A writer on Portugal, in the year 1780, complains of the scandalous licentiousness of the monks and nuns, of whom there were no less than two hundred and fifty thousand in a population of two millions. It is said that the convent Odivelas, the harem of the monarch John V., contained three hundred women, accounted the most beautiful and accomplished courtesans in the kingdom. The great Marquis de Pombal suppressed many of these convents, and was the general reformer of the religious orders. Of the effect of such an example from such quarters on the population at that time, sunk, as they were, in the most imbecile ignorance, little need be said. The women of Portugal were reputed to surpass all European females in gallantry, and their attractions were such that only one interview was necessary to complete the conquest. To this condition of common immorality, the rigor of their husbands and male relations may have contributed not a little. They are said to have been outrageously jealous, and to have made no scruple of murdering any stranger who gave them even the weakest grounds of suspicion. In the fundamental laws of Portugal, promulgated in 1143, it is enacted that, "if a married woman commit adultery, and the husband complain to the judge, and the judge is the king, the adulterer and adulteress shall be condemned to the flames; but if the husband retain the wife, neither party shall be punished." In the case of a rape perpetrated on the person of a lady of rank, all the property of the ravisher went to the lady; and in case the female were not noble, the man, without regard to his rank, was obliged to marry her. The writer whom we have already quoted[245] speaks of the venereal disease as being, at the time he wrote (1770-1780), habitual in Portugal, and that the Portuguese not knowing how to cure it, its malignity had become so intensified that, in some cases, individuals who had contracted a peculiar form of the malady had died in a few hours, as though struck down by an active and deadly poison. This is most probably the exaggeration of popular opinion on the subject. More recent writers are chary of information, and avoid the mention of matters so offensive to ears polite. The manners and morals of the higher ranks of society must have undergone a material change for the better in the present century, for an English nobleman (Lord Porchester, since Earl of Caernarvon) speaks in very favorable terms of the propriety, amiability, and excellence of the Portuguese ladies, which, excepting in the matter of intellectual education, left them in no wise behind the worthy of their sex in other countries of Europe. Among the lower classes, however, it would not seem that the tone of morals had been very much amended, whether we consider their regard for female virtue, or their cultivation of the maternal tenderness and solicitude natural to all created beings.