be brought back again; and that, meanwhile, a number of his people should be left as hostages. Diego then sailed to Lisbon, where he introduced with triumph these living trophies of his discovery. The king was highly gratified, and held many conversations with the Congo princes, whom he loaded with honours, and caused to be conveyed back at the appointed period to the shores of the Zaire. On Diego's arrival at that river, it was highly gratifying to see, waiting on the bank, the part of his crew whom he had left as pledges, and respecting whom he had felt some anxiety. He was invited to court, where the king not only received him with kindness, but agreed to embrace Christianity, and to send several of his principal lords to Europe, to be instructed in its principles. They sailed, accordingly, and this new arrival of Congo leaders of the first rank gave fresh satisfaction at Lisbon. They remained two years, experiencing the very best treatment; and on their being considered ripe for baptism, the king stood godfather to the principal envoy, and his chief nobles to others; on which occasion the Africans received the names of the persons by whom they had been thus honoured.

In 1490, a new armament, guided by Ruy de Sousa, conveyed back the Congo nobles to their native country. The Portuguese, on their arrival, were received by the king in full pomp. The native troops approached in three lines, making so prodigious a noise with horns, kettledrums, and other instruments, and raising shouts so tremendous, as to surpass all that the Europeans had ever witnessed in Catholic processions and invocations to the saints. The king himself was seated in the midst of a large park, upon an ivory chair raised on a platform. He was dressed in rich and glossy skins of wild beasts, a bracelet of brass hanging from his left arm, a horse's tail from his shoulder, and on his head a bonnet of fine cloth woven from the palm-tree. He gave full permission to erect a church and, when murmurs were heard from a few of his attendants, he instantly offered to put them to death on the spot but the Portuguese laudably dissuaded him from so violent a step. He himself and all his nobles were baptized; and free scope was allowed to the exertions of the Catholic missionaries. These churchmen seem to have been really

animated with a very devoted and persevering zeal; but they had, unfortunately, conceived an incorrect idea of what they came to teach, and, instead of inculcating the pure doctrines and precepts of Christianity, merely amused the people with empty and childish pageantry. The presentation of beads, Agni Dei, images of the Madonna and saints; the splendid processions; the rich furniture and solemn ceremonies of the church, dazzled the eyes of the savage natives, and made them view Christianity only as a gay and pompous pageant, in which it would be an amusement to join. The sacrament of baptism, to which the Catholics attach such pre-eminent importance, was chiefly recommended by a part of the ritual that consisted in putting into the mouth a certain quantity of salt, which, in Congo, is an extremely rare and valued commodity; and the missionaries were not a little disconcerted to find that he very form by which the natives expressed baptism was "to eat salt." Thus an immense body of the people were very speedily baptized and called Christians, but without any idea of the duties and obligations which that sacred name imposes. There was, however, one point which the missionaries soon began very conscientiously, and perhaps in rather too hasty and peremptory a manner, to enforce. Appalled by the host of wives that surrounded every African prince or chief, who fulfilled for him every purpose of state and domestic service, and whom it had been his constant study and pride to multiply, the missionaries made a call on their converts to select one, and to make a sweeping dismissal of all the others. This was considered an unwarrantable inroad on one of the most venerated institutions of the realm of Congo. To the aged monarch the privation appeared so intolerable that he thereupon renounced his Christian profession, and plunged again into the abyss of pagan superstition. Happily, Alphonso, the youthful heirapparent, saw nothing so dreadful in the sacrifice; he cheerfully submitted to it, and, braving his father's displeasure, remained attached to the Portuguese. The old king dying soon after, the zealous convert became entitled to reign; but his brother, Panso Aquitimo, supported by the nobles and almost the whole nation, raised the standard of rebellion in support of polygamy and paganism. A civil war ensued, in which the prince had little more than a

handful of Portuguese to oppose to the innumerable host of his rebel countrymen; however, in consequence, as his adherents believed, of the appearance in the clouds, at one time of St. James, and at another of the Virgin Mary, he always came off victorious. Doubless the better arms and discipline of the Portuguese rendered them superior in the field to the tumultuary host of their rude assailants.

