sometimes offends those who expect and demand them. He is fond of his ease, does his best to procure it, and enjoys it as much as possible. He loves good cheer, good wine, and good company. His senses as well as his mind have a high relish of perfection, and strive to attain it. He never eats a bad dinner without a severe censure upon the cook, as he never listens to folly without a keen rebuke. A little dissimulation would save him from many harmless enemies, who are not more to be regarded, however, than the small faults, which excite their enmity; but every species of deception, from whatever motive, is incompatible with the elevation, integrity and frankness of the man, whom I delineate. "One of his most remarkable, and, if I may so say, one of his fundamental qualities, is his regard for truth, so constant, so absolute, so scrupulous, that it might seem carried to an exaggeration, were it not for the importance of its principle. Never, under any circumstances, in the excitement of an animated story, or in the lively flow of pleasantry, does a word escape him, not a single word, that is not strictly conformable to truth. He has no conception of the pliancy of truth; he yields to her on all occasions, because nothing is more beautiful in his eyes than truth; and because, also, a mind so much enlightened by her rays, so capable of discovering her charms and extending her reign, is naturally inclined to uphold and defend her." --vol. i. pp. 506, 507. Mr. Morris married late in life Anne Carey Randolph, a connexion formed with his usual judgment, and which greatly contributed to his happiness. He left one son, who, after his mother's death, is to inherit the property. Astonishment has been expressed at the vast amount of Mr. Morris's accumulations. The secret is to be found in the accuracy of his judgment, the clearness of his foresight, and in his integrity and industry. Numerous volumes of business letters, copied in Mr. Morris's own handwriting, unfold a series of enterprizes, commercial schemes, and transactions in various countries, from which may be gathered a detailed history of the sources of his wealth, and the progress of its acquisition. But the chief basis of Mr. Morris's property was his successful speculations in new lands, continued for a long term of years. It may be mentioned as a last trait of his generosity, that he leaves in his will an additional income to his wife in case she should re-marry, "in order to defray the increased expenditure which may attend that connexion." ART. V.-1. Parnaso Lusitano, ou Poesias Selectas dos Auctores Portuguezes Antigos e Modernos, illustradas com Notas. Precedido de uma Historia abreviada da Lingua e Poesia Portugueza. 5 tom. 24mo. Paris. 1826. (Lusitanian Parnassus, or a Selection of Poetry from Ancient and Modern Portugueze Authors, illustrated with Notes. Preceded by a short History of the Language and Poetry of Portugal.) 2. Adozinda, Romance. Pelo Auctor da Historia da Lingua e Litteratura Portugueza, na Colleccâo intitulada Parnaso Lusitano, &c. &c. &c. 12mo. Londres. 1828. (Adozinda, a Romance. By the Author of the History of the Language and Literature of Portugal, in the Collection intitled the Lusitanian Parnassus. London.) This It is a very common idea amongst persons who know nothing about the matter, that the Portugueze language is merely a dialect of Spanish, spoken by a bigoted, illiterate people, and possessing no work worth reading except the LUSIAD of Camoens. idea is altogether erroneous. That Portugueze and Spanish are closely allied, is beyond dispute, and might be asserted a priori, seeing that they are sister tongues, born of the same parents;-of which relations by the way they enjoy double the usual number, that is to say, four, the Latin, Celtic, Gothic and Arabic languages. But, as is often the case in families, they differ widely in character, and Portugueze is the elder sister. By national authors it is called the eldest daughter of the Latin, and the claim would be irrefragable, could we give full credit to the high antiquity ascribed to a fragment, still extant, of a poem, which is said to have been found in the year 1187 in a condition so injured by time that little more than thirty lines were legible. This poem is believed by Portugueze scholars to have been written by Roderic, the last Gothic King of Spain, and thus to be coeval with the Arab conquest of the Peninsula in the beginning of the eighth century; a date and author which would prove Portugueze to have once been the general language of the whole country. But though the poem should not be the work of King Roderic, a MS. which was consumed by age in the twelfth century must be reasonably old in comparison even to the Romance or Provençal language, and we have some internal evidence of its not being much posterior to the earliest date assigned, in the paucity of words of Arab origin which it exhibits, Almirante and Gibraltar In conformity with, if not in corroboration of, this idea, we may observe that Portugueze writers consider the denomination of Spain as comprehending the whole Peninsula, which they divide into the Castilian and Portugueze nations or provinces. being, as we recollect, the only two. The language of this fragment is not much more difficult to be understood than that of Chaucer or Gower; and a little song, written during the reign of the first sovereign of Portugal, Count Henrique, who died in 1112, is perfectly intelligible even to us foreigners of the nineteenth century. Having thus established the antiquity of the Portugueze language, we must further observe that it is entirely free from the abundant gutturals that characterize the Spanish, and would rival the Italian in softness were not its melody somewhat disfigured by certain terminations in am, em and ao or om, the nasal enunciation of which, although bearing some affinity to the sound of the French words vin, &c. is averred to be utterly unattainable by any but native organs. That Portugal has for a considerable length of time been to a great degree bigoted and illiterate, must, we fear, be conceded, but in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, she ranked at least amongst the most cultivated and adventurous nations in Europe. Then was it that the scientific ardour and enterprise of one of her princes, Don Henrique, gave birth to those voyages of geogra phical research which led her bold and able mariners to the East Indies, inspired the genius of Columbus with the daring idea of reaching the desired point by sailing in a contrary direction, and thus occasioned the first