The places of amusement consist of five theatres, including the opera-house, where, as the London and Parisian _dilettanti_ well know, many excellent singers make their _début_: the getting up the scenery, &c., are inferior to few establishments of the kind anywhere, and the prices are very moderate. It is called San Carlos, and it is scarcely inferior in any respect, either in its architectural extent or the liberality of its appointments, to its more famous Neapolitan namesake. Madame Castellan—herself, I believe, a fellow-countrywoman of Inez de Castro, whose portrait she greatly resembles—has been the principal lyric artiste during the past season. There is also a building for bull-fights, which, though perhaps as much a national sport as in Spain, is not pursued with the same passionate ardour, nor with the same skill, as is displayed by professors of the tauro-machiac art in the sister country.
I also attended a sitting of the two Chambers, which appeared to be conducted with great decorum, but, at the same time, without that listlessness or buzzy-fussiness which pervades our own Senate when a bore or a nobody happens to be on his legs. The accommodation for members is at least as good as ours. To be sure, it could not possibly be much worse, if we may judge from those most qualified to form an opinion—the members themselves; for, what with the perpetual complaints about pestilent smells, hot blasts, freezing draughts, blinding light, and sightless darkness, one would imagine that the British Senate-house was constructed to serve as a ‘frightful example’ of deleterious architecture. The wonder is, that any M.P. has the face to approach a life-insurance office, at the beginning of a session, without being prepared with a ‘doubly hazardous’ premium on his ‘policy,’ knowing that he is going to talk, or listen to the talk, of politics for some six months; and, certainly, the looks of many of our law-makers can be consolatory to none but coffin-makers and residuary legatees. Not so with the Portuguese Conscript Fathers, nearly all of whom seemed as hale as new moidores out of the mint, both as to stamina, complexion, and sensibility. The enormous building where they meet (the old convent of San Bento) contains all the needful official and red-tape-ical departments. In the Upper Chamber, the Patriarch occupied the chair, in habiliments not unlike those of the Bishop of Oxford, when enrobed in his costume of Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and it was curious to see an epitome of our own admixture of the ecclesiastical with the temporal system of legislation, in the House of Lords, carried out in this Portuguese conjunction of spiritual with lay law-makers.