[In the first excerpt below, Bell examines the importance of The Lusiads to Portuguese history and notes Camões' classical and contemporary influences. In the second excerpt, Bell argues that Camões' true greatness is not as an epic poet, but as a lyric poet.]

THE LUSIADS

Portuguese history, rich in heroic and romantic episodes, did not, during its first five centuries, inspire great epic poems. Yet in the sixteenth century, in Portugal's new glory, a great national epic had become an aspiration among the more serious Portuguese poets. Garcia de Resende had regretted in 1516 that the Portuguese were so careless in recording their deeds, and his collection of verse in the Cancioneiro Geral proved that his complaint was not unfounded. Sá de Miranda was the first to revolt against these frivolous Court verses. Barros had expressed a wish for a more heroic poetry to correspond to his own epic Decadas, and Antonio Ferreira kept advising his friends to attempt the epic flight: Andrade Caminha, whose waxen artificial wings were unlikely to raise him more than a few inches from the ground; Diogo Bernardez, whose genius was not sufficiently universal; Diogo de Teive, who answered him in Latin:

Lysiadum jubes ut maxima regum
Facta canam.

While the poets of Sá de Miranda's school were thus debating as to who should confer immortal glory on the name of Portugal, a greater than Sá de Miranda was among them, preparing himself for the task. Camões in his youth before leaving Lisbon, in the fourth eclogue (Cantando por umvalle docemente), promises at love's inspiration to rival Homer and Virgil,¹ and he no doubt early fixed on Ariosto's ottava rima as the suitable metre for his epic; in this metre he composed some of his first short poems. When were the Lusiads written? Faria e Sousa alleges that João Pinto Ribeiro told him that Camões awoke one morning at Sofala or Mozambique with the idea of the epic in his mind, a story which probably originated in the fact that Couto had found Camões revising the Lusiads at Mozambique in 1569. From a passage in the Lusiads (x. 128) we may infer that the poem was practically complete at the end of 1558. Dr. Storck considers that the wish to celebrate his country in song first came to him on his journey (which he places in 1542) from Coimbra to Lisbon, during which he would see Batalha, Alcobaça, and other famous monuments of Portugal's earlier greatness. It is extremely probable that he was at work on the Lusiads for twenty years (1550-70), but the period of concentrated work on the poem may perhaps be narrowed to 1555-8. Critics who do not think it very proper for any literary masterpiece to be begun elsewhere than in prison hold that Barros' first Decad, published twelve days after Camões' arrest in the Rocio, inspired him to begin his epic; but in very truth Camões was probably thinking more of Borges than of Barros at that time. The third and fourth cantos, describing the early history of Portugal, may have been begun or finished before he sailed in 1553, but it was his voyage to India which revealed to him his opportunity of describing Vasco da Gama's famous voyage in the light of his own personal experience, and this now became the poem's central theme, round which he wove the reading of his earlier and later years. He drew from the antiquarian Resende, from the early chronicles of Portugal, contemporary historians of India, and many other sources.² The first eighteen stanzas of the first canto were added late, probably at Lisbon in 1570, as were the last stanzas of the poem (x. 145-56), in which he speaks of his country as sunk in ‘hũa austera, apagada e vil tristeza’. It is very interesting to compare the dedicatory stanzas in Canto I (6-18) with those addressed to King Sebastian at the end of Canto X (145-56). In his commentary Epiphanio Dias considers that a comparison between the last two stanzas of the poem and the fifteenth stanza of Canto I shows the long interval of time between the beginning and end of the Lusiads' composition. Others may believe that the words ‘Eu estes canto e a vos não posso’ (i. 15) as compared with ‘Para cantar-vos mente ás Musas dada’ (x. 155) indicate not the difference between early diffidence and later accomplishment, but are simply intended as an excuse for not having carried the period of the poem beyond 1550, whereas King Sebastian was resolved that his own should be the most heroic age of all. At length the poem on which Camões had for so many years staked his hopes of glory and advancement, which had been drenched in the South China Sea and solaced his weary sojourn at Mozambique, appeared in print. Officially it appears to have been regarded as a rhymed chronicle of the deeds of the Portuguese in India, which perhaps explains the subsequent appearance of histories in the form of rhymed epics. Camões, when he went to the Orlando Furioso for his metre, had promised himself to write of no fables but of the true heroic deeds of the Portuguese.