chapter 26

, or rather 32, since the intervening chapters deal with events prior to those with which Part I begins. Bimnarder, now again Narbindel--the name Bernardim was also spelt Bernaldim--after Aonia’s marriage lives with an old hermit and his nephew, Godivo, and passes his time in tears and contemplation, as in Part I. But he is discovered by his faithful squire, and meets Aonia, and the lovers are killed by the jealous husband (cap. 48). The last chapters are concerned with the happier love story of Romabisa and Tasbião.

Narbindel, the second of the two knights, the two friends _de que é a nossa historia_,[310] dies: therefore Bernardim Ribeiro cannot have written the second part. But it is rather a nice point; one may imagine that Ribeiro’s delight in so tragic an episode would compensate him amply for the obvious anachronism, and after all it is the _dona_ who tells the story.[311] The inconsistencies of detail need not concern us overmuch. That Belisa has a mother in Part I and is ‘brought up without a mother’ in Part II, that the Castle of Lamentor exists in Part II at a time when, according to Part I, it was not yet begun, that the name of Aonia’s husband is in Part I Fileno, and in Part II Orphileno, are just such contradictions as an alien continuer would most studiously have avoided, and we all know what happened to Sancho’s ass in a far less intricate story. Or they may be explained by the fact that Ribeiro had not revised his tale before it was printed, or by corrections made in copies of the original manuscript.[312] Perhaps on the whole we may conclude that Ribeiro, like Cervantes, by an exception wrote a valuable second part, but, unlike Cervantes, was unable to maintain it altogether on a level with the first. The mingling of rapt passion and colloquialisms is with Ribeiro not the inability of a poet to express himself but a deliberate mannerism, and is present in the five eclogues with which he introduced pastoral poetry. By his quiet resolution to be natural he thus became doubly an innovator, in poetry and prose. That he was a true poet is proved by the _romances_ in his novel: _Pensando vos estou, filha_ (Pt. I, cap. 21) and _Pola ribeira de um rio_ (Pt. II, cap. 11).[313] The eclogues may not excel those poems, but in their directness, primitive freshness, and grace they form a group apart, entirely distinct from their numerous eclogue progeny. One eclogue only, the celebrated _Trovas de Crisfal_, resembles them. The resemblance is remarkable and cannot fail to strike the most careless reader. Before Snr. Delfim Guimarães began his spirited campaign in favour of identification, the similarity had been recorded by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the _Grundriss_[314]: the extraordinary similarity of these _Trovas_ to the poetry of Ribeiro and to nothing else in Portuguese literature. In this poem of some 900 lines written in octosyllabic _decimas_, like Ribeiro’s eclogues, we have that romantic, passionate _saudade_ and sentimental grief, the mystic visions, the simplicity, the ingenuous conceits, wistfully humorous, the sententious reflections, the elliptical concision, the real shepherds, the familiar language, the love of Nature which are peculiarly Ribeiro’s. Tradition assigns the _Trovas_ to CRISTOVAM FALCÃO (_c._ 1512-53?),[315] who was born at Portalegre, in Alentejo, was made a _moço fidalgo_ in 1527, and is supposed to have fallen in love with and secretly married D. Maria Brandão (i.e. the Maria of the _Trovas_), whom her parents confined as a punishment in the convent of Lorvão. At the risk of being dubbed incorrigibly _simplicista_ one must confess that the simultaneous appearance of these two poets from Alentejo, not _fertil en poetas_, taxes one’s belief to the utmost. May not the secret marriage deduced from the _Trovas_ have been described by Ribeiro in his keen sympathy for his friend’s position, so like his own? The contention is not that Cristovam Falcão did not exist--there were several--or did not fall in love with Maria Brandão--_a do Crisfal_--or did not marry her, but that he did not write verses in the style familiar to us as that of Ribeiro.[316] It is remarkable that the very critics who represent Ribeiro in his _novela_ as hiding like a cuttle-fish in his own ink change their method when they come to the eclogues and accept every name and allusion with the greatest literalness, as though it were a poet’s duty to wear his heart in his verses. It is idle to adduce the fact that Cristovam Falcão wrote ungrammatical letters (so did Keats), or to devise far-fetched interpretations (such as _Crisma falso_) for the word Crisfal. What more probable than that Ribeiro and Falcão, born in the same province, became friends at Court, and that Ribeiro introduced his friend in one of his poems as he is supposed to have introduced Sá de Miranda in another, and as Miranda introduces Ribeiro (_Canta Ribero los males de amor_)? If in his favourite manner he added a little mystification in the word Crisfal, what more characteristic? The very form of the poem, in which first the _Autor_ and then Crisfal speaks (_Falla Crisfal_) suggests this, as does the title: _Trovas de um pastor per nome Crisfal_, compared with the definite _Trovas de dous pastores_ ... _Feitas por Bernaldim Ribeiro_.[317] It is not difficult to explain the printing of the _Trovas_ together with the works of Ribeiro and the hesitancy of the early editions in ascribing them, on hearsay, to Cristovam Falcão; but the word Crisfal caught the fancy, and those who learnt that it stood for Cristovam Falcão would inevitably confuse the explanation of the anagram with the authorship of the poem. One of those who did so was Gaspar Fructuoso (or Antonio Cordeiro), and the tradition which had begun so shakily with a _dizem ser_ gained strength with the years. Presumably the editor of the 1559 edition knew what was to be known on the subject, yet he speaks with a quavering uncertainty: it is only much later that the ascription to Cristovam Falcão becomes a fixed belief.[318] The eighth _Decada_ of Diogo do Couto was not published till 1673, i. e. over half a century after the death of its author. The explanatory sentence _aquelle que fez aquellas antigas e nomeadas_ (or _namoradas_) _trovas de Crisfal_[319] may well be, and probably is, a later interpolation. But although a few scholars definitely hold that Ribeiro wrote this poem, _grammatici certant_ and, should tradition prove too strong, we have to accept a second writer who claims an undying place in Portuguese literature owing to the marvellous success with which, divesting his muse of any qualities of its own, he identified himself with a poet who is the most characteristically Portuguese, but also the most individual of impassioned singers: Bernardim Ribeiro.

A kind of continuation of the story of _Crisfal_ (who is now enchanted within the fountain of his own tears) appeared at the end of the century in a small collection of poems entitled _Sylvia de Lisardo_ (1597). It contains forty-one sonnets (of which one only is in Spanish), three eclogues in _tercetos_ and _oitavas_, and various _romances_ (in Spanish) and shorter poems, and has been ascribed, without sufficient reason, to the historian Frei Bernardo de Brito. These poems must remain anonymous, and they throw no light on the _Crisfal_ problem, but in their true poetical feeling and power of expression they deserved their popularity[320] in the first half of the seventeenth century.

It is not certain but it is probable that Ribeiro went to Italy, and his Italian travels may have coincided with those of his life-long friend, the champion of humanism in Portugal, FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE MIRANDA (_c._ 1485-1558), the most famous of all the Portuguese poets with the exception of Camões and Gil Vicente. As a lyric poet far inferior to either of them, his great influence was due partly to his character, partly to his introduction of the new school of poetry, the _versos de medida nova_, or _de arte maior_, replacing the national _trovas de medida velha_ (octosyllabic _redondilhas_) by the Italian hendecasyllabics: Petrarca’s sonnets and canzoni, Dante’s _terza rima_ (_tercetos_), and the _octava rima_ of Poliziano and Ariosto. The exact date of Miranda’s birth is still uncertain, but if he was the eldest of five sons of the Coimbra Canon, Gonçalo Mendez de Sá, who were legitimized in 1490, he must have been born about the year 1485. Yet one would willingly make him younger. His life in Minho certainly sounds too active for a man of fifty: perhaps _c._ 1490 would be nearer the mark. He studied at the University at Lisbon and early frequented the Court. He soon won distinction as a scholar and was a Doctor of Law when he contributed several poems to Garcia de Resende’s _Cancioneiro_ (1516). His journey to Italy a few years later, in 1521, may have been due merely to the natural desire of a scholar to see Rome or there may have been other motives, a love affair of his own or his friendship with Bernardim Ribeiro. He was distantly related to the great Italian family of Colonna (as he was to Garci Lasso) and in Italy perhaps met the celebrated Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547), Marchesa di Pescara, besides probably most of the other distinguished Italians of the time, Lattanzio Tolomei, Sannazzaro, Cardinal Bembo, Giovanni Rucellai, Ariosto. During five years he saw the principal cities of Italy and Sicily and returned to Portugal in 1526 (or earlier, possibly after three years, in 1524) with a deep knowledge of Italian literature and the firm resolve to acclimatize in his country the metres in which the Italians had written things so divine. If he had seen at Rome the _Cancioneiro_ of thirteenth-century Portuguese poets[321] he must have realized that the metres were not so foreign as many might think; if he met Boscán on his homeward journey his determination to become innovator or restorer[322] would be strengthened. King João III was on the throne, and we are told in Miranda’s earliest biography (1614), which is attributed with some probability to D. Gonçalo Coutinho, that he became ‘one of the most esteemed courtiers of his time’. He was an enthusiastic believer in monarchy and in the divinity that doth hedge a king, but was less enamoured of the growing corruption and luxury at Court: probably he was himself more esteemed by the king than by the courtiers, and after the poetry of Italy he could scarcely share their taste for the trivial verses of the _Cancioneiro Geral_ nor could they see how a compliment could be turned more neatly than in the old _esparsas_ and _vilancetes_. During these years he wrote his first play, _Os Estranjeiros_, the eclogue _Alexo_ with _oitavas_ in Portuguese, and the _Fabula do Mondego_, perhaps in order to show his superiority over Gil Vicente.

There was an obvious antagonism between the laughing and the weeping reformer (for both protested vigorously in their different ways against the growing materialism of the day), between the learned, philosophical and the natural, human poet, and Vicente’s humour probably appeared to Sá de Miranda as unintelligible and undignified as Miranda’s hendecasyllabic poems may have appeared melancholy-thin and artificial to Vicente: _et ce n’est point ainsi que parle la Nature_. But the line in the introduction of the _Fabula do Mondego_ in which Miranda speaks of the king’s condescension,

Al canto pastoril ya hecho osado,

probably refers to some previous effort of his own rather than to the work of Vicente, and Miranda was in Italy when Gil Vicente was taunted by certain _homems de bom saber_ and turned the tables on them in the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_. The _Fabula do Mondego_ is a cold, stilted production of 600 lines in Petrarcan stanzas, the subject of which was

