LETTER XVIII.

Excursion to Cintra.--Villa of Ramalhaô.--The Garden.--Collares.--Pavilion designed by Pillement.--A convulsive gallop.--Cold weather in July.

July 9th, 1787.

I was at the Marialva Palace by nine, and set off from thence with the Marquis for Cintra. Having the command of the Queen’s stables, in which are four thousand mules and two thousand horses, he orders as many relays as he pleases, and we changed mules four times in the space of an hour.

A few minutes after ten we were landed at Ramalhaô, a villa, under the pyramidical rocks of Cintra, Signor S. Arriaga was so kind as to lend me a month or two ago, and which I have not had time to visit till to-day. The suite of apartments are spacious and airy, and the views they command of sea and arid country boundless; but unless the heat becomes more violent, I shall be cooler than I wish in them, as they contain not a chimney except in the kitchen.

I found the garden in excellent order, and flourishing crops of vegetables springing up between rows of orange and citron. Such is the power of the climate, that the gardenias and Cape plants I brought with me from England, mere stumps, are covered with beautiful blossoms. The curled mallows, and some varieties of Indian-corn, sown by my English gardener, have shot up to a strange elevation, and begin already to form shady avenues and fairy forests, where children might play in perfection at landscape-gardening.

After I had passed half-an-hour in looking about me, the Marquis and I got into our chair and drove to his own villa; a new creation, which has cost him a great many thousand pounds sterling. Five years ago it was a wild hill bestrewn with flints and rocky fragments. At present you find a gay pavilion designed by Pillement, and elegantly decorated; a parterre with statues and fountains, thick alleys of laurel, bay, and laurustine, cascades, arbours, clipped box-trees, and every ornament the Portuguese taste in gardening renders desirable.

We dined at a clean snug inn, situated towards the middle of the village of Cintra. The Queen has lately bestowed this house and a large tract of ground adjoining it, upon the Marquis. From its windows and loggias you look down deep ravines and bold slopes of woods and copses, variegated with mossy stones and ancient decayed chesnuts.

As soon as the sun grew low we went to Collares, and walked on a terrace belonging to M. la Roche, a French merchant, who has shown some glimmering of taste in the laying out of his villa. The groves of pine and chesnut starting from the crevices of rock, and rising one above another to a considerable elevation, give Collares the air of an Alpine village. Innumerable rills, overhung by cork-trees and branching lemons, burst out of ruined walls by the wayside, and dash into marble basins. A favourite attendant of the late king’s, who has a very large property in these environs, invited us with much civility and obsequiousness into his garden. I thought myself entering the orchards of Alcinous. The boughs literally bent under loads of fruit; the slightest shake strewed the ground with plums, oranges, and apricots.

This villa boasts a grand artificial cascade, with tritons and dolphins vomiting torrents of water; but I paid it not half the attention its proprietor expected, and retiring under the shade of the fruit-trees, feasted on the golden apples and purple plums that were rolling about me in such profusion. The Marquis, who shares with most of the Portuguese a remarkable predilection for flowers, filled his carriage with carnations and jasmine. I never saw plants more conspicuous for size and vigour than those which have the luck of being sown in this fortunate soil. The exposition likewise is singularly happy; skreened by sloping hills, and defended from the sea-airs by several miles of thickets and orchards. I felt unwilling to quit a spot so favoured by nature, and M---- flatters himself I shall be tempted to purchase it.

The wind became troublesome as we ascended the hill, crowned by the Marialva villa. The sky was clear and the sun set fiery. The distant convent of Mafra, glowing with ruddy light, looked like the enchanted palace of a giant, and the surrounding country bleak and barren as if the monster had eaten it desolate. To repose ourselves a little after our rapid excursion we entered the pavilion I told you just now Pillement had designed. It represents a bower of fantastic Indian trees mingling their branches, and discovering between them peeps of a summer sky. From the mouth of a flying dragon depends a magnificent lustre for fifty lights, hung with festoons of brilliant glass, that twinkle like strings of diamonds.

We loitered in this saloon till it was pitch-dark. The pages riding full speed before us with flaming torches, and the wind driving back sparks and smoke full in our faces, I was stunned and bewildered, and experienced, perhaps, the sensations of a novice in sorcery, mounted for the first time behind a witch on a broomstick. In less than an hour we had rattled over twelve miles of rough, disjoined pavement, going up and down the steepest hills in a convulsive gallop, so that I expected every instant to be thrown flat on my nose; but, happily, the mules were picked from perhaps a hundred, and never stumbled. I found the air on the heights above the Ajueda very keen and piercing.

It sounds strange to be complaining of cold at Lisbon on the ninth of July.