duce-rents, it was inferred erroneously, must fall again if such a treaty were concluded. The noble author of the picture of a Patriot King treated De Torcy's offer with unwonted disdain. His metaphysics and philosophy did not enable him to foresee the inevitable results of the Methuen treaty concluded ten years before. It cost more than a century and a quarter of time to force the national taste by the argument of the pocket, and to rivet a prejudice another century may not obliterate. The magic lay in the word "wool," the manufactures of which were to flourish the more the longer they were steeped in the blood of the Portugal grape, fevered with brandy. Yet, in 1801, and in the time of the largest import of the wine of Portugal, we received only from seven to eight million pounds of foreign wool, our own not sufficing, under the famed differential duties, and in 1849 we imported nearly seventy-seven millions.

The old wine company was formed at Oporto under the pretence of correcting abuses in making and exporting wines. The true ground of its formation was to create a monopoly to keep up prices which had before been low, and regulated in the open market. The first natural result of the Methuen treaty, made when the Portuguese were ignorant of the shortest way of preparing wine for exportation to England, was the neglect of all improvement. The second, the best part of twenty years afterwards, was that the Portuguese, to save trouble, deteriorated the wine by mingling at first a small quantity of brandy, about three gallons to the pipe, while fermentation was proceeding. Before this the wine was a pure, natural, sound growth, wholesome and vinous. The practice was then styled "diabolical" by the English merchants; what epithet it now deserves, when twenty-five gallons of spirit are added to the pipe, displacing the same number of wine gallons, in place of that amount in wine, it is not difficult to imagine.

Oporto was in future to be the only place of export for the district specified, including all the vineyards in which the Methuen wine was grown. The place of exit was under the absolute control of the company. They made specious excuses for the monopoly in professing how they would correct abuses. There was to be no bad vine-dressing, no elderberry colouring, and a just classification of wines. The market was to be opened at a fixed day. It need not be remarked that the whole was an odious monopoly to sustain prices artificially, which the excellent climate of the Douro and the zeal of the farmer would have kept down. They succeeded in getting up the prices, and in maintaining them, there is every reason to think, with inferior wine to what had been before made. Don Pedro wisely abolished this shameful monopoly in 1834. Habits, connexions, and capital interlocked for above a century, it required time to disunite and change from injurious to beneficial action. Oporto was declared a free port. The old system was still powerful when, in 1842, the company was restored with an influence irresistible. Attached to it was the right of exacting most oppressive export duties from the English merchants. Those duties, and a permit to pass wine out of Oporto, raised the cost of wine six or seven pounds a pipe; so that it is now worth the trouble to export the wine via America to England. The export duties are all included in the small sum of sixpence to exporters anywhere out of Europe, where little wine of Oporto will be

swallowed except by Englishmen, to whom it is peculiar. It is evident, therefore, against whom the impost is directed. The imposition, too, is in violation of the express words of a treaty, the object of which was to secure free and unrestrained permission to Englishmen to buy and sell, without preference or favour shared by others, throughout the realm of Portugal. The shufflings, evasions, and trickery displayed in the evidence, however disgusting, render its perusal useful to show how far the public may be abused by exclusive trading privileges. The adulterations of the first company seem to have increased notoriously after 1820, whence the remark of many elderly persons who are fond of port is well founded, that they are obliged to leave it off, " for it is not like what they were accustomed to take formerly."

With a continual increase of produce, although some estates are not half cultivated, the monopoly keeps prices higher now, when only three millions of gallons and a little more are consumed in England, than in the beginning of the century, when we consumed five or six millions. It is the only mercantile commodity in which increase of quantity is powerless to lessen price. Let us see how Portuguese ingenuity manages. In 1851, it appeared that ninety-five thousand pipes had been grown. Of this the company declared forty-one thousand odd hundreds to be of prime quality. This was too much to maintain prices, and the company_ordered that no more than twenty thousand should be exported in Europe! The difference of the forty-one thousand firstclass pipes they added to another class of eighteen thousand out of the quantity they had rated second, thus falsely denominating second more than one-half of the first quality, knowing that not more than five thousand could be disposed of. This Portuguese trick is not repeated every year in this precise mode, because sometimes the second class is transferred to the first, if it be necessary to increase the quantity of what they call first, or for any other cause; the infusion of brandy and colouring matter equalising differences in taste. Nor was this all, because the merchant who wanted to export the best wine was only allowed to export that which the company had adulterated, unless he had recourse to stratagem. He therefore purchased a permit as for the company's wine to go out, giving three pounds sterling for the document, and substituting the wine he wished to send in place of that which it was only legal, under the company's auspices, to send away. Thus eminent merchants here managed to get a little good wine out of the country by smuggling, the company itself winking at the breach of its own regulations, in order to extort money from the English merchant exclusively.