## partly derived from Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano). In 1532 the King gave

Miranda a _commenda_ (benefice) of the Order of Christ on the banks of the Neiva in Minho, and having acquired the neighbouring estate of Tapada (_quinta da Tapada_) he left the Court and retired to it not many months later. Miranda’s love of Nature was very deep, from his boyhood at Coimbra he had preferred the country to life in cities, and probably no other incentive was required, although it is thought that he may have been too zealous in support of Bernardim Ribeiro and that a passage in _Alexo_ (1532?) offended the powerful favourite, the Conde da Castanheira. Whatever the cause of his withdrawal, literature must call it blessed, for his new life in the country suited his temperament; the independence of character shown in his fine letter (one of the most famous poems in the Portuguese language) addressed to King João III developed, and close contact with the country and the peasants gave his poetry that indigenous flavour and peculiar charm which have fascinated all readers of the eclogue _Basto_, that individual stamp in which the Court poetry was infallibly lacking. He had already written his best work--for this eclogue and the letters show the real Miranda, pointed, original, racy of the soil--and written it in _quintilhas_, when in 1536 he married Briolanja, the sister of his old friend, now his neighbour at Crasto, Manuel Machado de Azevedo. Some miles away, at the straggling little village of Cabeceiras de Basto, he had other intimate friends, the Pereiras, and the gift, by one of these two brothers, Antonio Nunalvarez Pereira, of a manuscript of Garci Lasso de la Vega’s poems shortly before Miranda’s marriage revived his enthusiasm for the alien metres. He turned again to the hendecasyllable and wrote the eclogues _Andrés_ (1535), _Celia_, and _Nemoroso_ (1537), the latter in memory of the tragic death of Garci Lasso in the preceding year. He returned to the _quintilha_ later, employing it with flowing ease in _A Egipciaca Santa Maria_ (or _Santa Maria Egipciaca_), which was probably written between 1544 and 1554, when he was educating his two sons with _amor encoberto e moderado_ (_A Egipciaca_, p. 3), and nearer the former than the latter date. Its vigour and the promise of more[323] after 721 _quintilhas_ preclude the date (1556-8) assigned to it by its first editor, even without the statement of the 1614 biographer that Miranda wrote scarcely anything after his wife’s death in 1555; but it may have been written even earlier, before 1544. And still through all these various poems, despite their undeniable value and incidental beauties, it is the man, his life and character, that interest us. The wild yet green and peaceful scenery of Minho accorded well with his _alma soberana_, at once active and contemplative, disciplined and independent. At first hunting the wolf and boar occupied his leisure--we see him out with his dogs Hunter, Swallowfoot, &c., in crimson dawn and breathless noonday--and gave him a hundred opportunities for quiet observation of Nature, the streams, especially the birds, and the peasants. The poems written soon after his arrival still retain the freshness of these impressions. His evenings were spent with his friends at Cabeceiras--true _noctes cenaeque deum_--or in the more formal society at Crasto or with music--he played the viola--or his favourite authors, Homer in Greek, or Horace, the Bible, the Italians, or Garci Lasso and Boscán. Later gardening[324] and the education of his sons and entertainment of visitors took the place of his favourite wolf-hunting. As his fame and influence spread, Diogo Bernardez (whose recollections of Miranda were recorded in the 1614 life) was not the only disciple who came to see him in his retreat, and he corresponded in verse with most of the poets of the time, Andrade Caminha, Montemôr, Ferreira, D. Manuel de Portugal, Bernardez. Cardinal Henrique was a steadfast admirer of his work, and the young Prince João asked for a copy: _lhas mandou pedir_. This wide recognition after the first coldness[325] was some measure of comfort for the many sorrows of his last years, the death of his eldest son Gonçalo, killed in his teens in Africa (1553), of his wife (1555), of that promising precocious Prince João (1537-54) to whom he had thrice sent a collection of his poems, the departure of his brother, Mem, to become one of the most notable Governors of Brazil (1557). In the latter year King João died, leaving an infant heir to a distracted kingdom, and Miranda’s death followed a few months later. In a sense this philosopher was the most un-Portuguese of poets, for he had no facility in verse. He went on hammering his lines, altering, erasing, compressing in a divine discontent. He had a lofty conception of the poet’s art--to express the noblest sentiment in the best and fewest words--five versions of _Alexo_, twelve of _Basto_, attest his untiring zeal and his ‘art to blot’. The elliptical abruptness of his native _quintilhas_, by which they have something in common with those of Ribeiro, are not their least charm, and gives an effective emphasis to his sententious philosophy. In introducing the new measures[326] he used the Castilian language as being the most natural and suitable until, but only until, they should be thoroughly acclimatized. He wrote Castilian not fluently--that was not his gift--but correctly, with only occasional _lusitanismos_. His best work, however, was written in Portuguese: in the new poetry with which his name is for ever associated he is only the forerunner of the work of Diogo Bernardez and Camões,[327] the founder of a school to which Portuguese literature owes some of its chief glories. In Portuguese he wrote his comedies and, about half a century before Samuel Daniel’s _Cleopatra_ (1592), a tragedy _Cleopatra_, of which we only possess a few lines.[328] The poem on the life and conversion of St. Mary of Egypt[329] (a favourite theme a few centuries earlier, as in the Spanish _Vida de Santa Maria Egipciaqua_ (13th c.?), the fourteenth-century _Vida de Maria Egipcia_, and the French _Vie de Sainte Marie l’Égyptienne_) is stamped with the author’s sententious wisdom and love of discipline. It contains quaint plays on words (_Ide ao mar que por amar_, p. 169), _tours de force_ such as the three _quintilhas_ of _esdruxulos_ (pp. 179-80), and rises to wonderful lyric beauty in the saint’s farewell to Earth (_Vou para um jardim de flores_, pp. 166-9). He intended the poem to be ‘rare, unique and excellent’ and to some extent he achieved his aim. In much of his work the diction is rough and halting, but the greatness of the man nevertheless extends to his poetry. Perhaps the best example of this is the melancholy grandeur of the sonnet, technically so imperfect, _O sol é grande_. Force of character made him not only a laborious but a successful craftsman. When he died, honoured and admired by all the best intellects in the country, the position of the new school was assured and he had been able to hail with joy the support of younger writers: _Venid buenos zagales!_ Foremost in time among these poets of _el verso largo_ was D. MANUEL DE PORTUGAL[330] (1520?-1606), son of the first Conde de Vimioso and of D. Joana de Vilhena, cousin of King Manuel. He outlived all his fellow-poets, welcomed the appearance of _Os Lusiadas_, and in 1580 took the side of the Prior D. Antonio. His _Obras_ (1605) consist of seventeen books of poems, mostly of a religious character and written in Spanish--books 9 and 15 contain some Portuguese poems, and among them the fine mystic sonnet _Apetece minha alma_ (Bk. ix, f. 199 v.).

Among those who welcomed and acclimatized the new style none was a more talented or truer poet than DIOGO BERNARDEZ (_c._ 1530-_c._ 1600),[331] who confessed that he owed everything to Sá de Miranda and Antonio Ferreira.[332] Born of a distinguished family[333] at Ponte da Barca on the river Lima, he would ride over to visit Sá de Miranda or send him letters in verse, and he mourned his death in sonnet, letter, and eclogue with unaffected grief. He himself continued to sing by the banks of his beloved Lima, endeared to him all the more by disillusion at Lisbon and captivity in Africa. In a letter to Miranda he alludes to an apparently unhappy love affair at Lisbon. Later the retirement of his poet brother, Frei Agostinho, into a convent, the deaths of Miranda and Ferreira, the great plague of 1569, and the misfortunes of his country were all deeply felt by his affectionate nature. In 1576 he went as secretary of Embassy to Madrid, but otherwise he seems to have been disappointed in hopes of lucrative employment, and he was always ready to exchange the mud of the streets and the ‘bought meals’ of Lisbon, with its penurious, importunate _moços_,[334] for the dewy golden dawns, the hills and streams of Minho, _entre simples e humildes lavradores_ (_Carta_ 27). In 1578, however, he who had lamented that no Maecenas encouraged those eager to sing the deeds of Portuguese heroes was chosen to accompany as official poet[335] the Portuguese expedition which ended disastrously in _aquelle funeral e turvo dia_--the battle of Alcacer Kebir. It was not till 1581 that Bernardez returned from captivity. Whether he was ransomed by King Philip, or by the Trinitarians or Jesuits, or by himself or his friends, is not known. After his return and his marriage he frequently laments his poverty: not, he says, that he wishes to be the Pope in Rome, but merely to have enough to eat (_Carta_ 31). Yet apparently he had no cause to regret the change of dynasty so far as his personal fortunes were concerned. Whereas he had merely held the post of _servidor de toalha_ at the palace under King Sebastian, he was now (1582) appointed a knight of the Order of Christ with a pension of 20,000 _réis_ and was granted 500 _cruzados_ (‘in property and goods’) in the same year. In 1593 his yearly pension was 40,000 _réis_, of which one-half was to revert to his wife and children. Either these moneys remained unpaid or the new _cavaleiro fidalgo’s_ ideas had changed greatly since he had sung of the joys of rustic poverty and the vanity of riches. Bernardez found his inspiration in the Portuguese and Spanish poets of the new school (_cantigas strangeiras_, _strañas_),[336] and through them in the great Italians. Dante’s name does not occur in his letters, written in _tercetos_,[337] but Tasso--_o meu Tasso_---Ariosto, Petrarca, and others are mentioned.[338] In form and sound some of his _canções_ are not unworthy of Petrarca, but they are more homely and bucolic, have more _saudade_ and less definite images, no concrete pictures like that of _la stanca vecchierella pellegrina_ of the fourth _Canzone_. His second source of inspiration was his native Minho and the transparent waters and _fresca praia_ of the Lima. He was never happier than when wandering _lungo l’amate rive_, and this gives a pleasant reality to his eclogues. His muse, _a bosques dada e a fontes cristalinas_, sings not only of the conventional ‘roses and lilies’ but of honeysuckle, of cherries red in May, grapes heavy with dew, golden apples, nuts, acorns, the trout so plentiful that they can be caught with the hand, hares, partridges, doves, the thrush and the nightingale, and mentions oak, ash, elm, poplar, beech, hazel, chestnut, and arbutus. These eclogues, written in various metres, sometimes with _leixapren_ or internal rhyme, are collected in _O Lima_ (1596), which also contains his letters. His other works are sonnets, elegies, odes in _Rimas Varias_, _Flores do Lima_ (1596), and a third small volume _Varias Rimas ao Bom Jesus_ (1594) which includes elegies and odes to the Virgin written during his captivity, a long _Historia de Santa Ursula_ in octaves, and other devotional verse of much fervour and his wonted perfection of technique. If, read in the mass, his poems produce the impression of a cloying sweetness, it must be remembered that never before had Portuguese poetry risen to so harmonious a music. Faria e Sousa accused him of plagiarizing Camões, but in the case of a writer whose accepted poems, the _dulcissima carmina Limae_, are of such excellence the accusation cannot be seriously entertained. Neither he nor Camões was a great original poet, but in both the command of the new style was such that their poems were often confused by collectors. A passage in one of Bernardez’ letters (5, l. 6) seems to imply that his poetry was not appreciated at Lisbon. It was too genuine and clear to suit the clever Court rhymesters. But he had his followers, who would send him their poems to be corrected, or rather, praised, and later Lope de Vega recognized him as his master in the eclogue in preference to Garci Lasso.

FRANCISCO GALVÃO (_c._ 1563-1635?), equerry to the Duke of Braganza, was a true poet if he wrote the sonnet _A Nosso Senhor_ ascribed to him by his editor, Antonio Lourenço Caminha, in _Poesias ineditas dos nossos insignes poetas Pedro da Costa Perestrello, coevo do grande Luis de Camões, e Francisco Galvão_ (1791): _Ó tu de puro amor Deos fonte pura_. Innocencio da Silva vigorously doubts the authenticity of these poems, which are mostly of a religious character or concerned with Horace’s theme of the golden mean, as that of the _Obras ineditas de Aires Telles de Meneses_ (1792) published by the same editor, who professed to have faithfully copied them from the _antigos originaes_ of the time of João II. Bernardez’ brother Frei AGOSTINHO DA CRUZ (1540-1619), born at Ponte da Barca, entered as a novice the Convent of Santa Cruz in the Serra de Sintra in 1560, and took the vows a year later. In 1605 he obtained permission to live as a hermit in the Serra da Arrabida, where he cultivated _saudade_ and the muses, although his poems were no longer profane, as when in his youth as Agostinho Pimenta he haunted with his brother Diogo the banks of the Lima. These early verses he burnt: _Queimei, como vergonha me pedia, Chorando par haver tão mal cantado_. The eclogues, elegies, letters, sonnets, and odes that survive prove that _mal_ is here a moral, not an aesthetic adverb, and that he shared his brother’s love of Nature and in no mean degree his power of expressing it in soft, harmonious verse.

That gift was denied to ANTONIO FERREIRA (1528-69), who combined enthusiasm for the new style--_a lira nova_--and for classical antiquity with a rooted antipathy against the use of a foreign language or foreign subjects. His uneventful life as judge, courtier, and poet was cut short by the plague of 1569. His poetry is not that of a poet but of the Coimbra law student who had become a busy magistrate.[339] It is thus at its best when it does not attempt to be lyrical, for instance in his excellent letters in _tercetos_. His odes are closely modelled on those of Horace (_o meu Horacio_). Nor did he claim originality: indeed, his plan of introducing certain new forms was a little too deliberate for a great poet,[340] and his best sonnet is a translation from Petrarca. For bucolic poetry neither the grave doctor’s style nor his inclinations were well suited. Not only is the smooth flow of the verse which charms us in Diogo Bernardez here absent but the metre often actually halts,[341] and throughout his work we have sincerity, lofty aims, a stiff unbending severity, but not poetical genius. Ferreira was a true patriot, and it was his boast and is his enduring fame that he devoted himself to exalt the Portuguese language.[342] It was most fortunate for Portuguese literature that at this time of changing taste a poet of Ferreira’s great influence should have forsworn foreign intrusions in the language with the exception of Latin (in the introduction of which, however, his characteristic restraint forbade excess), and left both in prose and verse abiding monuments of pure Portuguese. This was the more remarkable in a poet who disdained the old popular metres (_a antiga trova deixo ao povo_) and had no thought apparently for popular customs or traditions. His _Poemas Lusitanos_, published posthumously, contain over a hundred sonnets, besides his odes, eclogues, elegies, epigrams (which are but fragments of sonnets), and letters, and he also wrote a _Historia de Santa Comba_ in fifty-seven _oitavas_.

