nd
Alpine strawberries are in abundance. The Indian cane, with its splendid
blossom, whose colour resembles that of the Guernsey, or rather the
Chinese lily, is a gay addition to the ornaments of this earthly
paradise. Mr. Kinsey says "The _ulmis adjungere vitem_ is well known in
poetical description, but in Portugal, besides overshadowing their
artificial supporters, the vines are seen attaching themselves to, or
hanging down in luxuriant festoons from forest-trees, such as the oak,
chestnut, and cork, in all the wildness of nature, and not unfrequently
insinuating themselves among the branches of myrtle-trees, which attain
a considerable size in the hedge-rows, and contrasting their large,
purple bunches with the snow-white blossom. The union is truly poetical,
and its novelty is charming to the eye of a northern traveller. A vine
is often purposely planted by the farmer under an oak-tree, whose boughs
it soon over-runs, repaying the little labour expended in its
cultivation by its fruit, and the lop of its branches. Ten pipes of
green wine, _vinho verde_, expressed from these grapes, will yield one
pipe of excellent brandy. Being light and sharp, the vinho verde is
preferred by the generality of Portuguese in the summer, to wines of
superior strength and quality."

The population of Oporto and Villa Nova was stated by Colonel Batty in
1830, to amount to about 80,000 inhabitants.

* * * * *

POETS, MINOR AND MAJOR.

Perhaps no branch of literary reputation is so difficult to establish as
that of first-rate poetic excellence. During the last fifty years, many
meritorious competitors for bardic renown have successively aspired to
public favour, and have each in their turns exhibited their fancy-woven
_bouquets_, as containing a more beautiful assemblage of "flowers of all
hue," as Milton divinely sings, than those which their equally emulative
and praiseworthy compeers have, in their best attempts, laid out upon
the _parterre_ of the public. In the poetic foreground of the above
period, are to be seen the names of Pye, Ogilvie, Whitehead, Tasker,
Mason, Cowper, Merry, Jerningham, Woty, Hurdis, Pratt, Fitzgerald, &c.
over whose metrical effusions, with the exception of the fifth and
sixth, the clouds of obscurity have long since cast a darkening hue.
Even the "Elegaic Sonnets" of Charlotte Smith, which first appeared in
1784, and formed a sort of poetical era in point of popularity,