad This Cintra is a town on a hill and in a hole, a kind of half-funnel opening on a long plain which is dotted by small villages and farms. If the donkey-boys were extirpated it might be fine on a fine day. In the afternoon of that day I went on board the Dunottar Castle, and in the evening sailed for Madeira. A week's odd moments of study and enforced intercourse with waiters and male chambermaids, whose French was even more primitive than my own, had taught me a little Portuguese, that corrupt, unbeautiful, bastard Spanish, and I found it useful even on board the steamer. At any rate, I was able to interpret for a Funchal lawyer who sat by me at table, and afterwards invited me to see him. This smattering of Portuguese I found more useful still at Madeira, or at Funchal its capitalfor I stayed in native hotels. It is the only possible way of learning anything Returning to the station, I ensconced myself in a carriage out of the way of the cutting wind, and talked fluent bad French with a kindly old Portuguese who looked like a Quaker. Two others came in and entered into a lively conversation in which Charing Cross and London Bridge occurred at intervals. It took an hour and a quarter to do the fifteen miles between Cintra and Lisbon. I was told it was considered by no means a very slow train. Travel-about the people in a short visit. ling in Portugal may do something to reconcile one to the trains in the south east of England. Moreover, the English hotels are full of invalids. It is curious to note the present prevalence of consumption The last place I visited in Lisbon was among the natives of Funchal. It is a the market. Outside the glare of the good enough proof on the first face of it hot sun was nearly blinding. Just in that consumption is catching. There that neighborhood all the main build- is a large hospital here for Portuguese ings are purely white, even the shadows patients, though the disease was unmake one's eyes ache. In the open known before the English made a spaces of the squares even brilliantly health resort of it. |