The work of PERO DE ANDRADE CAMINHA (1520?-89), an industrious writer of verse rather than a poet, is as cold and unmusically artificial as Ferreira’s in its form, while it lacks Ferreira’s high thought and ideals and his love for his native language. One may imagine that it was through friendship with Ferreira--who scolds him for writing in Spanish--that he became one of the set of Miranda and Bernardez. Camões he must have known,[343] and indeed refers to him satirically in his epigrams: he seems to have actively disliked so wayward a genius, a man so unfitted to be a Court official. Caminha himself was the son of João Caminha, Chamberlain of the Duchess Isabel of Braganza, and of Philippa de Sousa of Oporto, where (or at Lisbon) the poet may have been born. After studying at the University, either at Lisbon, or after its transference to Coimbra in 1537, he entered the household of the Infante Duarte. In 1576 the poet retired to the palace of the Braganzas at Villa Viçosa and died there thirteen years later. During the last ten years of his life he held a _tença_ of two hundred milreis besides other sources of income (he was Alcaide Môr of Celorico de Basto, as his father had been of Villa Viçosa), so that his lot compares handsomely with that of Camões. He had planned an edition of his works in nine books, but only a few occasional poems were published during his lifetime. He wrote short poems in all the usual kinds, but, although trusted and honoured by the princes he served, he entirely lacked Camões’ divine _furia_ and had no compensating sympathy or insight or lyrical charm. What would not Camões have made of his chanty, _cantiga para çalamear_![344]

In perfect contrast to the laboured verses of Andrade Caminha is the spontaneous flow of the lines to the river Leça beginning _Ó rio Leça_, by which the Conde de Mattosinhos, FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE MENESES (1515?-84), is chiefly remembered. They place him at once among the principal poets of the century. He succeeded the Conde de Vimioso as Camareiro Môr of Prince João, held the same post in the first years of King Sebastian’s reign, and subsequently under King Henrique, who created him Count of Mattosinhos in return for his services as Governor of Portugal (during the absence of King Sebastian) and on other occasions. After the death of the Portuguese king he retired to Oporto, and no doubt spent the remaining summers at Mattosinhos near the gentle stream which he had immortalized.

The Portuguese poems of ANDRÉ FALCÃO DE RESENDE (1527?-98), born at Evora, nephew of the antiquarian André and of the poet Garcia de Resende, were first published at Coimbra in an incomplete volume _Poesias_ [1865], and consist of the _Microcosmographia_ and some spirited anti-Drake ballads and good sonnets (e.g. _Ó fragil bem_, _Ó breve gosto humano_) and satires. BALTHASAR DE ESTAÇO (born in 1570), Canon of Viseu, and his brother the antiquarian GASPAR DE ESTAÇO, Canon of Guimarães and author of _Varias Antiguidades de Portugal_ (1625), were both born at Evora. The former’s _Sonetos, Eglogas e ovtras rimas_ (1604), published, according to the preface, in the author’s mature age but written in the green, contain some religious sonnets of high merit.

A far more celebrated writer than these minor poets was JORGE DE MONTEMÔR (_c._ 1520-61), or _hispanice_ Montemayor, who was early driven by poverty from Montemôr o Velho (where he was born between 1518 and 1528) a few years after Mendez Pinto. Fortunately the latter did not relate his travels in Chinese, but Montemôr, with the exception of a few brief passages[345] in his _Diana_, wrote exclusively in Spanish. In Spain his musical talent gave him a livelihood, and as musician and singer of the Royal Chapel he remained at the Court till 1552, when he accompanied the Infanta Juana as _aposentador_ on the occasion of her marriage with that promising patron of letters, the Infante João. But even before the prince’s death in 1554 Montemôr returned to Spain. In 1555 he may have gone in the train of Philip II to England, and subsequently served as a soldier in Holland and Italy till a duel, perhaps in a love affair, at Turin ended his days in 1561.[346] Despite his brief and restless life Montemôr, who showed in _Las obras de George de Montemayor_ (1554) that he was no mean poet, found time to write one of the most famous books in literature. The date of its publication--it was dedicated to Prince João and Princess Juana--is uncertain, but it was probably an early work. In spirit, since not in the letter, it belongs to Portugal. Its gentle, easy style (Menéndez y Pelayo calls it _tersa, suave, melódica, expresiva_), the sentimental love and melancholy, the introduction of bucolic scenes, the references to Portugal--_cristalino_ applied to the Mondego is no conventional epithet, as only those who have seen its transparent waters can fully realize--mark the _Diana_ as the work of a Portuguese. Its fame soon overleapt the borders of the Peninsula. In Spain it had a numerous progeny, to which Cervantes refused the grace somewhat grudgingly given to Montemôr’s work as ‘the first in its kind’. In Portugal this, the eldest child of Bernardim Ribeiro’s _Menina e moça_, had to wait over half a century before it found a worthy successor in the _Lusitania Transformada_.

Little certain is known of the life of FERNAM ALVAREZ DO ORIENTE (_c._ 1540-_c._ 1595?). Born at Goa, he served in the East, and may have fought in the battle of Alcacer Kebir. His resemblance to Moraes in temperament and adventures perhaps gave rise to the assertion that he wrote the fifth and sixth parts of _Palmeirim de Inglaterra_. The scene of his _Lvsitania Transformada_ (1617) is partly in Portugal (the banks of the river Nabão and the seven hills of Thomar) and

## partly in India (_no nosso Oriente_). Like Montemôr’s _Diana_, it is

divided into _prosas_ and poems, and it is modelled on the _Arcadia_ of Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530)--the mountains of Arcadia transformed into Lusitania[347]--which, however, each of its three books equals in length. The prose setting, although devoid of thought, is mellifluous and clear, and the poems, which contain reminiscences of Camões, rival in the harmony and transparent flow of the verse that ‘prince of the poets of our time’, as Alvarez calls him. Some critics have even ventured to attribute the work to Camões, as though his genius were so poor that he must needs fall to quoting himself in whole lines, as is here the case. But Alvarez had certainly caught some measure of Camões’ skill and of _il soave stilo e ’l dolce canto_ of Sannazzaro and Petrarca. He is, moreover, less vague[348] than many writers of eclogues, and in singing his own love story describes what his eyes have seen. It was, however, an aberration to favour the _verso esdruxulo_ (Ariosto’s _sdruccioli_) (cf. Sannazzaro’s _Arcadia_, Ecl. 1, 6, 8, 9, 12), a truly Manueline adornment which other Portuguese poets unfortunately copied as a new artifice.[349]

As a poet Manuel de Faria e Sousa, who was something more than a pedant of pedants, deserves a place among the multitude of Portuguese writers of eclogues, since of the twenty long eclogues contained in his _Fvente de Aganipe y Rimas Varias_ (7 pts., 1624-7) the first twelve are in his native tongue. They show no originality but have occasional passages of quiet beauty. Nos. 7 and 8 are both entitled ‘rustic’ and purpose to represent peasants of Minho. They are so overcharged with archaisms and rustic words and expressions (_samicas_ and _namja_ of course occur, and _grolea_ (glory), _marmolea_ (memory), the form _suidade_, &c.) that they would probably have been Greek to the peasants. As a critic Lope de Vega called Faria the prince of commentators, on the strength of his learned and copious editions of the Lusiads and lyrics of Camões, for whom he had a genuine devotion. Time has lent an interest, if not validity, to his literary criticisms. In poetry he was as prolific as in prose: he boasted, in the age of Lope de Vega, that he had written more blank verse than any other poet and that his printed sonnets exceeded those of Lope by 300.

ELOI DE SÁ SOTTOMAIOR (or Souto Maior), the author of _Jardim do Ceo_ (1607) and _Ribeiras do Mondego_ (1623), is generally perhaps more familiar with the Saints than with the Muses, but some of his poems are not without merit. The latter work, in prose and verse, has no originality, although the author was careful to state that he had composed it before the _Primavera_ of FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ LOBO (_c._ 1580-1622), who in strains not less sweetly harmonious than the Lima poems of Bernardez sang the little stream of Lis that runs so gaily through his native Leiria. He went to study at Coimbra in 1593, took his degree there in 1602, returned to Leiria and before 1604 was in the service of Theodosio, Duke of Braganza, at Villa Viçosa. He was drowned in his prime in the Tagus coming from Santarem to Lisbon. He was alive in 1621, but, as Dr. Ricardo Jorge has shown in his able biography, died before the end of 1622. The fact of his drowning is well established, otherwise the tradition might have been attributed to passages in his works in which he seems to foretell such a fate. An extraordinarily prolific writer, his fame rests chiefly on his three pastoral works of mingled prose and verse: _A Primavera_ (1601) and its second and third parts _O Pastor Peregrino_ (1608) and _O Desenganado_ (1614). Rodriguez Lobo somewhere speaks disparagingly of books ‘long as leagues in Alentejo’, but length and monotony are not absent from his own pastorals. Look into them where you will, beautiful descriptions, showing deep love of Nature, will present themselves, and delightful verse and harmonious prose, excellent in its component parts although allowed to trail in the construction of the sentences. But the reader who attempts more than a desultory acquaintance is soon overcome by a feeling of satiety, for the _Primavera_ in its _brandura sem fim_ and the complete absence of thought is like a stream choked by water-lilies: lovely, but tiring to the swimmer.

Through all these love-lorn shepherd scenes runs a vague thread of autobiography. The passion of Bernardim Ribeiro is replaced by a suaver melancholy. The poet leaves the Lis for Coimbra and then goes to Lisbon and thence to distant lands, where he wanders as a pilgrim till he is shipwrecked at the mouth of the Lis and returns to his home to find Lisea given to another. It is divided into _florestas_. In the opening _florestas_ the quiet streams, the green woods and pastures, are charmingly described; later the scene is transferred to the _campos do Mondego_ and the _praias do Tejo_. A breath of the sea is welcome in _O Desenganado_, but the story soon returns to shepherd life and its series of natural but rather insipid incidents.

Had Rodriguez Lobo written not better but less, his pastoral romances would probably be far more widely read. But his finest work is of a different kind, a long dialogue, _Corte na Aldea e Noites de Inverno_ (1619), between a _fidalgo_, D. Julio, and four friends in the long winter evenings near Lisbon. Suggested by Baldassare Castiglione’s famous _Il Cortigiano_, which had been popularized in Spain by Boscán’s excellent translation (1534), this work, for which Gracián prophesied immortality, is full of the most varied interest. The prose, excellent as is all that of this champion of the Portuguese language, _jardineiro da lingua portuguesa_ (which his countrymen, he complained, patch and patch like a beggar’s cloak), is here more vigorous and compact in its construction without losing its harmonious rhythm, attractive as the conversations which it records. Besides the beautiful verses lavishly scattered through his prose works, Rodriguez Lobo wrote a long epic on Nun’ Alvarez in twenty cantos of _oitavas_: _O Condestabre de Portugal D. Nuno Alvarez Pereira_ (1610),[350] a volume of _Eglogas_ (1605), in which he is a recognized master, a volume of _Romances_ (1596) written, with two exceptions, in Spanish,[351] and, perhaps, a Christmas play entitled _Auto del Nascimiento de Christo y Edicto del Emperador Avgvsto Cesar_, published in 1676. It is written in _redondilhas_ in Spanish and Portuguese.[352] This _auto_ is followed by an _Entremes do Poeta_ in Portuguese. A poet, an obdurate Gongorist (_Do Gongora tive sempre opinadas preferencias_), recites a sonnet to a lady: _Celicola substancia procreada_, which she does not understand, and a _ratinho_, also at a loss (_he para mim cousa grega_), advises him to give over his jargon for a more natural language:

Gerigonças no fallar, Que amor nam he contrafeito.

But Rodriguez Lobo has no need of such attributions to justify his great and enduring fame.

FOOTNOTES:

[302] Cf. H. Lopes de Mendonça, _O Salto Mortal_, Act iii: _Tanto gostaes d’este livro: É por ser triste?--É por ser verdadeiro._

[303] Eclogue 5 (_a qual dizem ser do mesmo autor_), which is undoubtedly by Ribeiro, refers to Coimbra in the lines: _É lembrarme os sinceiraes De Coimbra que me mata_.

