Though it was as a maritime power that Portugal rose to its greatest height, it has been from time immemorial an agricultural nation, and the mass of its people are engaged in tilling the soil. They are a cheerful, industrious race, who, far from meriting Lord Byron's contemptuous epithet of "Lusitanian boors," are gifted with a natural courtesy and refinement of manner. A New-England farmer would be tempted to follow the poet's example and regard them with contempt: weighed in his balance, they would certainly be found wanting. There is no public-school system in operation, and the Portuguese farmer is not likely to be able to read or sign his name. But the want of literature is not felt in a Southern country, where social intercourse is far more cultivated than in our own rural districts. It is not by reading the newspapers, but by talking matters over with his neighbor, that the Portuguese farmer obtains his sound and intelligent views on the politics of his country. He is a great talker, taking a keen interest in all that goes on, enjoying a joke thoroughly and addressing his comrade with all the ceremonies and distinctions of a language which contains half a dozen different forms of address. The illiterate peasant is no whit behind the man of culture in the purity of his Portuguese. In no country in Europe is the language kept freer from dialect, and this notwithstanding the fact that it is one of involved grammatical forms. In France the use of the imperfect subjunctive is given up by the lower classes and by foreigners, but in Portugal the peasant has still deeper subtleties of speech at the end of his tongue. Add to this that he has a vocabulary of abuse before which the Spaniard or the California mule-driver would be silenced, and you have the extent of his linguistic accomplishments. This profane eloquence was an art imparted no doubt by the Moors. The refinements of syntax come from the Latin, to which Portuguese bears more affinity in form than any other modern language.