Such are some of the effects of the differential duty in favour of Portugal which are still in full action. The Methuen treaty drove away the wines and the consequent exchanges of goods with other countries. Port and sherry have been the staple, with a little claret and Champagne to oblige a fashionable customer. Some commercial houses affect to acknowledge no other species of wine than port and sherry, and many have heard, but never really known, any other qualities.

duce-rents, it was inferred erroneously, must fall again if such a treaty were concluded. The noble author of the picture of a Patriot King treated De Torcy's offer with unwonted disdain. His metaphysics and philosophy did not enable him to foresee the inevitable results of the Methuen treaty concluded ten years before. It cost more than a century and a quarter of time to force the national taste by the argument of the pocket, and to rivet a prejudice another century may not obliterate. The magic lay in the word "wool," the manufactures of which were to flourish the more the longer they were steeped in the blood of the Portugal grape, fevered with brandy. Yet, in 1801, and in the time of the largest import of the wine of Portugal, we received only from seven to eight million pounds of foreign wool, our own not sufficing, under the famed differential duties, and in 1849 we imported nearly seventy-seven millions.

The old wine company was formed at Oporto under the pretence of correcting abuses in making and exporting wines. The true ground of its formation was to create a monopoly to keep up prices which had before been low, and regulated in the open market. The first natural result of the Methuen treaty, made when the Portuguese were ignorant of the shortest way of preparing wine for exportation to England, was the neglect of all improvement. The second, the best part of twenty years afterwards, was that the Portuguese, to save trouble, deteriorated the wine by mingling at first a small quantity of brandy, about three gallons to the pipe, while fermentation was proceeding. Before this the wine was a pure, natural, sound growth, wholesome and vinous. The tice was then styled "diabolical" by the English merchants; what epithet it now deserves, when twenty-five gallons of spirit are added to the pipe, displacing the same number of wine gallons, in place of that amount in wine, it is not difficult to imagine.

prac

Oporto was in future to be the only place of export for the district specified, including all the vineyards in which the Methuen wine was grown. The place of exit was under the absolute control of the company. They made specious excuses for the monopoly in professing how they would correct abuses. There was to be no bad vine-dressing, no elderberry colouring, and a just classification of wines. The market was to be opened at a fixed day. It need not be remarked that the whole was an odious monopoly to sustain prices artificially, which the excellent climate of the Douro and the zeal of the farmer would have kept down. They succeeded in getting up the prices, and in maintaining them, there is every reason to think, with inferior wine to what had been before made. Don Pedro wisely abolished this shameful monopoly in 1834. Habits, connexions, and capital interlocked for above a century, it required time to disunite and change from injurious to beneficial action. Oporto was declared a free port. The old system was still powerful when, in 1842, the company was restored with an influence irresistible. Attached to it was the right of exacting most oppressive export duties from the English merchants. Those duties, and a permit to pass wine out of Oporto, raised the cost of wine six or seven pounds a pipe; so that it is now worth the trouble to export the wine via America to England. export duties are all included in the small sum of sixpence to exporters anywhere out of Europe, where little wine of Oporto will be

The

swallowed except by Englishmen, to whom it is peculiar. It is evident, therefore, against whom the impost is directed. The imposition, too, is in violation of the express words of a treaty, the object of which was to secure free and unrestrained permission to Englishmen to buy and sell, without preference or favour shared by others, throughout the realm of Portugal. The shufflings, evasions, and trickery displayed in the evidence, however disgusting, render its perusal useful to show how far the public may be abused by exclusive trading privileges. The adulterations of the first company seem to have increased notoriously after 1820, whence the remark of many elderly persons who are fond of port is well founded, that they are obliged to leave it off, " for it is not like what they were accustomed to take formerly."