[304] As in the case of Gil Vicente, we are vexed with homonyms--a notary, an admiral, &c. Dr. Theophilo Braga, skilfully dovetailing hypotheses, develops his biography fully. _Casi todo lo que de él se ha escrito son fábulas sin fundamento alguno_, wrote Menéndez y Pelayo in 1905.

[305] Fray Luis de Leon may have remembered this passage in _De los Nombres de Cristo_, Bk. 3 (1917 ed., t. 1, p. 198; _Bib. Aut. Esp._, t. 37, p. 182).

[306] _Nossos amores contados por um modo que os não entenderá ninguem_, Garrett, _Um Auto de Gil Vicente_.

[307] _La Voluntad_, Barcelona, 1902. Camillo Castello Branco held similar views.

[308] The word cannot be translated exactly, but corresponds to the Greek πόθος, Latin _desiderium_, Catalan _anyoranza_, Galician _morriña_, German _Sehnsucht_, Russian тоска (pron. _taská_). It is the ‘passion for which I can find no name’ (Gissing, _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_).

[309] Menéndez y Pelayo’s strict division between the ‘subjective’ pt. 1 and pt. 2 as _externa y de aventuras_ is thus somewhat arbitrary.

[310] Pt. 1, cap. 9; pt. 2, cap. 25.

[311] In pt. 2, cap. 9, this is forgotten: _outras_ [_cousas_] _que não são escritas neste livro_, a slip which throws no light on the authorship.

[312] It was characteristic of the hot-house air in which Portuguese literature existed that the first publication of a book often consisted in its circulation (_correr_) in manuscript from courtier to courtier, a special licence being obtained for this apart from the licence to print. Those to whom it appealed made copies. The earliest known edition of _Menina e moça_ is of 1557-8: _Primeira & segũda parte do liuro chamado as Saudades de Bernaldim Ribeiro com todas suas obras. Treladado de seu propria original. Nouamente impresso._ 1557 (Euora. The date of the colophon is January 30, 1558). An introductory note _Aos lectores_ says: _Foram tantos os traduzidores deste liuro & os pareceres em elle tam diuersos que nam he de marauilhar que na primeira impressam desta historia se achassem tantas cousas em contrario de como foram pello auctor delle escriptas ... foy causa de andar este liuro tam vicioso ... conueo tirarse a limpo do propria original_, &c., &c.). The edition of 1554, quoted by Brunet, was probably the first in spite of the words _com summa diligencia emendada_ (i.e. corrections of the manuscript). The phrase _de nouo_ tells more against than in favour of an earlier edition (= rather ‘new’ than ‘anew’).

[313] Ribeiro, so far as we know, wrote no line of Spanish. Boscán’s _romance Justa fué mi perdición_ and the _romance Ó Belerma_ have been wrongly ascribed to him.

[314] p. 287: ... _so ganz persönlichem Stil, dass sie mit keinem anderen Dichter vor oder nach ihnen, wohl aber untereinander zu verwechseln wären_; and p. 292: Bernardim Ribeiro writes _ganz im Stile des Falcão_. Cf. F. Bouterwek, _History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature_, Eng. tr. 1823, ii. 39: ‘A long eclogue by this writer, which forms an appendix to the works of Ribeyro, so completely partakes of the character of the poems which it accompanies that were it not for the separate title it might be mistaken for the production of Ribeyro himself. It therefore proves that Ribeyro’s poetic fancies, his romantic mysticism not excepted, were by no means individual.’

[315] According to Dr. Theophilo Braga, he was born in 1515; married in 1529 Maria Brandão (aged eleven); was profoundly influenced by Ribeiro’s _Trovas de dous pastores_ (1536) but did not plagiarize it in the _Trovas de Crisfal_ (1536-41), similar passages being due to the _situação quasi similar_ (i.e. _quasi identica_) of the two friends; went to Italy on a diplomatic mission in 1541; spent the year 1543 in Rome and returned to Portugal in the winter of 1543-4; was factor of the fortress of Arguim from 1545 to 1548; and died in 1577.

[316] The whole question at issue is whether the _de_ of _Trovas de Crisfal_ = ‘by’ or ‘about’ (cf. _O Livro das Trovas d’ El Rei_ = rather ‘belonging to’ than ‘by’ the king), and protests against _a illusão de pretender identificar em um mesmo poeta o apaixonado de Aonia e o de Maria_ (_Obras_, 1915 ed., p. 10) or _o intuito de converterem Christovam Falcão em um mytho_ (ibid., p. 42) are beside the point.

[317] That one of the figures is identical in the woodcuts of these two _folhas volantes_ is not significant: it appears also in an anonymous edition of the _Pranto de Maria Parda_.

[318] In the 1559 ed. the words _hũa muy nomeada e agradauel Egloga chamada Crisfal ... que dizem ser de Cristouam Falcam, ho que parece alludir ho nome da mesma Egloga_ may legitimately be held to imply merely that some persons, misled by the anagram, attributed the poem to Falcão.

[319] _Decada_ 8, cap. 34 (1786 ed., p. 322).

[320] The _licença_ of the 1632 edition says, _Este livrinho ... muitas vezes se imprimio_.

[321] Cf. 1885 ed., No. 109:

Eu digo os Provençais que inda se sente O som das brandas rimas que entoaram.

Cf. Boscán ap. Menéndez y Pelayo, _Antología_, tom. xiii (_Juan Boscán_), p. 165: _En tiempo de Dante y un poco antes florecieron los Proenzales, cuyas obras por culpa de los tiempos andan en pocas manos._ Menéndez y Pelayo also (ibid., p. 174) gives a reference by Faria e Sousa to King Dinis: _El rey don Dionis de Portugal nació primero que el Dante tres ó quatro años y escrivió mucho deste propio género endecasílabo, coma consta de los manuscritos._

[322] Cf. 1885 ed., No. 112:

¿Como se perdieron Entre nos el cantar, como el tañer Que tanto nombre a los pasados dieron?

[323]

Adeus leitor a mais ver, Porque ainda haveis de ver mais (_A Egipciaca_, p. 181).

[324] He must often have repeated Nuno Pereira’s lines, which may have influenced him when he read them in the _Cancioneiro Geral: Privar em cas da Rainha Deos vollo deixe fazer, E a mi hũa vinha E regar hũa almoinha Em que tenho mor prazer ... Lavro, cavo quanta posso ... O gingrar de meu caseiro_, &c.

[325] His complaint in the second elegy (1885 ed., No. 147, l. 17) shows how far he was in advance of his age in Portugal: _Um vilancete brando ou seja um chiste, Letras ás invenções, motes ás damas, Hũa pregunta escura, esparsa triste, Tudo bom, quem o nega? Mas porque, Se alguem descobre mais, se lhe resiste?_

[326] Often he combines several in the same poem. Thus the long (533 lines) eclogue on the death of Garci Lasso (_Nemoroso_) begins in _tercetos_, proceeds with _rima encadeada_ (internal rhyme), and ends with Petrarcan stanzas.

[327] Cf. the sonnet (1885 ed., No. 126) _Esprito que voaste_ with _Alma minha gentil_.

[328] The autograph manuscript of this and of other poems, discovered in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional by Snr. Delfim Guimarães in 1908, has been reproduced in facsimile by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the _Boletim_ of the Lisbon _Ac. das Sciencias_, vol. v (1912), pp. 187-220. See _infra_, p. 164.

[329] Leonel da Costa, the translator of Virgil and Terence, later wrote a poem in seven cantos of _redondilhas_ on the same subject: _A Conversão miraculosa da felice egypcia penitente Santa Maria_ (1627).

[330] Faria e Sousa even makes him the first Portuguese poet to write hendecasyllabics, setting aside those of Sá de Miranda as unreadable: _son incapaces de ser leidos!_ (_Varias Rimas_, pt. ii, p. 162).

[331] He was _Moço da camara_ in 1566. He was appointed a knight of the Order of Christ in 1582. He married apparently after his return from Africa in 1581. He was alive in 1596 (although in one of his poems he refers to a premature old age) and dead in 1605. On the other hand, he was apparently over twenty-five in 1558. It is thought that the right of passing on his official posts to his children (_sobrevivencia_), granted to his father in 1532, may indicate the date of the birth of the eldest of his eleven children: Diogo Bernardez (who did not, like some of his brothers, use his father’s second name, Pimenta).

[332] _Carta_ 12: _Confesso dever tudo áquella rara Doutrina tua_.

[333] The succeeding generation was also distinguished, one of the poet’s nephews becoming Bishop of Angra, another Governor of Angola, a third Professor at Coimbra University.

[334] Bernardez’ letters in verse contain many such references to everyday life, e. g. the Lisbon negress selling fried fish in the _Betesga_.

[335] A confident sonnet by him in this capacity is extant: _Pois armarse por Christo não duvida Sebastião._

[336] _O doce estillo teu tomo por guia_ and _Escrevo, leio e risco_ he writes to Miranda, but his muse was far more spontaneous than Miranda’s, and it appears from another passage (in _Elegia_ 5) that his alterations were less of style than of matter.

[337] _Carta_ 32 is an exception, and consists of seventy-two _oitavas_.

[338] He introduces Italian lines (_Cartas_ 23, 27, 30) and wrote a sonnet in Italian.

[339] Cf. _Carta_ 4: _Foge inda o dia ao muito diligente_, although whether this is due to his work or to the number of his friends is not clear.

[340] _Com cujo_ [Miranda’s] _exemplo meu pai, que entam estaua nos estudos, pretendeo com a variedade destes sens manifestar como a lingua Portugueza assi em copia de palauras como em grauidade de estylo a nenhuma he inferior_ (Miguel Leite Ferreira, Preface to _Poemas Lvsitanos_, 1598).

[341] To take an example not from the eclogues but from one of his sonnets, the words

da guerra Nossa livres viveis em paz e em gloria

correspond but ill to their peaceful sense.

[342] Cf. _Carta_ 2. Bernardez (in an elegy on Ferreira’s death addressed to Andrade Caminha) records that among all Ferreira’s verses not a line was written in a foreign tongue: _um só nunca lhe deu em lingua alhea_.

[343] Thirteen times the same subject is treated by Camões and Caminha, sometimes exclusively by them (C. Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, _Pero de Andrade Caminha_ (1901), p. 55).

[344] _Obras_, ed. Priebsch, p. 361.

[345] All that he wrote in Portuguese is contained in two pages (389-91) of Garcia Peres’ _Catálogo_ (1890).

[346] Fray Bartolomé Ponce, _Primera Parte de la Clara Diana a lo divino_ (1582?): _Me dijeron como un muy amigo suyo le habia muerto por ciertos zelos ó amores_ (quoted by Ticknor, iii. 536, and by T. Braga (omitting _ciertos_), _Bernardim Ribeiro_ (1872), p. 80).

[347] _Argumento desta obra._

[348] e.g.

No mato o rosmaninho, a branca esteva, No campo o lirio azul que o chão cubria.

[349] _Que estes se chamem poetas!_ rightly exclaims Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina (_Seram Politico_ (1704), p. 146) of those who revel in the use of _esdruxulos_.

[350] The whole of Canto XIV is given to a vigorous account of the battle of Aljubarrota, already described more vividly in fewer stanzas by Camões. Another poem in _oitavas_ by Rodriguez Lobo, _Historia da Arvore Triste_, was published in _Fenix Renascida_, vol. iv.

[351] In Spanish also are the fifty-six _romances_ which make up the poem _La Jornada_, &c. (1623), written on the coming of Philip III to Portugal in 1619. In the eclogues, written chiefly in _redondilhas_, he sings with spontaneous charm _as praticas humildes e os cuidados Não por arte fingidos e enfeitados_ of the _rusticos vaqueiros_, as he says in the prefatory sonnet. Many of the words are pleasantly indigenous: _milho_, _boroa_, _salgueiraes_, _rafeiro_, _charneca_, _chocalho_, _abegões_, _ovelheiros_.

[352] For instance, when the Angel has announced in Spanish _las alegres nuevas_, the goatherd, _ratinho_, Mendo, says: _A din Rey, a din Rey ay! Que estou amorrinhentado, Acudame algum Cristom ou Sancristom._ Laureano, the shepherd, speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and Silvia says: _Porque o que sinto quisera Dizelo em bom Portugues._ An _Auto e Colloquio do Nascimento de Christo_ (1646) attributed to Francisco Lopes was reprinted in 1676.

