To avoid prolixity, tho' in a part of my narrative which may be more agreeable to my reader than it was to me, the providore having at last finished his nap, dispatched this abfurd matter of form, and gave me leave to come, or rather to be carried, on shore. WHAT it was that gave the first hint of this ftrange law is not eafy to guefs. Poffibly, in the infancy of their defection, and before their government could be well established, they were willing to guard against the bare poffibility of furprize, of the fuccefs of which bare poffibility the Trojan horse will remain for ever on record, as a great and memorable example. Now the Portuguese have no walls to fecure them, and a veffel of two or three hundred tuns will contain a much larger body of troops than could be concealed in that famous machine, tho' Virgil tells us (fomewhat hyperbolically, I believe) that it was as big as a mountain. ABOUT feven in the evening I got into a chaife on fhore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the fame time one of the most populous, to a kind kind of coffee-houfe, which is very pleafantly fituated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Taio from Lisbon to the fea. HERE we regaled ourselves with a good fupper, for which we were as well charged, as if the bill had been made on the Bath road, between Newbury and London. AND now we could joyfully fay, Therefore in the words of Horace, L 2 |