³ The example thus set was followed by others, with sad results in the absence of Camões' genius, his marvellous power of weaving music out of reality. Thus Jeronimo Corte Real published three long epic poems, the second of which, on Don Juan de Austria's victory at Lepanto, Felicissima Victoria (1578), changed its name to Austriada, no doubt after the appearance of Juan Rufo Gutierrez’ La Austriada in 1584. A few years later came Luis Pereira Brandão's lamentable Elegiada (1588) and the historian Francisco de Andrade's pedestrian epic (1589) on the first siege of Diu. Thus Camões suffered from his imitators, as from the biographers, critics, translators, and portrait-painters. Ercilla's La Araucana (1569) was published three years before the Lusiads, when Camões was on his way home with his poem completed, and its success may have smoothed the way for the publication of the Portuguese epic. In Spain Camões rapidly won admirers, and they had the good taste, as Faria e Sousa records,⁴ to prefer the lyrics to the epic, for although to a Portuguese Camões must ever be the author of the Lusiads, to the lover of poetry he is first and foremost a great lyric poet. Two Spanish translations of the Lusiads appeared in Castille in the year of Camões' death, at Alcalá and Salamanca. Cervantes spoke of ‘the most excellent Camões,’⁵ Lope de Vega called him ‘divine’. Calderón, Tirso de Molina, and Herrera appreciated his work, Gracián referred to him as ‘immortal.’⁶ In Italy, Torquato Tasso, twenty years Camões' junior, in a sonnet on Vasco da Gama spoke of Camões as the ‘buon e dotto Luigi’. In England he was not translated till the middle of the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth century, which might have been expected to be hostile to so lyrical a genius, he seems to have been the subject of considerable study in both France and England. Voltaire criticized and praised the Lusiads, and Montesquieu, in a passage of L'Esprit des Lois, declared that Camões' epic ‘fait sentir quelque chose des charmes de l'Odyssée et de la magnificence de l'Énéide.’⁷ The Lusiads was gradually translated into many languages, including Latin and Hebrew (a Greek version has been mentioned but never seen). In Portugal Camões effected a revolution. The early Portuguese poetry, delightful and remarkable as it is, became as though it were not for the next three centuries. Besides a long line of tedious epics lasting into the nineteenth century, he inspired hundreds of lyric poets, the most prominent of whom in the field of the eclogue were Fernam Alvarez do Oriente and Francisco Rodriguez Lobo. Six years before Camoes' death Magalhães de Gandavo, in his Regras, called Camões ‘our famous poet’; in the sonnet ‘Quem é este que na harpa Lusitana’, written probably during Camões' last years and attributed to Francisco Gomez de Azevedo,⁸ he is exalted both as dramatic and epic poet. Diogo Bernardez considered that Camões' own poems were his highest praise: ‘se louva a si só em toda a parte’, and Couto in old age wrote down a few belated recollections about ‘the prince of the poets of our time’. Luis Franco Corrêa, who professed to have been Camões' ‘friend and companion’ in India, collected some of his poems in a still unpublished Cancioneiro, and Fernam Rodriguez Lobo Soropita edited the first edition of the lyrics in 1595. In 1631, according to Alvaro Ferreira de Vera, there were twelve editions of the Lusiads.⁹ Clearly there was criticism also. In 1576, in his ode on Gandavo's book on Brazil, Camões refers significantly to the critics: algum zoilo que ladrasse. At the beginning of the seventeenth century his poetry is ‘calumniada de muytos’, says Manuel Corrêa, and sixty years after his death a Portuguese critic, João Soares de Brito, thought it worth while to publish an Apologia (1641) of Camões' poetry. But before considering some of the criticisms levelled then and later against the Lusiads it may be well to give a short analysis of the poem. Canto I begins by declaring the author's purpose (i. 1-3), invokes the nymphs of Tagus (i. 4-5), and addresses King Sebastian (i. 6-18), exhorting him against the Moors and translating Virgil's line ‘Et votis iam nunc adsuesce vocari’. Then, as in the Aeneid, and in modern novels of the realistic school, the reader is plunged in medias res. The deities of Olympus look down on the Portuguese adventurers approaching Mozambique, and Jupiter addresses the other gods, of whom Venus and Mars favour the enterprise of the Portuguese and Bacchus is hostile (i. 19-41). Vasco da Gama, of proud and lofty heart, reaches the island of Mozambique, where he explains his mission and asks for pilots for India, but the natives attack the Portuguese and only after being constrained to sue for peace send them a pilot, although still with treacherous intent. At Mombasa the wiles of Bacchus, the pilot, and the natives are defeated by the forethought of Venus (i. 42-106; ii. 1-32). Venus, after accomplishing her task of saving the Portuguese, listens to Vasco da Gama's prayer and ascends to Olympus to beseech Jupiter in their favour (ii. 33-43). Jupiter answers by foretelling the great deeds of the Portuguese, which shall throw into the shade those of Greek and Roman: victories over the Turks and kings of India, triumphs in the Red Sea, at Ormuz, Diu, Goa, Cannanore, Calicut, Cochin, and