§ 3

_The Drama_

After Gil Vicente’s death the _autos_ continued to flourish in number if not in excellence, and evidently answered to a very real popular demand. It was in vain that the Jesuits produced their Latin plays and that serious poets of high reputation sought to wean the affections of the people from the _auto_ to the classical drama.[353] This opposition of the educated did, however, conduce to the swift deterioration of the _auto_, although some of those of a religious character, chiefly the Nativity plays, still succeeded in reflecting a part of the charm that characterized the Vicentian drama. To Gil Vicente’s lifetime probably belongs the _Obra famosissima tirada da Sancta Escriptura chamada da Geração humana, onde se representam sentenças muy catolicas & proueitosas pera todo christã: Feita por huũ famoso autor_ (1536?). Indeed, the verse runs so easily, the peasants are so natural, that one might almost suspect him of having had a hand in its composition. But the metre (8 8 4 8 8 4) is more monotonous than he would have used throughout. The _dramatis personae_ are angels, peasants,[354] Adam, Justice, Reason, Malice, two devils, a priest, four saints and doctors of the Church, a Levite, the Church, the Heavenly Samaritan. Adam in a scene closely resembling that of the _Auto da Alma_ is tempted by Malice. Justice intervenes, and finally the Samaritan leads him to the _estalagem_ of Holy Mother Church. The _Auto de ds [Deus] padre & justiça & mia [Misericordia]_ belongs to the same period. It is written in octosyllabic verse and contains a similar medley of peasants, prophets, and abstract virtues. In the first part the angels in Portuguese announce to the Virgin the birth of Christ, and in the second part the peasants, who speak Spanish, go to offer rustic gifts to _el muy chiquito donzel_. Another early and anonymous play is the _Auto do Dia do Juizo_, included in the _Index_ of 1559, which for its subject closely follows Gil Vicente’s _Auto da Barca do Inferno_. A peasant, a false and lying notary, a market-woman who had offered weekly bread and wax to Santa Catharina but had ’robbed the poor people’, a butcher, a miller who had mixed bran in his sacks of flour, are introduced in turn and duly consigned by Lucifer to Hell.

If we only knew the quondam Franciscan monk ANTONIO RIBEIRO CHIADO (_c._ 1520?-91) and his contemporary and rival, the mulatto servant of the Bishop of Evora, by their mutual abuse, we could form no very high opinion of their character or their wit. In bitter _quintilhas_ Chiado reviles the latter for his dark complexion; AFONSO ALVAREZ answers by upbraiding _nonno Chiado_ as the son of a cobbler and a market-woman and for the habits which had made the cloister seem so dismal a place to Frei Antonio do Espirito Santo. Fortunately some of the plays of both of them survive, and we are better able to judge of their merits. The mulatto, who was a valued member of his master’s household and prides himself that Chiado has nothing worse to throw in his face than the colour of his skin, was certainly Chiado’s inferior in wit and talent. Both imitate Gil Vicente without having a vestige of his lyrical genius or greater skill in devising a plot. Alvarez preferred religious subjects. In his _Auto de Santo Antonio_ St. Anthony restores to life the drowned son of two peasants, who are imitated from Vicente’s _Auto da Feira_.[355] The only other of his plays that we have is the _Auto de Santa Barbara_, but we know that he also wrote an _Auto de S. Vicente Martyr_ and an _Auto de Santiago Apostolo_.

Chiado’s plays and witty sayings, _avisos para guardar_ and _parvoices_, appear to have made him extremely popular in Lisbon, Camões recognized his talent, and Lisbon’s most famous street still bears his name in common speech. His boisterous life at Lisbon after leaving his convent may have given him his name Chiado (cf. the _chiar_ of ox-carts), but it existed as a surname earlier. His _Pratica de Oito Figuras_ (1543?), _Auto das Regateiras_ (1568 or 1569), and _Pratica dos Compadres_ (1572), are the work of an accomplished wit who was intimately acquainted with the farces of Gil Vicente and, in the last two, with the prose plays of Jorge Ferreira. Many of Vicente’s types are present, but all in a town atmosphere, in which cards take the place of the rustic dances and lyric yields to epigram, the natural genius of Vicente to a laboured smartness. We have the _clerigo de vintem_, the _ratinho_ from Beira, the vain _pação_, the poor _fidalgo_ or _escudeiro_, the negro with his pidgin Portuguese, the witch, the ill-tempered _velha_, the _trovador_ chaplain, the ambitious priest, the corrupt judge. The scenes are even more disconnected and less dramatic, and the ingenious _redondilhas_ necessarily seem artificial because their author so often challenges comparison with the more genuine skill of his master, Gil Vicente. Chiado’s _Auto de Gonçalo Chambão_ was reprinted several times in the seventeenth century, but is now unknown. Of his _Auto da Natural Invençam_ (_c._ 1550) a single copy survives, in the library of the Conde de Sabugosa, whose edition (1917) is of exceptional interest. The play, as reminiscent of Vicente as are the other plays of Chiado, describes the acting of an _auto_ in a private house in the reign of João III, and bears witness to the frequency of such representations at Lisbon and to their extraordinary popularity.

BALTHASAR DIAZ, a blind poet (or _jogral_) of Madeira, in the first half of the sixteenth century wrote plays which have retained their popularity. He versified at great length traditions of chivalry and of mediaeval saints. We do not possess his _Trovas_ written on the death of D. João de Castro (1548), and many of his plays, _Auto da Paixam de Christo_, _Auto de El Rei Salomão_, _Auto da Feira da Ladra_, have become rare or unknown. One of the best of them, the _Auto de Santo Aleixo_, perhaps owes its survival to its subject, akin to the popular theme of a prince in disguise. The rich and noble Aleixo wanders in rags to the Holy Land. The Devil, who tempts him in the form of a wayfarer, declares that now--the eternal querulous ‘now’ of the poets--only the rich are honoured and learning is neglected. Later the Devil becomes a courtier and again tempts St. Aleixo, who is defended by an angel. The _Auto de Santa Catherina_ is a long devout play of which the persons are St. Catherine, her mother, her page, the Emperor Maxentius, a hermit, three _doutores_, Christ, the Virgin, angels. The saint, who receives news of her mother’s death with admirable equanimity, suffers martyrdom at the end of the play with equal fortitude. Diaz also dramatized the story of the Marques de Mantua. Although devoid of dramatic or lyric talent, he is sometimes interesting. Women, whose dresses and fashions are contrasted in the _Auto de Santo Aleixo_ with the hard toil of the men, are represented in the _Auto da Malicia das Mulheres_ as treating their husbands ‘like negroes’. We do not know whether Diaz spoke from experience, his life is very obscure; but he may have spent his last years in Beira if the passage in his _O Conselho para bem casar_:

estou nesta Beira tão remoto de trovar (1680 ed., p. 2)

be not merely a reference to Boeotia, any place far from Lisbon.

Traces of Vicente and the _Celestina_[356] are apparent in ANRIQUE LOPEZ’ _Cena Policiana_ or _O Estvdante_, in which a _fidalgo_ and a student[357] figure. The poor _escudeiro_ and his fasting _moço_ are prominent in JORGE PINTO’S _Auto de Rodrigo e Mendo_. Spanish romances are quoted with great frequency, and Vicente’s _En el mes era de Abril_ is parodied by the _moços_.[358] Indeed, their knowledge of literature was become embarrassing since, when his master’s guest, invited to a dinner which did not exist, recites some verses that he has made, Rodrigo has already read them in Boscán and heard them sung in the street.[359]

The exact dates of ANTONIO PRESTES, of Torres Novas, are unknown, but seven of his plays, after having been acted at Lisbon and published in _folhas volantes_, were first collected by Afonso Lopez half a century after Gil Vicente’s death in the _Primeira Parte dos Avtos e Comedias Portuguesas_, &c. (1588). The _Auto da Ave Maria_, written between 1563 and 1587, is an allegorical play in which Reason is vanquished by Sensuality; Heraclitus mourns over her fall while Democritus laughs. A knight in league with the Devil[360] robs in turn an almoner, a _ratinho_, and Fast, but his pious habit of saying an _Ave Maria_ causes St. Michael to rescue him from the Devil and reconcile him with Reason. Of the profane plays, that with the most definite plot is the _Auto dos Dous Irmãos_, in which an old man, after refusing to see his sons who have married without his permission, divides all his money between them and is then neglected by both: he is sent from one to the other like King Lear. But the story is feebly worked out here as in the other plays. Their action is mostly that of a puppet show. Sometimes the _moço_, who always plays a prominent part, seems to be the only link in the plot, as Duarte in the _Autos dos Cantarinhos_. These _moços_, who show the author’s acquaintance with Gil Vicente[361] and _Lazarillo de Tormes_,[362] are quite unlike either Lazarillo or Apariço. They are certainly hungry, but they combine starvation with laziness, presumption and abundant learning. The names of Petrarca and Seneca are on their lips; they read _Palmeirim_ and quote romances of chivalry and Spanish _romances_ glibly.[363] Indeed, the chief interest of these artificial plays is the light thrown on the times: the position of women, the bribery of judges and lawyers, the aping of foreign manners, the mixed styles of architecture. They contain no poetry, little drama, and their wit is seldom natural. Like Prestes, JERONIMO RIBEIRO, perhaps a brother of Chiado, was born apparently at Torres Novas. Only one of his plays was published: the _Auto do Fisico_, written in the last third of the sixteenth century. It has some farcical Vicentian scenes, the inevitable hits against the doctors and lawyers--the _moço_ dresses up as a _doutor_ to receive a simple fisherman from Alfama--and is generally more popular and natural than Prestes’ plays.

SIMÃO MACHADO (_c._ 1570-_c._ 1640), who as a Franciscan monk--Frei Boaventura--ended his life at Barcelona, was also born at Torres Novas. His plays--_Comedias portvgvesas_ (1601?)--are two: _Comedia de Dio_ and _Comedia da Pastora Alfea_. They are written in Spanish and Portuguese indiscriminately despite Gonçalo’s admonition _palrar como Pertigues_.[364] The author explains that, well aware of his countrymen’s love of what is foreign, he uses Castilian to save his plays from the neglect often bestowed in Portugal upon works written in Portuguese. His verse is ordinarily the _redondilha_, although Nuno da Cunha in the first part of _O Cerco de Dio_ makes a speech in _oitavas_. He has lyrical facility and his peasant scenes are full of life, for instance, the dialogue between the cowherd Gil Cabaço and Tomé the goatherd in _Alfea_.

The Gospel story was dramatized by FREI FRANCISCO VAZ of Guimarães in a long _Auto da Paixão_. The oldest edition we have is dated 1559, and it has been often reprinted, with thirty rough woodcuts. Some of these are very spirited, as that of the cock crowing after St. Peter’s denial, or that of Judas hanging himself. After a long introductory speech in _versos de arte maior_ the play proceeds in _redondilhas_ (over 2,000 lines). Religious subjects have always been favourites with the Portuguese, especially those affording scope for lavish scenic display, not only those of martyred saints, as the _Auto de Santa Genoveva_, but those based on the New Testament, as the later play _Acto figurado da degolação dos Innocentes_ (1784) in seven scenes.[365]

Two plays, the _Auto da Donzella da Torre_ and _Auto de Dom André_, are attributed to Gil Vicente’s grandson, GIL VICENTE DE ALMEIDA. The latter, written before 1559, in which a peasant brings his unlettered son (_nem nunca falei Gramatica_) to Court, and a _ratinho_, on becoming a page, promises himself to learn to sing and play on the guitar within a month, has a Vicentian character.

To the beginning of the seventeenth century also belongs the _Pratica de Tres Pastores_ (1626), a Christmas play by FREI ANTONIO DA ESTRELLA, who may perhaps be identified with Frei Antonio de Lisboa, author of the lost _Auto dos Dous Ladrões_ (1603). The three shepherds, Rodrigo, Loirenço, and Sylvestre, are awakened by an angel singing _cousas de preço_. They agree that the song echoing over the hills is no earth-born music but _algum Charubim ou Anjo ou Charafim_, and presently they go to Bethlehem to offer their rustic gifts. The author has caught the charm and spontaneity of the earlier Christmas _autos_. Another seventeenth-century _auto_ of the same kind is the _Colloquio do Nascimento do Menino Jesus_ by the Lisbon bookseller, FRANCISCO LOPEZ. The scene and conversation of the three shepherds, Gil, Silvestre, and Paschoal, with their _assorda ou migas de alho_ in the cold night--_mas como queima o rocio_, says Gil--are very naturally drawn. An echo of the satirical side of Gil Vicente’s genius is to be found in the _Auto das Padeiras chamado da Fome_ (1638),[366] in which the various frauds of the bakeresses, sardine-sellers, market-women, pastry-cooks, and tavern-keepers of Lisbon are shown up by the devils Palurdam and Calcamar, as in the _Barca do Purgatorio_. There is nothing of Vicente in the _Auto novo da Barca da Morte_ (1732) by a Lisbon author who wrote under the name of Diogo da Costa (Innocencio da Silva, ii. 153, believed that his real name was André da Luz). It consists of a single scene crowded with classical allusions. Death has deprived Midas of his gold, Alexander of his victories, Aristotle of his learning. The actors here are a rich miser, a poor man, a youth, an old man, and Death, whose boat Time steers. The title of the _Auto novo e curioso da Forneira de Aljubarrota_ (1815), also attributed to Diogo da Costa, is misleading, since it is a prose narrative of the experiences of that _valorosa matrona_, who, dressed as an _almocreve_, comes to Lisbon with her two _bestinhas_ laden with wine.