discovery of the New World. And when the astronomical science and nautical skill of the Portugueze had effected this grand object of their ambition, their intrepidity and military efficiency, acquired in contests with the Moors, enabled the small numbers sent out by the smallest of European kingdoms, to triumph over those dreaded Mahometan warriors who had conquered Asia, and to add an immense and wealthy empire to the dominions of Portugal. It was during this period of political splendour that the writers, still regarded as the Portugueze classics, flourished. But the greatness of Portugal was not permanent. The boyish imprudence of Sebastian drenched the sands of Africa with the best blood of his kingdom; his crown, despoiled of its hardy defenders, dropt helplessly, a burthen rather than a prize, upon the head of his great-uncle, the Cardinal Henrique, a man, if not actually imbecile, at least unfit, from advanced age and monastic habits, for governing under circumstances of difficulty; and upon this old monarch's death, it fell a prey to the power, the gold, and the craft of Philip II. of Spain. Portugal, thus inthralled, lost her vigour. Her colonies were conquered by Holland, and her authors took to writing bad Spanish. It appears surprising that the same energy which subsequently enabled Portugal to burst her fetters, seat her lawful hereditary King, in the person of the Duke of Braganza, upon the throne, and recover some of her colonies from the Dutch, should not have revived her intellectual powers; our recollection of the coincidence of martial and literary glory in Greece, being rather too vivid to allow of our agreeing with Francisco Manuel de Nascimento, who (in an epistle, Da Arte Poetica e Lingua Portugueza, or of the Art of Poetry and the Language of Portugal, prefixed as a second poetical introduction to the compilation before us) ascribes it to the long wars induced by the necessity of maintaining the newly recovered independence of Portugal. He says "The tumult, the disorder, that belong To brazen cannon and to mortar hoarse, To nought but clashing arms direct their ears, Save on the glowing ball, the murderous breach." But, alas! the terrible Inquisition, with its despotic authority and its innate hostility to mental illumination, offers too ready a solution of the difficulty. We might be tempted to add, as a second cause, the neglect which letters and science long experienced from the court and higher nobility of Portugal. But this neglect existed when Camoens wrote, and was not confined to literature. If Camoens died in an hospital, so did some of those generals who conquered half India for their ungrateful country. Yet other generals regained or enlarged the Indian empire, whilst Camoens had no successor for upwards of a hundred years after the recovery of Portugueze independence. If, soon after that revolution, several authors did once more write in their mother tongue, they transplanted into it all the faults (especially the inflated bombast termed Gongorism, from its first inventor Gongora,) then disfiguring the literature of Spain, to which they added the conceits introduced by Marini into that of Italy; and it was not till the middle of the eighteenth century that Portugueze genius revived, fostered apparently by the vigorous and national administration of the Marquez de Pombal, and the efficiency which, amongst his other reforms, he gave to the course of instruction, previously almost null, of the University of Coimbra. We now come to the third point of the vituperative opinion we are endeavouring to refute, and perhaps the five little volumes before us may be thought sufficiently to answer the question, whether there be any Portugueze work besides the Lusiad worth reading? We must, however, premise a word or two upon the general character of Portugueze literature, or rather poetry, to which upon the present occasion we shall confine our attention, ere we proceed to offer our readers a few specimens, which may, we should hope, awaken some interest in the language and writings of a country, one of England's oldest, and long one of her most faithful, allies. The poetry of Portugal differs altogether from that of the sister peninsular kingdom. It is entirely free from the extravagance and frequent absurdity with which the latter is usually taxed by strict classical critics; but we must confess that in our estimation it pays a high price for an exemption purchased with the sacrifice of originality and nationality. In all countries, we apprehend, poetry has been the spontaneous offspring of native genius. In Spain, as in England, the authors of a more enlightened era were too deeply imbued with the same spirit and impulses that gave birth to the first attempts at song, to reject the rude strains of their untutored predecessors, and devoted their higher cultivation and classical knowledge to the improving and polishing the national muse. In Portugal, on the contrary, as in Italy, the study of the classics seems to have inspired a disgust for every thing else. The early simple Chacra, analogous to the Romance of Spain and the English Ballad, was contemptuously rejected, as fit only for the nursery; and the mutilated fragments of them that remain, exist, we believe, chiefly in those store houses of legendary lore, the memories of village crones. These Chacras, like the Spanish Romances, were written in a metre peculiar, as far as we know, to the peninsula, called asonancia, an imperfect rhyme in which the vowels only are considered; e. g. air and maid are asonante; and the effect to the ear arises chiefly from the constant recurrence of the same vowels, one asonancia running through the whole or great part of a poem. In Portugal, the metre has perished with the Chacra, which has not, until within the last few years, been deemed worthy the attention of a single scholar. The very utmost stretch of patriotism and of national feeling went no farther than to endeavour to adapt the vernacular idiom to the perfect models of antiquity, and in such classical Portugueze strains to sing national subjects. Similarity of design has produced a great similarity of character in many points at least in the literature of the two countries; the Portugueze being chiefly distinguished from the Italian by an occasional tone of imaginative and philosophical melancholy, more akin to the warblings of the northern muse. This resemblance has, probably, induced Portugueze poets to borrow from their Italian brethren whatever the great masters of both did not yield them, namely, many of their metrical forms, as |