Malacca, even to the far confines of China (ii. 44-55). He then sends down Mercury to guide the Portuguese to the harbour of Melinde, where they are hospitably received by the King, who visits Gama on board and inquires about the past history of his country (ii. 56-113). Gama describes Europe and its head, Spain, and the crown of its head, Portugal (iii. 1-21). The heroic deeds of Viriatus and the early Portuguese kings are then chronicled, the victory of Ourique (iii. 42-53), and the victory of Salado (iii. 109-17). The death of Inés is related in deathless stanzas (iii. 118-36), and the magnificent account of the battle of Aljubarrota follows (iv. 23-44). King João II sends messengers to the East (iv. 61-5) and King Manuel is visited in a dream by Ganges and Indus, promising him tribute (iv. 66-75). He entrusts Gama with the command of the expedition (iv. 76-83), which leaves Lisbon in the presence of the assembled people (iv. 84-94), but an old man of venerable appearance in ten heartfelt stanzas inveighs against the enterprise, voicing the opinions of the Little Englanders of that day (iv. 95-104). Gama's voyage to Mozambique is now related (v. 1-89), with a splendid description of the appearance of the Cape of Good Hope in the form of the giant Adamastor. With a reliable pilot Gama leaves Melinde for India, but Bacchus goes down to visit the gods of the sea and stirs them up against the audacious navigators (vi. 1-37). The story of Magriço (vi. 43-69), told to beguile their way, is interrupted by a furious storm (vi. 70-85), after weathering which they have sight of India. The poet here pauses to upbraid the stubborn perversity of the Germans, harsh Henry VIII of England, with his new manner of Christianity, and the King of France, most Christian only in name (vii. 1-14). He then turns to the deeds of the Portuguese, their arrival at Calicut, where they rejoice to find a friendly Spanish-speaking Mahometan Berber, and Gama's reception by the Governor (Catual) and King (Samori) (vii. 15-77). Camões here breaks off to lament his own ill-fortune (vii. 78-87). The Catual, while Vasco da Gama is ashore, visits his brother Paulo on board. The visit is not historical, but it gave Paulo occasion to explain the figures and the battle-scenes on the flags and awnings, from Luso and Ulysses to the Meneses who won fame in North Africa (viii. 1-43). Meanwhile the Mahometans or Moors incite the King against the new-comers, and Gama has some difficulty in getting back to the ships (viii. 44-99). After further unsatisfactory negotiations Gama leaves on the homeward voyage, carrying a few natives and samples of spices (ix. 1-17). Venus prepares for them an island of delight (in the Azores?), where all the Nereids receive them (ix. 18-95). The island and its fruits are described in glowing colours—the whole canto seems a picture by Rubens. The marriage of mariners and sea-nymphs symbolizes Portugal's glory and lordship over the ocean. Tethys sings (x. 6-74) of the future deeds of the Portuguese in India, of Duarte Pacheco (x. 12-25), D. Francisco de Almeida (x. 26-38), Albuquerque (x. 39-45), and other Governors down to D. João de Castro († 1548). She then shows them a magic globe and explains the world and the system of the universe, in which she and the other gods have no part—somos fabulosos: mere poet's toys (x. 77-90). She shows them the various regions of the Earth and prophesies yet further achievements of the Portuguese (x. 91-142). The Portuguese then leave the island and return to Lisbon (x. 143, 144) and the work ends with twelve stanzas addressed to King Sebastian (x. 145-56). It will be seen that Voltaire was right in describing the Lusiads as ‘une nouvelle espèce d'épopée’. It is a bundle of episodes, and on the central theme, Gama's voyage of discovery, is hung with great skill the whole of Portugal's glorious history. Gama is present throughout, and the time of the action is eighteen months (March 1498 to September 1499). Although present throughout, Gama is, however, not prominent. Camões could sum up a character or a situation in a concentrated phrase, and if the critics, as Burton remarked,¹⁰ ‘find him poor in character painting’, that is partly because it was not his object to sing of one hero but of a thousand, while the time of the poem really covers many centuries. With a fine audacity Camões begins his poem with the words As armas e os barões: arms and the men I sing, as compared with Virgil's Arma virumque.