Of the twenty-five plays contained in the _Musa entretenida de varios entremeses_ (1658) edited by Manuel Coelho Rebello, No. 17 (_Castigos de vn Castelhano_) is in Spanish and Portuguese, six are in Portuguese,[367] all the rest in Spanish. Popular plays continued to be written long after the introduction of the classical drama and in spite of the antagonism of the priests. They were often composed in a variety of metres, as the _Acto de Sᵗᵃ Genoveva, Princesa de Barbante_ (1735) by Balthasar Luis da Fonseca, if its verse can be called metre,[368] or the _Comedia famosa intitulada A Melhor Dita de Amor_ (1745) by Rodrigo Antonio de Almeida,[369] which opens with a sonnet and proceeds in _redondilhas_, hendecasyllables, and prose.

In the Christmas plays and peasant scenes some of Gil Vicente’s poetry had lingered; the plays of more fashionable authors caught no gleam of his lyrism, but sketched types and satirized manners successfully, none more so than Mello’s _Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz_, written, it must be remembered, before _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ (1670). Both kinds, consciously or unconsciously, were derived from Vicente’s genius as manifested in his plays for the Court and of the people.

During Gil Vicente’s lifetime, perhaps, Sá de Miranda had written the two plays, _Os Estrangeiros_ (_c._ 1528) and _Os Vilhalpandos_ (1538?),[370] with which he introduced classical comedy into Portugal (nearly a quarter of a century before its introduction into France and England). _Os Estrangeiros_ was a novelty[371] in more ways than one, for it was written in prose. Both plays were, as the author admitted, imitated from Plautus and Terence and also from Ariosto, whose comedies were composed in the first third of the century. _Os Estrangeiros_ was, he further observed in a brief introductory letter to the Cardinal Henrique, rustic and clumsy.[372] Its only claim to be called rustic, in character as apart from treatment, consists in a few allusions to popular customs. We would have had it more indigenous. The scene is Palermo, the plot, _à la_ Plautus, consists of the difficulties and differences between father and son, and there is the _aio_, the vainglorious soldier Briobris, _nas armas um Roldão_, and the _truão_ who plays the part of _gracioso_. The action advances in long soliloquies to the final reconciliation between father and son. The character of _Os Vilhalpandos_, which Mello called ‘a mirror of courtly wit’, is similar, with the difference that Fame instead of Comedy speaks the prologue and the action between son, father, and courtesan is placed in Rome. Both the plays were acted before Cardinal Henrique and printed by his command. As if to mark his initiative in every field, Miranda also composed a classical tragedy entitled _Cleopatra_ (_c._ 1550), the title of which is of interest as preceding the plays of Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). The twelve octosyllabic lines (_abcabcdefdef_) that survive (from a chorus?) give no idea of its character, but it probably followed closely the _Sofonisba_ (1515) of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550). A Spanish version of Sophocles’ _Electra_ by Hernan Perez de Oliva appeared in 1528, and in 1536 Anrique Ayres Victoria had translated this into Portuguese octosyllabic verse: _A Vingança de Agamemnon_. The date of the first edition is unknown; the second appeared in 1555. Nor do we know when _Cleopatra_ was written,[373] although it must have been prior to Antonio Ferreira’s classical tragedy acted at Coimbra, _Inés de Castro_ (_c._ 1557), which has hitherto been considered the first of its kind in Portugal. Written when the author was about thirty, that is, about the time of Miranda’s death, it copied the form of Greek tragedies and, the better to acclimatize this, a thoroughly national subject was chosen--the death of Inés--whereas Miranda had gone to Rome and Egypt. As might be expected from Ferreira’s other work the conception was executed with the careful skill of a conscientious craftsman. The drama has unity, the style is purest Portuguese, the chorus sometimes soars into poetry, as in the celebrated passage _Quando amor naceo_. That the same high language is spoken throughout, that, as has often been observed, scenes of dramatic opportunity--a meeting between D. Pedro and his father or Inés--are omitted, merely shows that Ferreira had no dramatic instinct. Perhaps the only dramatic passage--and even so it is of more psychological than dramatic interest--is that in Act III: _Inés._ ‘Ah, woe is me! what ill, what fearful ill dost thou announce?’ _Chorus._ ‘It is thy death.’ _Inés._ ‘_Is my lord dead?_’ Nevertheless, the play was a remarkable achievement, carried out without faltering and with a sustained loftiness worthy of its subject. No one any longer believes that Ferreira copied from the _Nise lastimosa_ by Geronimo Bermudez, published under the pseudonym Antonio da Silva eight years after Ferreira’s death. This is a slightly expanded Spanish translation, closely following the 1587 edition[374] of _Inés de Castro_, which differs considerably from that of 1598. The _Nise laureada_ which accompanied it is perfectly insignificant. Like Miranda, Ferreira wrote, besides one tragedy, two comedies, _Bristo_ and _O Cioso_. There are indications that he had in mind Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ _Eufrosina_ as well as Miranda’s comedies. Bristo soliloquizing is the counterpart of Philtra, and in his dedication of _Bristo_ to Prince João he acknowledges his debt to previous plays.[375] In this comedy, written during some vacation days at Coimbra University, the action is very primitive, but the braggart Annibal and the charlatan Montalvão account for some farcical scenes. His later play, _O Cioso_ (the jealous husband is also handled by Gil Vicente and Prestes), belongs to a higher plane, i. e. to comedy rather than farce, although _Bristo_ is not entirely devoid of character-drawing. _Bristo_ was ‘made public’ (_publicada_) before 1554, but neither play was published till 1622. Both are remarkable for the correctness and concise vigour of their prose.

The three plays of Camões, written perhaps between the years 1544 and 1549 during his first stay at Lisbon, belong entirely neither to the classical drama nor to the more ancient _autos_, but combine elements of both. They are written in _redondilhas_, mostly _quintilhas_. The third, _El Rei Seleuco_ (1549?), is slighter even than a Vicentian farce. It has a curious prologue scene (_Vorspiel auf dem Theater_) in prose. The versification is easy, but its chief interest is the important part it may have played in its author’s life. The earliest in date, _Filodemo_, although it lacks Vicente’s savour of the soil, has a graceful charm and faintly recalls the _Comedia do Viuvo_. Filodemo, orphan son of a Danish princess and a Portuguese _fidalgo_, is in love with Dionysa, daughter of his father’s brother, whose son Venadoro is in love with Filodemo’s sister Florimena. Their relationship is unknown, but the discovery of their true birth smoothes the path of love and ends the play. _Os Amphitriões_, in Portuguese and Spanish,[376] is based on the _Amphitruo_ of Plautus. The predicaments resulting from the appearance of Jupiter as Amphitrião’s double and Mercury as the double of Sosia are deftly and humorously worked out in delightfully spontaneous verse.

