EARTHQUAKE AT LISBON.

During these transactions, the public was overwhelmed with consternation by the tidings of a dreadful earthquake, which, on the first November, shook all Spain and Portugal, and many other places in Europe, and laid the city of Lisbon in ruins. When the news of this great calamity first reached England, it was feared the consequences of it might affect our public credit, considering the vast interest which the English merchants had in the Portuguese trade; but fortunately, it afterwards proved inconsiderable, in comparison of what had been apprehended; the quarter in which the English chiefly lived, and where they had their warehouses, having suffered the least of any part of the city; and most of the English merchants then residing there, together with their families, being at their country houses, to avoid the insults to which they might have been exposed from the Portuguese populace, during the celebration of their auto-da-fe, which was kept that very day. The two first shocks of this dreadful visitation continued near a quarter of an hour, after which the water of the river Tagus rose perpendicularly above twenty feet, and subsided to its natural bed in less than a minute. Great numbers of houses, of which this city then contained about thirty-six thousand, extending in length near six miles, in form of a crescent, on the ascent of a hill upon the north shore of the mouth of the river Tagus, within nine miles from the ocean, were thrown down by the repeated commotions of the earth, together with several magnificent churches, monasteries, and public buildings. But what entirely completed the ruin of this then most opulent capital of the Portuguese dominions, was a devouring conflagration, partly fortuitous or natural, but chiefly occasioned by a set of impious villains, who, unawed by the tremendous scene at that very instant passing before their eyes, with a wickedness scarcely to be credited, set fire even to the falling edifices in different parts of the city, to increase the general confusion, that they might have the better opportunity to rob and plunder their already desolated fellow-citizens. Out of three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, which Lisbon was then supposed to contain, about ten thousand perished by this calamity; and the survivors, deprived of their habitations, and destitute even of the necessaries of life, were forced to seek for shelter in the open fields.