Alphonso being thus firmly seated on his throne, the missionaries for a time secured a safe and comfortable establishment in Congo. Being reinforced by successive bodies of their brethren, they spread over the neighbouring countries, Sundi, Pango, Concobella, Maopongo, many tracts of which were rich and populous, though the state of society was often extremely rude. Every where their career was nearly similar. The people gave them the most cordial reception, flocked in crowds to witness and to share in the pomp of their ceremonies, accepted with thankfulness their sacred gifts, and received by thousands the rite of baptism. They were not, however, on this account prepared to renounce their ancient habits and superstitions. The inquisition, which was speedily instituted among their ecclesiastical arrangements, caused a sudden revulsion; and the missionaries thenceforth maintained only a precarious and even a perilous position. They were much reproached, it appears, for the rough and violent methods employed to effect their pious purposes; and though they treat the accusation as most unjust, some of the proceedings of which they boast with the greatest satisfaction tend not a little to countenance the charge. When, for example, they could not persuade the people to renounce their idols, they used a large staff with which they threw them down and beat them in pieces; they even sometimes stole secretly into the temples and set them on fire. A missionary at Maopongo having met one of the queens, and finding her mind inaccessible to all his instructions, determined to use harper remedies, and, seizing a whip, began to apply it to her majesty's person. The effect he describes as most au spicious; every successive blow opened her eyes more and more to the truth, and she at length declared herself wholly unable to resist such affecting arguments in favour of the Catholic doctrine. It was found, however, that she had hastened to the king with loud complaints respecting this

mole of spiritual illumination, and the missionaries thence forth lost all favour both with that prince and the ladies of his court, being allowed to remain solely through dread of the Portuguese. In only one other instance were they permitted to employ this mode of conversion. The smith, in consequence of the skill, strange in the eyes of a rude people, with which he manufactured various arms and implements, was viewed by them as possessing a measure of superhuman power; and he had thus been encouraged to advance pretensions to the character of a divinity, which were very generally admitted. The missionaries appealed to the king respecting this impious assumption; and that prince, conceiving it to interfere with the respect due to himself, agreed to deliver into their hands the unfortunate smith, to be converted into a mortal in any manner they might judge efficacious. After a short and unsuccessful argument, they had recourse to the above potent instrument of conversion; yet Vulcan, deserted in this extremity by ali his votaries, made still a firm stand for his celestial dignity, till the blood began to stream from his back and shoulders, when he finally yielded, and renounced all pretensions to a divine origin.

Farther acquaintance discovered other irregularities, against which a painful struggle was to be maintained. It was a prevailing practice, that before marriage the two parties should live together for some time, and make trial of each other's tempers and inclinations, before they formed the final engagement. To this system of probation the people were most obstinately attached, and the missionaries in vain denounced it, calling upon them at once either to marry or to separate. The young ladies were always the most anxious to have the full benefit of this experimental process; and the mothers, on being referred to, refused to • incur responsibility, and expose themselves to the reproaches of their daughters, by urging them to an abridgment of the trial, of which they might afterward repent. The missionaries seem to have been most diligent in the task, as they call it, of "reducing strayed souls to matrimony." Father Benedict succeeded with no less than six hundred; but he found it such "laborious work," that he fell sick and died in consequence. Another subject of deep regret respected the many superstitious practices still prevalent,

even among those who exhibited some sort of Christian profession. Sometimes the children brought for baptism proved to be bound with magic cords, to which the mothers, as an additional security from evil, had fastened beads, relics, and figures of the Agnus Dei. The chiefs, in like manner, while they gladly availed themselves of the protec tion promised from the wearing of crucifixes and images of the Virgin, were unprepared to part with the enchanted rings, and other pagan amulets, with which they had been accustomed to form a panoply around their persons. In case of dangerous illness, sorcery had been always contem, plated as the main or sole remedy; and those who rejected its use were reproached as rather allowing their sick relations to die than incur the expense of a conjurer. But the most general and most pernicious application of magic was made in judicial proceedings. When a charge was advanced against any individual, no one ever thought of inquiring into the facts, or of collecting evidence; every case was decided by preternatural tests. The magicians prepared a beverage, which produced on the guilty person, according to the measure of his iniquity, spasm, fainting, or death, but left the innocent quite free from harm. It seems a sound conclusion of the missionaries, that the draught was modified according to the good or ill will of the magicians, or the liberality of the supposed culprit. This trial, called the bolungo, was indeed renounced by the king, but only to substitute another, in which the accused was made to bend over a large basin of water, when, if he fell in, he was concluded guilty. At other times, a bar of red-hot iron was passed along the leg, or the arm was thrust into scalding water; and if the natural effects followed, the person's head was immediately struck off. Snail-shells, applied to the temples, if they stuck, inferred guilt. When a dispute arose between man and man, the plan was to place a shell on the head of each, and make them stoop; when he from off whose head the shell first dropped had a verdict found against him. While we wonder at the deplorable ignorance on which these practices were founded, we must not forget that the "judgments of God," as they were termed, employed by our sage ancestors during the middle ages, were founded on the same unenlightened views, and were in some cases absolutely identical.