For those so fastidious as to be satisfied neither by the popular _autos_ nor the staid classical plays, yet another kind was provided in the shape of Celestina comedies in prose. Of the life of their author we know scarcely more than that he was very well known in his day. Judging by literary merit only, one might assign the verses written by Jorge de Vasconcellos in the _Cancioneiro Geral_ to JORGE FERREIRA DE VASCONCELLOS (_c._ 1515-63?), since the poems, alike in the new and the old style, interspersed in his works do not prove him to have possessed high poetical talent. It is as a dramatist and still more as a writer of Portuguese prose that the distinguished courtier of King João III’s reign[377]--deserves a higher place in Portuguese literature than his ungrateful countrymen have habitually accorded him. But the dates forbid the identification of the dramatist with the earlier poet, who was also a notable courtier since he is specially mentioned in Vicente’s _Cortes de Jupiter_ (ii. 404). One of the few definite facts known to us concerning Jorge Ferreira is that affirmed in the preface of his _Eufrosina_: that this play was the first fruit of his genius, written in his youth.[378] The exact date of _Eufrosina_ is unknown, but it was written after the University had been finally established at Coimbra in 1537--the date of the letter from India (December 20, 1526[379]) is clearly a misprint since mention is made of the siege of Diu (1538). Ferreira de Vasconcellos evidently studied law at the University. If he was born, not at Coimbra but at Lisbon, he may have begun his studies in the capital. At the time of Prince Duarte’s death (1540) he was in his service, as _moço da camara_, and he continued as a Court official, first, perhaps, in the service of the heir to the throne, Prince João, who died on January 2, 1554, and then in that of King Sebastião. In 1563 he was succeeded as Secretary (_escrivão do Tesouro_) by Luis Vicente, probably son of the poet Gil. The document[380] which nominates his successor by no means implies his death, since, as Menéndez y Pelayo[381] observed, his name is unaccompanied by the formula _que Deus perdoe_ or _aja_. But it is strange, if he did not die till 1585, the date given by Barbosa Machado, that nothing more is heard of him after 1563 (we are told that his son died at the battle of Alcacer Kebir), and that his son-in-law called _Aulegrafia_, written before the death of Prince Luis (1555), his swan-song.[382] Apart from manuscript treatises which were never published, Jorge Ferreira is the author of four works in prose, the three plays, _Eufrosina_, _Ulysippo_, _Aulegrafia_, and the _Memorial da Segunda Tavola Redonda_. The latter is an involved romance of chivalry[383] which describes the adventures of the Knight of the Crystal Arms, emulator of the Knights of the Round Table and Amadis of Gaul. Each chapter commences with a brief sententious reflection, from which the reader is plunged into mortal combats of knights, centaurs, giants, and dragons. It begins by giving an account of King Arthur, his disappearance, and the prosperous reign of Sagramor. It ends with a vivid description of the tournament (August 5, 1552) at Enxobregas (= Xabregas) in which the ill-fated Prince João was the principal figure. Barbosa Machado included among Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ works _Triunfos de Sagramor em que se tratão os feitos dos Cavalleiros da Segunda Tavola Redonda_ (Coimbra, 1554). A passage in the _Memorial_[384] may have led to the belief that this was a second part of the _Memorial_, of which the first known edition is that of Coimbra, 1567, but from the preface[385] it appears that the _Memorial_ _is_ the _Triunfos_. The title _Triunfos de Sagramor_ may have been given to an earlier edition,[386] or it may have been the title of the second half of the work. The author himself declares that his story had been ‘presented’ to Prince João.[387] The editor of _Ulysippo_ in 1618 says that the _Memorial_ had been printed at least twice during the author’s lifetime.[388] Yet it is difficult not to suspect that the date 1554 was a confusion with the year of the death of the prince to whom the work was dedicated. The same uncertainty, as we have seen, prevails as to the date of the first edition of the author’s masterpiece _Eufrosina_. (He published his plays anonymously, partly perhaps for the same reason that made him insist that his characters represented no definite persons but types.) The earliest edition that we have is that of Evora, 1561, that of Coimbra, 1560, having disappeared, if it ever existed.[389] The words on the title-page, _de nouo reuista & em partes acrecentada_, need not imply more than that, as we know, the manuscript had circulated among his friends: _por muitas mãos deuassa e falsa_. As a novelty, _invençam noua nesta terra_, _Eufrosina_ with its proverbs and its ingenious thoughts and phrases was appreciated in Portugal, whose inhabitants were justifiably proud now to possess a _Celestina_ of their own, a _Celestina_ with less action and rhetoric but more thought and sentiment.[390] Quevedo was loud in its praises, Lope de Vega perhaps quoted it,[391] its influence on the style of Mello and other Portuguese writers is clear. It was a legitimate success and its modern neglect is all the more deplorable because in this play the Portuguese language, the richness, concision, and grace of which are exalted in the preface, appears in its purest, raciest form. The author’s vocabulary is immense, his sentences admirably vigorous and clear. After heading the E’s in the _Index_ of 1581 (_Evphrosina_ simply, without author) it was reprinted by the poet Rodriguez Lobo in 1616, in a slightly modified form, shorn, that is, of some of the coarser passages and of all reference to the Scriptures.[392] The style is not the only merit of _Eufrosina_. Despite the lack of proportion in some of the scenes, in which Jorge Ferreira proves himself to have been, like Richardson, ‘a sorry pruner’ (four scenes out of the thirty-nine constitute a quarter of the play), there is a certain unity in this story of the love of the poor courtier Zelotipo de Abreu for Eufrosina, proud and beautiful daughter of the rich _fidalgo_ D. Carlos, Senhor das Povoas, in the little ancient university town above the green waters and willows of Mondego. The numerous other persons are strictly subordinate, and both scenes and characters are skilfully drawn. The artificial construction, the convention by which emotion finds vent in a string of classical allusions, scarcely mar the exceedingly natural presentment of many of the scenes. Charming, for instance, is that in which Eufrosina and her companion and friend Silvia de Sousa, Zelotipo’s cousin, watch from the terrace of their house the river’s gentle flow and along its bank the citizens and students taking the air in the cool of the evening. The play contains as many characters as a modern novel. There is Cariofilo, a gay good-hearted Don Juan; his friend, the more serious Zelotipo, type of the Portuguese lover, the _galante contemplativo_; D. Carlos, quick to anger but easily appeased; the pedantic, unscrupulous Dr. Carrasco, whose conversation with D. Carlos gives scope for a vigorous attack on the legal profession; Silvia, who sacrifices her love and gives up to Eufrosina her cousin’s verses that she had so carefully kept; the _moços_ Andrade and Cotrim, greedy, timid, and talkative; the gentleman of Coimbra, Philotimo, a wise and kindly man of the world. Other phases of Coimbra life are shown in the _moças de rio_ and _de cantaro_, who fetch water or wash clothes in the Mondego and metaphorically toss in a blanket Galindo, the rich D. Tristão’s agent from Lisbon; in the love-lorn student with his Latin, the morose and jealous workman Duarte, proud of his position as _official_, the resolute goldsmith and his languid daughter Polinia, the old servant Andresa and the merry servant girl Vitoria, and, most prominent of all, Philtra the _alcoviteira_, deploring the wickedness and degeneracy of the world and full of wise saws--the play contains many hundreds. Eufrosina herself is first described by the lover--brow of Diana, lips of Venus, limbs of Pallas, clear green eyes[393] of Juno, quietly mirthful; then by his servant Andrade--the fairest thing that ever he thought to see, fan in hand, the sleeves of her dress like a ship at full sail[394]--so that we have an effective impression of her beauty. Besides Coimbra life we obtain glimpses of that of the Court at Lisbon and Almeirim in a letter from the courtier Crisandor, of India in a very real and interesting letter from Silvia’s brother, even of Cotrim’s native village. That the unity was not sacrificed to these many by-scenes says much for the author’s skill. This praise cannot be given to his second play written some ten years after the first, _Ulysippo_ (1547?), for here the reader loses his way among the many courses of true love. There are twenty-one _dramatis personae_, but the principal interest is in the sketch of Constança d’Ornellas, the hypocritical _beata_,[395] or, rather, that is the most original part, since in the play as a whole there is a certain monotony after _Eufrosina_, and many of the proverbs are the same.[396] Excellent as the earlier play in its terse and idiomatic prose,[397] full of interest in the insight it gives into the customs and life of the people, its chief fault is the intricacy, or absence, of plot which makes it difficult reading, and of course it would naturally please less on its first appearance as being no longer a new thing. The author, who knew how the Portuguese prized _novidades_, appears to have been conscious of this, since his third play, _Aulegrafia_, written perhaps in 1555,[398] and first published in 1619, was developed on somewhat different lines. It is concerned, as its name implies, exclusively with the Court, and the people and popular proverbs are in abeyance. In its fifty scenes we are introduced to typical Court ladies, noble _fidalgos_, poor gentlemen and their servants, one of whom considers it _mais fidalgo nam saber ler_. The play is by its author termed ‘a long treatise on Court manners’,[399] and as such it is admirable and full of interest, however negligible it may be as drama. Its style, moreover, even excels in atticism Ferreira’s other works. The most remarkable character is that of the young (_menina e moça_) and very wily aunt of Filomela. She is twice described in detail (f. 46 and f. 153 v.), and we perceive that Philtra of the people, the middle-class Constança d’Ornellas, and the aristocratic Aulegrafia are really three persons and one spirit. In _Ulysippo_ one of the lesser personages was the Spanish _Sevilhana_ (mentioned also in _Eufrosina_), and here a boastful Spanish adventurer is introduced in the person of Agrimonte de Guzman, who disdains to speak Portuguese. The scene of both the later plays is Lisbon. The author drew from his experience here, as previously at Coimbra, and often describes to the life the persons that he had met. Scarcely any other writer gives us so intimate an idea of the times--of this the latter heyday of Portugal’s greatness--or of the gallant, lovesick, dreaming Portuguese, who considers love as much a monopoly of his country as the ivory and spices of India.[400]

FOOTNOTES:

[353] The disapproval of the popular drama is frequent in religious writers. In the seventeenth century Antonio Vieira declared that _uma das felicidades que se contava entre as do tempo presente era acabarem-se as comedias em Portugal_. Feo earlier, in common with many others, had similarly denounced the romances of chivalry _pelos quaes o Demonio comvosco fala; livraria do diabo_ (_Tratt. Qvad._ (1619), ff. 156, 157).

[354] One of them, João, _lavrador_, says: _Vimos ver se he assi ou nam De hũa arremedaçam Que s’a ca d’arremedar.... Ora nos dizei se he assi Que fazem ho ayto cá._

[355] e. g. Branca Janes says of her husband:

He hum grão comedor, Destruidor da fazenda, &c.

[356] Cf. _este leo ja Celestina_ (_Primeira Parte dos Avtos_, &c. (1587), f. 44).

[357] The student’s song on f. 44 v. and f. 46, _Polifema mi postema Grande mal he querer bem_, parodies Lobeira’s _Leonoreta fin roseta_.

[358] Ibid., f. 49.

[359] _Primeira Parte dos Avtos_, f. 57:

_Ro._ Senhor, se me dá licença, Ja eu aquela trova li.

_Os._ Qual trova leste? _Ro._ Essa sua, Como a disse nua e crua.

_Os._ E onde a leste, vilão?

_Ro._ Cuido, señor, que em Boscão, E canta-se pela rua.

[360] The Devil speaks both Portuguese and Spanish. All the other characters in Prestes’ plays, with the exception of an enchanted Moor, speak Portuguese. On the other hand, there are frequent Spanish words and quotations. The word _algorrem_ occurs twice in these plays, but the attempt to retain the old style of peasant conversation is but half-hearted.

[361] Duarte in the _Auto dos Cantarinhos_ sleeps on an _arca_ (chest) like the _moço_ in _O Juiz da Beira_. There are other echoes of Vicente, as the words _quem tem farelos?_ (1871 ed., p. 65), the reference to _Flerida e Dom Duardos_ (p. 485), the line _Que má cousa são vilãos_ (p. 420), the peasant who, like Mofina Mendes, builds up his future on the strength of an apple of gold, which proves to be a coal (pp. 407-8).

[362] _Auto do Mouro Encantado_ (p. 347). Unless there was an earlier edition of _Lazarillo de Tormes_, this play must therefore have been written after 1554. Prestes’ _Auto do Procurador_ was written before 1557.

[363] p. 262. For a corresponding knowledge of _Amadis de Gaula_, &c., among English servants see Dr. Henry Thomas, _The Palmerin Romances_, London, 1916, pp. 38-40.

[364] _Alfea_ (ed. 1631), p. 59. The wonderful spelling is due to the printer (e.g. _sesse_ = cease) as well as to the peasants (e.g. _monteplica_ = multiply, _pialdrade_ = piety).

[365] _Composto por A. D. S. R._ There is an earlier _Acto Sacramental da Jornada do Menino Deus para o Egypto_ (1746).

[366] It contains a dispute between Maize and Rye, after the very popular fashion of the contention between Winter and Spring in Vicente’s _Auto dos Quatro Tempos_, and the poetical contrasts common in the Middle Ages and in the East, and still in vogue among the _improvisatori_ of Basque villages, between wine and water, boots and sandals, &c.

[367] i.e. No. 3: _De hvm almotacel borracho_; No. 5: _Dos conselhos de hvm letrado_ (a _ratinho_ figures in this, as a _ratiño_ figures in No. 17); No. 6: _Do negro mais bem mandado_ (the _escudeiro’s moço_ is here a negro who speaks in broken Portuguese, e.g. Zesu); No. 11: _Dous cegos enganados_; No. 13: _Das padeiras de Lisboa_ (besides the bakeresses there is a _meleiro_ (honey-seller), an _alheiro_ with his _braços_ of leeks, an _azeiteiro_, &c.), and No. 25. The titles of these plays sufficiently show their homely character.

[368] Of its author we only know that he was _Ulysbonense_. The play had many editions: 1747, 1758, 1789, 1853.

[369] A priest of the same name wrote political and religious pamphlets in the middle of the nineteenth century.

[370] The _affronta de Dio_ is mentioned. It may have been written in the same year as Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ _Eufrosina_.

[371] In a letter sent with _Os Vilhalpandos_ to the Infante Duarte he says that _ninguem que eu saiba_ had so written in Portuguese.

[372] _A comedia qual he tal va, aldeaã e mal atauiada._

[373] A passage in _Aulegrafia_ (1555?) describes the dramatic death of Antony as a new thing: _parece-me que o estou vendo_ (f. 129).

[374] _Tragedia mvy sentida e elegante de Dona Inés de Castro ... Agora nouamente acrescentada_ (31 ff. unnumbered). The one who published _first_ was the most likely to be the thief. _Saudade_ is translated _soledad_.

[375] _Nesta Universidade ... onde pouco antes se viram outras que a todas as dos antigas ou levam ou não dam ventagem._ _Bristo_ was written _por só seu desenfadamento em certos dias de ferias e ainda esses furtados ao estudo_. It is a _comedia mixta, a mor parte della motoria_.

[376] In _El Rei Seleuco_ the doctor and in _Filodemo_ the shepherd and _bobo_ speak Spanish.

[377] _Homem fidalgo mᵗᵒ cortezão & discretto_ (Rangel Macedo, manuscript _Nobiliario_, in Lisbon _Bib. Nac._); _aquelle galante e elegante cortesão Portugues_ (_licença_ of 1618 ed. of _Ulysippo_).

[378] _As primicias do meu rustico engenho, que he a Comedia Eufrosina, e foi ho primeiro fruito que delle colhi, inda bem tenrro._

[379] _Eufrosina_, ii. 5.

[380] Discovered by General Brito Rebello in the Torre do Tombo and printed in his _Gil Vicente_ (1902), p. 114.

[381] _Orígenes de la Novela_, vol. iii, p. ccxxx.

[382] Sousa de Macedo, in _Eva e Ave_ (1676 ed., p. 131), says that he lived in the reign of King João and in the beginning of that of King Sebastian, which confirms the date 1563 as that of his death.

[383] Some of its heroes have geographical names, as King Tenarife of the Canary Islands and the Spanish Moor Juzquibel, who now survives in the name of the mountain that falls to the sea above Fuenterrabía. The author shows considerable knowledge of the Basque country, and we may perhaps infer that he was at the French Court and studied the Basque provinces on the way.

[384] 1867 ed., p. 21: _como se vee ao diante no triumpho del rey Sagramor_.

[385] _Nesta trasladação do triumpho del Rey Sagramor_, ibid., p. viii.

[386] A vague tradition placed the 1554 edition in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo, but inquiries in 1916 proved that nothing is known of it there.

[387] _Ao esclarecido Principe ja apresentada_, ibid., p. vii.

[388] _A primeira parte da Tabola redonda que pera a terceira impressão emendou o Autor em sua vida_ (_Aduertencia ao leitor_).

[389] Nicolás Antonio, whose information as to Portuguese books was often far from accurate, says that there were several editions before that of 1616, probably an erroneous deduction from the 1561 title-page. The late Menéndez y Pelayo, who also made many slips in dealing with Portuguese literature, declared that the 1560 edition was in the British Museum, which, however, only possesses a (mutilated) copy of the edition of Evora, 1561 (lacking the colophon with the date). Of the 1561 edition several copies exist, that of the Torre do Tombo, that in the library of the late Snr. Francisco Van Zeller at Lisbon, and that of the British Museum.