With a continual increase of produce, although some estates are not half cultivated, the monopoly keeps prices higher now, when only three millions of gallons and a little more are consumed in England, than in the beginning of the century, when we consumed five or six millions. It is the only mercantile commodity in which increase of quantity is powerless to lessen price. Let us see how Portuguese ingenuity manages. In 1851, it appeared that ninety-five thousand pipes had been grown. Of this the company declared forty-one thousand odd hundreds to be of prime quality. This was too much to maintain prices, and the company ordered that no more than twenty thousand should be exported in Europe! The difference of the forty-one thousand firstclass pipes they added to another class of eighteen thousand out of the quantity they had rated second, thus falsely denominating second more than one-half of the first quality, knowing that not more than five thousand could be disposed of. This Portuguese trick is not repeated every year in this precise mode, because sometimes the second class is transferred to the first, if it be necessary to increase the quantity of what they call first, or for any other cause; the infusion of brandy and colouring matter equalising differences in taste. Nor was this all, because the merchant who wanted to export the best wine was only allowed to export that which the company had adulterated, unless he had recourse to stratagem. He therefore purchased a permit as for the company's wine to go out, giving three pounds sterling for the document, and substituting the wine he wished to send in place of that which it was only legal, under the company's auspices, to send away. Thus eminent merchants here managed to get a little good wine out of the country by smuggling, the company itself winking at the breach of its own regulations, in order to extort money from the English merchant exclusively.

Such are some of the effects of the differential duty in favour of Portugal which are still in full action. The Methuen treaty drove away the wines and the consequent exchanges of goods with other countries. Port and sherry have been the staple, with a little claret and Champagne to oblige a fashionable customer. Some commercial houses affect to acknowledge no other species of wine than port and sherry, and many have heard, but never really known, any other qualities.

The

HAD they been on the parched, arid shores of India, with all the force of its burning sun concentrated on their heads, the heat could scarcely have been more intense. There was no place to turn to for shade; no green spot on which the aching eye could rest: the glare was unbroken and terrible, as it always is there in the brilliant days of summer. town itself, with its white houses, was anything but grateful to the sight, and though the sky was dark blue, to that the eye could not raise itself through the universal glare. The sands burnt with heat; the rays of the sun recoiled from the white bathing-machines; the sea glittered to the eye only in an inferior degree to the white sails of the vessels passing up the Channel; and on the water in the harbour the eye dared not and could not rest, for it was like gazing on molten gold, destroying the sight it dazzled.

On the terrace at the bathing-rooms, or, as it is there styled, the Etablissement des Bains, sat a bevy of girls of various lands-for crowds of many nations flock in summer to that gay French watering-place. They were idly gossiping away the mid-day heat, and longing for the cool hours of night, and for the dancing they would bring-that they might make themselves hot again. Near to one of the doors opening to the large room sat an English girl. Not tall, but stately as the young American at her side; dreamy and imaginative as the Italian before her; calm and self-possessed as the West Indian, who stood making marks with her parasol upon the gravel beneath; graceful and easy as were the French, and beautiful as befitted her birthplace, was this English maiden. Listless enough the group all seemed, save the French, who, as usual, were sitting, clustered in a heap, chattering and gesticulating away. She held a newspaper, this English girl, and glanced at its pages from time to time.

"Have you anything interesting there?" inquired one of the French. "No," was the reply of Miss Chard, raising her eyes from the journal, and offering it to the fair questioner.

"Ah bah! merci to you, mademoiselle, all the same, but I never touch a newspaper," answered the coquettish Gaul.

"The Débats !" remarked the haughty West Indian, with a badlyconcealed sneer. "You are fond of political discussions possibly, Miss Chard; the English mostly are."

"England's men," broke in the American lady, "but not its females, I think. Their minds are not formed for such, their talents are not equal to it."

A quiet, proud smile sat on the beautiful lip of the English girl, though politics were as a sealed book to her; and the American's sentence was cut short by an exclamation from one of the French.

"Ma foi! but the English have talents! talents and pride. Though in all the social conditions of life-a ball-room, for instance, or a morning visit-you may just as well see so many dancing bears."

As she spoke, a gentleman stepped out upon the terrace from the