A Spanish army, composed of forty thousand men, entered Portugal in 1762; their progress, however, through that country was but very short; and by the assistance of the English, and the count de la Lippe, to whom the former had given the command of the Portugueze troops,[47] an honourable peace was signed on the 10th of February in the following year: after which their quiet was only disturbed by some hostilities in America, which terminated very much in the same manner as the former ones, without the powers of Europe being engaged in the quarrel. The count d'Oeyras, afterwards created marquis de Pombal, never lost sight, even in the midst of all his difficulties, of his original plan of reforms and ameliorations. The greatest obstacles he had to encounter proceeded from Brazil, and the town of Oporto, from the inhabitants of which he had but little reason to expect opposition, since the measure to which they so strongly objected was shortly followed by an increase of their wine trade, which became twice as considerable as before. Portugal being much more fruitful in vines than in corn, the king published an edict in 1765, commanding all the vines in the environs of the Tagus, Mondego and Vecha, to be rooted up, and the land sown with wheat. The vineyards in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, Oeyras, and some other places, were, however, suffered to remain. By a former edict, of the month of October, 1761, twenty-two thousand writers or clerks employed in the different tribunals were reduced to only thirty-two persons. The minister, by a salutary law, which took place on the 25th of May, 1773, _for ever_ abolished the odious distinction formerly existing in Portugal, between the _old_ and _new_ christians. The latter, composed of converted Jews and Moors, were always suspected of insincerity, and regarded in the kingdom _as marked with infamy, and for ever separated from the other Christians, and incapable of acting in any capacity, either ecclesiastical or civil_. The progress of learning also was a principal object in the marquis de Pombal's system of improvement: he reformed the university of Coimbra; he converted on the 19th of May, 1766, the college occupied by the novices of the order of Jesus, and which was esteemed one of the finest buildings in Lisbon, into a school for the nobility: he likewise established other schools for children of all descriptions; and published a plan of public education, which, if properly followed, could not fail of restoring science and good morals throughout the whole of Portugal. He left no means untried to wrest from the hands of the English the different branches of commerce, of which they were become exclusive possessors. He set just bounds to the despotic authority of the holy office, which, by an edict of the 20th of May, 1769, became merely a royal tribunal, invested with no other power than what was transmitted to it by the sovereign, thus depriving it of