r friends, their scholars,
or acquaintance. In the dead of the following night, a strong guard of
soldiers literally drove them through the streets to the water's edge.
They were then conveyed in boats aboard a ship, and steered for Bahia.
Those who survived the barbarous treatment they experienced from Pombal's
creatures were at last ordered to Lisbon. The college of Pernambuco was
plundered, and some time after an elephant was kept there.

Thus the arbitrary hand of power, in one night, smote and swept away the
sciences; to which succeeded the low vulgar buffoonery of a showman.
Virgil and Cicero made way for a wild beast from Angola! and now a guard
is on duty at the very gate where, in times long past, the poor were
daily fed!!!

Trust not, kind reader, to the envious remarks which their enemies have
scattered far and near; believe not the stories of those who have had a
hand in the sad tragedy. Go to Brazil, and see with thine own eyes the
effect of Pombal's short-sighted policy. There vice reigns triumphant,
and learning is at its lowest ebb. Neither is this to be wondered at.
Destroy the compass, and will the vessel find her far-distant port? Will
the flock keep together, and escape the wolves, after the shepherds are
all slain? The Brazilians were told that public education would go on
just as usual. They might have asked Government, who so able to instruct
our youth as those whose knowledge is proverbial? who so fit as those who
enjoy our entire confidence? who so worthy, as those whose lives are
irreproachable?

They soon found that those who succeeded the fathers of the Society of
Jesus had neither their manner nor their abilities. They had not made
the instruction of youth their particular study. Moreover, they entered
on the field after a defeat, where the officers had all been slain; where
the plan of the campaign was lost; where all was in sorrow and dismay.
No exertions of theirs could rally the dispersed, or skill prevent the
fatal consequences. At the present day the seminary of Olinda, in
comparison with the former Jesuits' college, is only as the waning moon's
beam to the sun's meridian splendour.

When you visit the places where those learned fathers once flourished,
and see with your own eyes the evils their dissolution has caused; when
you hear the inhabitants telling you how good, how clever, how charitable
they were--what will you think of our poet laureate for calling them, in
hi