In vain you look in the Tagus for that forest of shipping which should fringe the watery highway to, and ought to constitute the leading feature in, so fine a port—the capital of a country the once nautical genius of whose people is expressed in the only poem in any language that makes adventures on the deep its theme. A few stray vessels here and there, with river and fishing boats, and those singular latine sails, that so strike the stranger,[28] some steamers and Government vessels, were all that could now be seen on the bosom of the river, so famed amongst the ancients for its golden attributes, not because of its auriferous sands,[29] but because of the affluent tide of its teeming commerce—that port whence, in after ages, though now ages long ago, went forth those expeditions which brought much of Asia into comparative contiguity with Europe, and discovered, and long held so much of, the finest portion of the New World. For a wonder, not a ‘speck of power’ of that nation, whose commerce rose as Lusitania’s fell, not an English man-of-war, ubiquitous in every water, and very often present, and too long at a time, in most unnecessary numbers, in these waters in particular, was to be seen, though Admiral Corry’s squadron, containing many of the finest and latest built men-of-war in our navy, including the ‘Duke of Wellington,’ and now with Napier in the Baltic, has since been there. Their absence, however gratifying to financial economists and advocates of non-intervention in politics, helped to complete the triste and dreary air of the empty mart and shipless bay. The cause of this poverty of trade must be obvious to all, even to enlightened Portuguese. The Government, blind to all experience elsewhere, deaf to the supplications of common sense and even self-interest, draw a kind of cordon round the little trade they still possess, and encumber it with such a net-work of preposterous restrictions, as actually to squeeze the life-blood out of it, or, rather, altogether arrest its circulation, which is the same thing in the end, as regards the vitality of commerce. The evil extends to every ramification of industrial pursuit; and one half of the population live upon a system that seems to have been invented to exclude, instead of encouraging business to come to their shores. Hence, it need hardly be said, that smuggling is the most profitable trade going; and a large and rapidly increasing business in that line is carried on, along the frontier in particular.