¹¹ He takes for his subject a whole nation, and as a result his epic, like Milton's Paradise Lost, is without a hero. On such lines it required true genius to compose a spirited and living poem. The voyage of Gama gives a faint unity of action and the sense of proportion is as a rule maintained. Exception has been taken to the long story of Magriço, but it should be noted that the action is not interrupted, the ships are sailing on o'er seas before untraversed while the story is being told. On the other hand the eighth canto is stationary, and in Paulo da Gama's narrative we go back to the third canto. No doubt Camões had found that there was too much material to be included in that canto if the proportion of the poem was to be preserved; patriotism forbade its omission, aesthetic sense reserved it for a later place. Others find fault with the artificial presentment of the globe in the last canto as a piece of dead matter in the living flow of the poem. The introduction of the heathen gods was early impugned and the Censor¹² was careful to point out that they were demons. To us the artistic lapse in this respect is the passage in which the poet goes out of his way to explain that these gods are fabulous and have no existence outside the poet's mind. Yet to Camões' pagan Renaissance sense of beauty they were very real, and but for the intervention of Venus the Portuguese would have ended their enterprise at Mombasa. We must, however, excuse what was evidently an afterthought, intended to win the good graces of the Censor. It has been objected, again, that Camões' poem is imitative. For the general plan as well as for many details of the execution he went to Virgil, for the matter to many contemporary literary sources. So various indeed are the sources, so rich is the poem in history, geography, and mythology, that one marvels to think that most of it must have been composed far from a library, and one marvels too at the way Camões gives even the closest imitation a magic of his own and lightly and triumphantly bears aloft a burden of learning on the wings of his genius. The style in which the Lusiads is composed has been praised and blamed. Portuguese critics often hold that real poetic diction in Portugal begins with Camões, and it is true that Portuguese poets had hitherto written for a narrower circle. Writers who wished to be more widely read used Latin or Spanish. When the Bishop of Silves published his Latin chronicle of King Manuel's reign in 1571 it did not cover different ground from that of Goes' Portuguese chronicle, but being in Latin it aspired to penetrate ‘per omnes Reipublicae Christianae regiones’. Camões was a universal poet, and, writing in Portuguese, he enlarged the language to make it an instrument capable and worthy of its higher responsibilities and the new place of Portugal in the world. His introduction of latinisms did not impair the vigour of his own verse, but it led to abuses later. Camões had prayed for ‘hũa furia grande e sonorosa’ (Caminha is supposed to refer to Camões in one of his epigrams: ‘dizes que um poeta ha de ter furia’) and an ‘estilo grandilocuo e corrente’, and very occasionally he falls into that turgidity which became so pronounced in later Portuguese, but as a rule his style is clear, direct, and natural, the despair of the translators. More serious than these alleged defects are the prosaic lines and passages and slovenly rhymes in the Lusiads. Often three successive rhymes are formed by the past tense of a verb: -avam, -avam, -avam; but Camões was too natural a poet to set great store by the rhyme, and the transparent flow of his verse does not in fact depend on any such artificial aid. It was inevitable that a poem so closely bound to reality should sometimes brush the ground; the wonder is that it soars so often: the poet's patriotic fervour and furia give it an epic spirit and a rapidity, an immortalis velocitas, which carries the reader over the weaker stanzas, some of which, when observed separately, are found to be halting and uninspired. And whatever blemishes the poem may have, it will always remain one of the world's greatest poems by reason of its magnificent lyric flights (praises of Portugal, the account of D. Inés de Castro's murder, the battle of Aljubarrota, Gama's departure from Belem, the vision of Adamastor, the island of Venus), and passages in which thought and experience and wisdom are condensed into phrases of that pregnant force and brevity for which the Portuguese language is famous, often into a single memorable line. A large part of the poem is a personal experience. The comparatively little notice given in the Lusiads to Prince Henry the Navigator (yet he is praised in viii. 37 and receives a splendid epithet in v. 4: o generoso Henrique) is held to indicate that the poem was not originally intended to be a poem of the sea. Certainly the omission was not due to the fact that the Infante Henrique, with an English mother, was only half a ‘Lusiad’, since several stanzas are given to his brother, the heroic Prince Fernando; more probably, Camões omitted the expeditions sent out by the Duke of Viseu because they covered the same ground as the later voyage of Gama. But without Camões' own voyage the Lusiads would have lacked its abiding fascination. In passage after passage he earns Humboldt's praise as a great painter of the sea.¹³ The singular vividness of the descriptions goes hand in hand with the living construction of history. With an inexhaustible lyric vein Camões combined great power of concentration, and the result is that the Lusiads is crowded with unfading pictures—who could forget that of D. Lianor de Sousa inset in the vision of Adamastor?—and a poem but half the length of the Gerusalemme Liberata nobly enshrines the whole of Portugal's history and empire.

CAMõES AS LYRIC AND DRAMATIC POET

The versification in Camões' three plays is delightfully easy. Would he have risen to Shakespearian heights in the drama had he been given some encouragement, had he been able to gather the fruits of the three E's, of which he was reasonably proud,¹⁴ and to develop his genius at leisure? There are keen observation and a true vein of comedy in Os Amphitriões, in which Jupiter takes the form of Amphitrião and Mercury that of his servant; the plot is skilfully worked out in Filodemo, in which Filodemo, orphan child of a Portuguese fidalgo and a Danish princess wrecked off the coast of Portugal, before his parentage is known falls in love with his cousin Dionysa, while Dionysa's brother, Venadoro, falls in love with Florimena, sister of Filodemo, and the revelations of the old shepherd who had brought up Florimena provide a happy ending. But Camões' genius was not really dramatic, although, had he not left Lisbon in 1553, he would probably have produced a few more such lively comedies, with action more complicated and closely woven than any devised by Gil Vicente, with whose plays he was of course familiar before he sailed to India, although they were not published in a collected edition until nine years later. It is as a great lyric poet that Camões stands supreme. Writing probably in 1569, he tells us that misfortune had dulled his senses, and if—it is extremely improbable—the Couto MS. is right in assigning the composition of the seventy-three quintilhas beginning Sobolos rios que vão to that year, at Mozambique, they would have to be considered as the swan-song of his lyric verse. The ode written for Orta's Coloquios in 1563 is, to say the least, frigid, as is that in Gandavo's book thirteen years later, while the sonnet attributed to him in 1569 by the Couto MS. is a truly paralytic effort. Henceforth his muse was only to be stirred to fresh magnificence by the thought of his country and his country's last hope, the young King Sebastian. The opening stanzas of the Lusiads were no doubt added just before its publication (one need not infer from stanzas seven and nine that Sebastian was still an infant). He may have written, also, one or two fine sonnets, such as that beginning Ó quanto melhor é o supremo dia (no. 234, ii. 118), which, if not by Camões, at least deserves to be. But he could no longer write those wonderful lyrics which flowed up out of the abundance of his heart: ‘eu não a escrevo, d'alma a trasladei.’¹⁵ Were Camões in his lyrics merely a successful imitator of Petrarca or o brando e doce Lasso, why should we read him? We look for something new in a literature unknown to us; we do not go to Lisbon to gaze into shop-windows which we can see in Paris. But the fact is that in Camões' lyrics—redondilhas, canções, oitavas, sextinas, eclogues, odes, and elegies—we enter an enchanted country. They have a peculiar glow and magic which one seeks in vain elsewhere. There is in this poetry something more than una dolcezza inusitata e nova; there is also a new experience. In some of the sonnets and canções especially, and in the oitavas and elegies, there is a fascination which can, perhaps, best be explained by saying that they are the work of a Celtic bard in an orange grove. The spontaneous musical cry of the heart is there, but it is no longer uttered amongst the grey mists and heather of Galicia, but has an added richness of harmony, transparency, and light (rather than colour). It is wedded to the now thoroughly acclimatized Italian metres, but has a vigour and limpidity to be found in few even of the poets of Italy. Glowing and crystalline are indeed the adjectives which best characterize Camões' verse at its best. When he is deeply moved his poetry wells forth in unfailing expression of heart and intellect at one, till the paper and ink become a living soul. There is nothing which his poetry cannot then express musically and with transparent clearness. And it is so natural and abundant that it flows like a river in flood, ‘liquidus puroque simillimus amni,’ with a rapidity which makes great poetry even of those poems which are marred by ugliness of detail. Take the first stanza of the eclogue which he considered the best of all those that he had then written:¹⁶

Que grande variedade vão fazendo,
Frondelio amigo, as horas apressadas!
Como se vão as cousas convertendo
Em outras cousas varias e inesperadas!
Um dia a outro dia vai trazendo
Por suas mesmas horas ja ordenadas;
Mas quam conformes são na quantidade
Tam diferentes são na qualidade.

Here the rhyme adds nothing, rather it detracts from the beauty, but there is thought, feeling, and deep sincerity. A poet less sure of his genius would not have dared to begin this long poem so naturally, almost carelessly. Camões is so rich in thought and experience and in suffering that he can afford to express himself with a singular simplicity. It is this sincerity and naturalness, combined with vigorous thought and a haunting melancholy and expressed in pure music of a peerlessly pellucid strain, that make of Camões' poetry a new and individual thing. We may say that his canções are moulded on those of Petrarca, that in the sonnet Aquella triste e leda madrugada he is merely translating Virgil through Petrarca, and in the sonnet Alma minha gentil copying Petrarca and Guido Guidiccioni (1500-41); but that does not explain Camões: no one who has read these poems will assert that they are imitative, they are too evidently sprung from a deep individual experience—puras verdades ja por mim passadas. Strangford considered Camões one of the most original poets of modern times: ‘to that character [originality] he [Camões] has perhaps a juster claim than any of the moderns, Dante alone excepted.’ Camões first sang com grandes esperanças, and then with lembranças tristes, and the lyrics of the decade 1545-55 set him beside the greatest of the world's poets: after reading them one feels less inclined to quarrel with Storck's verdict that he excels all the poets of the sixteenth century throughout the world.¹⁷ During those quiet months at Goa, especially, soon after his arrival, he had preserved his exquisite sensibility, while loss and suffering lent a peculiar quality to his verse. Rarely has poetry had reason to be more thankful than for the destiny which drove Camões across the seas, filling his lyrics with music born of his grief and the Lusiads with vivid personal description. Because Camões is so spontaneous and natural, because his lyric vein is so abundant—que irei fallando sem o sentir mil annos—it is sometimes thought that he is an example of a poet born, not made. Camões would have said: nascitur et fit. It can scarcely be an accident that the phrase engenho e arte recurs so frequently in his poems.¹⁸ Some of the years at Coimbra, before he went (or returned) to Lisbon, must have been years of intense study, and of study in many fields—history, philosophy, classical mythology, as well as the poetry of four or five different languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Latin, perhaps Greek. In his studious humanism he was, in fact, well qualified to distinguish with Dante between goose and eagle.¹⁹ Camões' poetry is by no means confined to the new Italian metres. His plays were written in redondilhas, the native octo-syllabic metre of Spain and Portugal, suggested by cantigas muito velhas (iv. 413) such as he had heard in his cradle: tristes versos d'amor (ii. 211); and in his lyrics, written in the same metre with a variety of excellence, he fascinates all readers by his pensive grace or petulant gaiety, whether he is singing the charms of the enchanting Barbara, deliciously glossing the popular song of Lianor at the fountain, lamenting the years' swift flow, turning a pretty compliment, satirizing passing events and persons, or, in a higher strain, pouring forth his heart in an ‘undisturbèd song of pure concent’:

Sobolos rios que vão
Por Babylonia me achei,
Onde sentado chorei
As lembranças de Sião
E quanto nella passei.

Gil Vicente had plunged both hands into the Middle Ages and given us marvels of lyric song. Sá de Miranda laboured hard to acclimatize the verso largo which he had introduced from Italy; Camões in his lyrics, a true child of the Renaissance, combined the natural ease of the old school with the mellow harmonies of the new. In their lightness and substance, impassioned ecstasy linked with thought and clearness, and charged with light and music, he showed what force and vigour the Portuguese language can unite with its melodious softness in the hands of a master. Were Portuguese literature, so rich in varied, fascinating works in prose and verse, confined to the works of Camões, whom Schlegel considered to be in himself a literature, even then no lover of poetry could afford to neglect the study of the Portuguese language, if only for the sake of reading Camões in the original.

Notes

1. ‘Em quanto eu aparelho um novo esprito e voz de cisne tal que o mundo espante … Ha de m'ouvir por vos o mundo todo.’ (Ecl. V. (iii. 62), A quem darei.) Cf. ii. 273 (written probably much later).

2. See J. M. Rodrigues, Fontes dos Lusiadas, in O Instituto, vol. liv (1904), &c., and the notes of Epiphanio Dias and others to editions of the Lusiads. The word Lusiadas, which is of course masculine and means ‘Portuguese’, is a Latinism, first coined, apparently, by Portuguese poets in Latin poems written in Camões' infancy.

3. He more than once refers to the fact that he is singing of puras verdades.

4. Varias Rimas, vol. i (1685), Prologo. The todos meant, no doubt, especially Faria e Sousa's friend Lope de Vega, who considered that ‘the best of Camões' stanzas, marvellous as they are, no yguala a sus mismas redondillas’. (See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos ap. Circulo Camoniano, vol. i, p. 69.)

5. Don Quixote, Pt. II, cap. 58.

6. Calderón refers to ‘el gran Luis de Camoens’ in A secreto agravio secreta vinganza. See C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in Circulo Camoniano, vol. i, p. 94; Tirso de Molina, well acquainted with Portugal, in Por el sotano y el torno (ib., p. 165). Herrera imitated Camões' poetry, and M. Adolphe Coster considers that his elegy, Si el grave mal, was addressed to Camões. Gracián speaks of the immortal Camões in his Arte de Ingenio, Tratado de Agudeza (1642), 1669 ed., p. 17. For the praise of Camões by Francisco Sanchez, el Brocense, see Severim de Faria, f. 123, v.

7. De l'Esprit des Lois, liv. xxi, chap. 17. Samuel Johnson in 1772 spoke highly of the merit of ‘the Lusiad’. He had intended to translate it.

8. It is printed anonymously in the 1607 ed. of the Rimas. See Storck, Luis' de Camoens sämmtliche Werke, Bd. ii, pp. 378-80.

9. A. Ferreira de Vera, Breves Lovvores da Lingva Portvgvesa (1631), f. 89. The twelve editions might be 1572, 1572, 1584, 1591, 1597, 1607? 1609, 1609? 1612, 1613, 1626, 1631.

10. Sir R. Burton, Camoens (1881), vol. i, p. 98.

11. This was well brought out in the Grundriss (p. 321) by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.

12. ‘Vi por mandado da santa & geral inquisição estes dez Cantos dos Lusiadas de Luis de Camões, dos valerosos feitos em armas que os Portugueses fizerão em Asia & Europa, & não achey nellas cousa algũa escandalosa, nem contraria â fe & bõs custumes, somente me pareceo que era necessario aduertir os Lectores que o Autor pera encarecer a difficuldade da nauegação & entrada dos Portugueses na India, vsa de hũa fição dos Deoses dos Gentios. E ainda que sancto Augustinho nas suas Retractações se retracte de ter chamado nos liuros que compos de Ordine, aas Musas Deosas Toda via como isto he Poesia & fingimento, & o Autor como poeta, não pretenda mais que ornar o estilo Poetico não tiuemos por inconueniente yr esta fabula dos Deoses na obra, conhecendoa por tal, & ficando sempre salua a verdade de nossa sancta fe, que todos os Deoses dos Gẽtios sam Demonios. E por isso me pareceo o liuro digno de se imprimir, & o Autor mostra nelle muito engenho & muita erudição nas sciencias humanas. Em fe do qual assiney aqui.—Frey Bertholameu Ferreira.’

13. See Wilhelm von Humboldt, Kosmos (Stuttgart, 1847), Bd. ii, pp. 58-61.

14. Lus. x. 154: Estudo, Experiencia, Engenho.

15. Canção vii (Manda-me Amor que cante docemente), ii. 200.

16. Carta beginning Desejei tanto [1554]; Ecl. i. (iii. 5).

17. Vida, p. 724.

18. Cf. Sonnet 117 (Não ha louvor); Ecl. 5 (iii. 61); Sonnet 2 (Eu cantarei de amor tão docemente); Oitavas, viii (ii. 339); Eleg. 18 (iii. 225); Eleg. 20 (iii. 232).

19. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, cap. iv: ‘Et ideo confiteatur eorum stultitia qui, arte scientiâque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad summa summe canenda prorumpunt; a tanta presumptuositate desistant et, si anseres naturali desidiâ sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.’