[390] João de Barros, _Dialogo em lovvor da nossa lingvagem_ (1540), wrote that the Portuguese language _parece nam consintir em si hũa tal obra como Celestina_ (1785 ed., p. 222).

[391] _La Filomena_, 1621 ed., p. 188. The quotation, if direct, was from the 1561 edition, not that of 1616, in which part of the sentence quoted is omitted, as in the Spanish translation first published ten years later, in 1631.

[392] They were considered out of place in a comedy. The Catalogue of 1581 condemns _todos os mais tratados onde se aplicam, vsurpam & torcem as autoridades & sentenças da sancta escriptura a sentidos profanos, graças, escarnios, fabulas, vaidades, lisonjarias, detracções, superstições, encantações & semelhantes cousas_. The rules were carried out most mechanically.

[393] Green eyes are beloved by Portuguese writers for their rarity or from an early mistaken rendering of the French _vair_ (e.g. Sylvia in the sixteenth, Joaninha in the nineteenth century). The _glosadores_ inclined to them on account of the second person of the infinitive ‘to see’: _verdes_.

[394] In Arraez, _Dialogos_ (1604), f. 311 v. fashionable women _parecem ... velas de nao inchadas_.

[395] In the first edition she had been called a _beata_. In that of 1618 she became merely a widow woman, _dona viuva_, but the editor defeated the censor’s intentions by noting the change in the preface and declaring that but for this she remained exactly the same as before.

[396] Here the doctors, not the lawyers, are _conjurados contra o mundo_.

[397] Cf. the brief but eloquent praises of wine and of love.

[398] One might be inclined to place it later were not the Infante Luis (†November 27, 1555) still alive.

[399] _Um largo discurso da cortesania vulgar_, f. 178 v. Cf. f. 5: _pretende mostraruos ao olho o rascunho da vida cortesaã_. On f. 5 v. it is called _esta selada_ _Portuguesa_. The courtiers spend all the time they can spare from the pursuit of love in discussing the rival merits of the _romance velho_ and new-fangled sonnet, of Boscán and Garci Lasso, of Spanish and Portuguese, a line of a Latin poet, &c.

[400] _O amor é portugues_ (_Aulegrafia_, f. 38 v.).

§ 4

_Luis de Camões_

The plays of LUIS DE CAMÕES (1524?-80) are in a sense typical of his genius, for they show him combining two great currents of poetry, the old indigenous and the classic new. A generation had sprung up accustomed to wide horizons and heroic deeds, and poets and historians regretted that there was no Homer or Virgil to describe them adequately. Camões was not a Homer nor a Virgil, but he was a more universal poet than Portugal had yet produced, and by reason of his marvellous power of expression he triumphantly completed the revolution which Sá de Miranda had tentatively begun. In a sense he was not a great original poet, but in his style he was excelled by no Latin poet of the Renaissance. The eager researches of modern scholars have succeeded in piercing the obscurity that enveloped his life, although many gaps and doubtful points remain. Four or five generations had gone by since his ancestor Vasco Perez had passed out of the pages of history,[401] and some of the intervening members of the family had also won distinction, but Camões’ father, Simão Vaz de Camões, was a poor captain of good position (_cavaleiro fidalgo_) who was shipwrecked near Goa and died there soon after the poet was born in 1524. Through his grandmother, Guiomar Vaz da Gama, he was distantly related to the celebrated Gamas of Algarve. His mother, Anna de Sá e Macedo, belonged to a well-known family of Santarem.[402] Whether he was born at Lisbon or Coimbra is still uncertain. His great-grandfather had settled at Coimbra. That Camões studied there scarcely admits of doubt. He alludes to it in his poems, and nowhere else in Portugal could he have received his thorough classical education. In the year 1542 or 1543 he went to Lisbon. The exact dates of events in his life during the next ten years are difficult to determine, but the events themselves are clear enough. His birth and talents assured him a ready welcome in the capital. Whether he became tutor to D. Antonio de Noronha, son of the Conde de Linhares (the Portuguese ambassador whom Moraes accompanied to Paris), or not, he soon had many friends and was probably received at Court. Referring later to this time he is said to have spoken of himself as _cheo de muitos favores_, and in this popularity he wrote a large number of his exquisite _redondilhas_ and also sonnets, odes, eclogues, and the three _autos_. But Camões had fallen passionately in love with a lady-in-waiting of the queen, Catherina de Athaide.[403] Tradition has it that he first saw her in church on a Good Friday (1544?). We may surmise that Natercia’s parents objected to the suit of the penniless _cavaleiro fidalgo_, and that Camões pressed his suit on them with more vehemence than discretion. He was banished from Court, and spent six months in the Ribatejo (Santarem) and two years in military service in North Africa (Ceuta). He admits that he had been in the wrong, but not seriously so, and hints that envy had played its part in his downfall. It is probable that his play _El Rei Seleuco_ had given a handle to the enemies that his growing reputation as a poet had made. It must be confessed that its subject was tactless, for in the play the king gives up his bride to his son, which could easily be interpreted as a reflection on the conduct of the late King Manuel, who had married his son’s bride. The two years in Africa passed slowly. In a letter (_Esta vae com a candea na mão_) he describes sadness eating away his heart as a moth a garment, and it was with his thoughts in Lisbon that he took part from time to time in skirmishes against the Moors, in one of which he lost his right eye. Hard blows, scanty provisions, and no chance of enriching oneself as in India were the features of military service in North Africa, and when Camões returned to Lisbon his prospects contrasted sharply with those which had been his when he first came from the University a few years before. He was now nearly thirty,[404] disfigured by the loss of an eye and embittered by the turn his fortunes had taken. He no longer looked on life from the inside, gazing contentedly at the show from the windows of privilege, but was himself in the arena. For the school of Sá de Miranda he had probably never felt much sympathy, considering it too severe and artificial. He wished to live and enjoy, and although the patronage of literary Prince João may have encouraged him to hope for better times, he meanwhile set himself to sample life as best he might, associating with rowdy companions (_valentões_), who brought out the Cariofilo side of his character at the expense of the contemplative Zelotipo. Whether he had intended to embark for India in 1550, or this be a pure invention on the part of Faria e Sousa, it is certain that he was still in Lisbon on June 16, 1552. On that day the Corpus Christi procession passed through the principal streets. In the crowded Rocio Camões was drawn into a quarrel with a Court official, Gonçalo Borges, and wounded him with a sword-cut on the head. For nearly nine months Camões lay in prison, and then, Borges having recovered and bearing no malice, he was pardoned[405] (March 7, 1553) and released, but only on the understanding that he would leave Portugal to serve the king in India. Before the end of the month he had embarked in the ship _S. Bento_. Hitherto he had hoped against hope for an improvement in his lot; now he went, he says, as one who leaves this world for the next, and with the words _Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea_,[406] turned his back on the calumnies and intrigues of Lisbon. In one of his finest elegies[407] he described the voyage, a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, and the arrival at Goa in September 1553. The voyage was full of interest to him, and he made good use of it, becoming what Humboldt called him--a great painter of the sea[408]--but so far as comfort was concerned he fared probably much as would a modern emigrant. His disillusion at Goa is poignantly described in a letter[409] written soon after his arrival. He found it ‘the stepmother of all honest men’, money the only god and passport, and he sends a note of warning to _aventureiros_ in Portugal eager to make their fortune in India. We know from the bitter pages of Couto and Corrêa how difficult it was for a private soldier to thrive there, and the position of a _reinol_ newly arrived from Portugal was precarious. Camões joined a few weeks later (November 1553) in a punitive expedition along the coast of Malabar against the King of Chembe, and in 1554 probably accompanied D. Fernando de Meneses in a second expedition to Monte Felix or Guardafui (Ras ef Fil), the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. After his three years’ service (1553-6) he continued to live at Goa. He had found time to write poetry, and sent home a sonnet and an eclogue on the death of his friend D. Antonio de Noronha. His play _Filodemo_ was acted, probably in the winter of 1555, before the popular Governor Francisco Barreto, who provided him with the post of _Provedor Môr dos Defuntos e Ausentes_ (i. e. trustee for the property of dead or absent Portuguese) at Macao. Whether his satiric verses had anything to do with the appointment we do not know--some have maintained that the Portuguese of Goa appreciated his poetical powers best at a distance--but it is more probable that his appointment was a favour, since every post in India was eagerly coveted, and it was a kinder action to give him a comparatively humble one at once than the reversion to a more lucrative office, filled thrice or even ten times over by the deplorable system of ‘successions’.[410] He set sail in the spring of 1556, and after touching at Malacca, arrived at the Molucca Islands, the most lawless region in India. Camões himself, according to Storck, was wounded about this time, but in a fight at sea, not in one of the chronic broils at Ternate or Tidore. In 1557 or 1558 he reached Macao, but two years later he was relieved of his post owing to a quarrel with the settlers, whose part was taken by the captain of the silver and silk ship passing from Goa to China. On his authority Camões was sent to Goa, protesting against _o injusto mando_, which was a common fate of officials in India. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Tongking, lost all his possessions, and arrived penniless and perhaps in debt at Goa in 1560 or 1561. To these four or five chequered years are ascribed the wonderful _quintilhas_, the most beautiful in the language, _Sobolos rios que vam_, which may owe something to Vicente’s admirable paraphrase of Psalm l, the _canção Com força desusada_, the _oitavas Como nos vossos_, and the completion of the first six books of the _Lusiads_. Soon after his return he was probably imprisoned for debt, but was released, probably at the instance of the Viceroy, D. Francisco Coutinho, Conde de Redondo, to whom Camões addressed his first printed poem, the ode in Orta’s _Coloquios_ (1563). Camões’ thoughts must have now more than ever turned homeward. Fortune had danced tantalizingly before him, holding out hopes which broke as glass in his hands whenever he attempted to seize them.[411] Of his life between 1564 and 1567 we know nothing. He did not occupy the post of factor of Chaul, the reversion to which indeed he may perhaps only have received after his return to Portugal. He was eager to get home. In 1567 he accompanied Pedro Barreto to Mozambique, glad to get even so far on the return voyage. There poverty and illness delayed him till 1569, when through the generosity and in the company of some friends, among whom was the historian Couto, he was able to embark for Portugal. They reached Lisbon in April, 1570.[412] Sixteen years had passed. The popular, impulsive, talented youth returned middle-aged, poverty-stricken, and unknown. Antonio de Noronha and many others of his friends were dead. Catherina de Athaide had died in 1556 (although she may have continued to receive Camões’ rapt devotion as the dead Beatrice that of Dante), Prince João, hope and patron of poets, two years earlier. The plague, to which nearly half the city’s population had succumbed, had only recently abated, and Camões may have witnessed the thanksgiving procession in Lisbon on April 20, 1570. Modern critics have even denied him the only consolation which probably remained to him in the _patria esquiva a quem se mal aproveitou_[413], but there seems no reason to reject the tradition that his mother was alive; in fact she survived him and continued to receive the pension of 15,000 _réis_[414] granted him from 1572 till his death on Friday, June 10, 1580. It was a sum barely sufficient to support life, and it was not always regularly paid, so that he is reported to have been in the habit of saying that he would prefer to his pension a whip for the responsible officials (_almoxarifes_). Tradition, to the indignation of reasonable historians, loves to represent a faithful Javanese slave, who had accompanied Camões to Europe, begging for his master in the streets of Lisbon. Camões did not go with King Sebastian to Africa. He may have been already ill when the expedition set out in June 1578--the plague soon began again to ravage Lisbon, and long years of suffering and disappointment must have sapped his strength. Two years later his life of heroic endurance, in patience of the _juizos incognitos de Deos_,[415] ended. He was perhaps buried in a common grave with other victims of the plague.[416] Long absence had served to strengthen his love for his _patria ditosa amada_, and the news from Africa left him no heart to battle against disease, content, as he wrote to the Captain-General of Lamego, to die with his country, with which his name has ever since been intimately linked. Couto and Mariz agree that he brought _Os Lusiadas_ with him virtually complete on his return to Portugal. It was published through the influence of the poet D. Manuel de Portugal in 1572. Camões has often been called the prince of heroic poets, but it is noteworthy that Faria e Sousa in 1685 says that ‘all have hitherto, especially in Spain, considered him greater as a lyric than as an heroic poet’.[417] _Os Lusiadas_ rather than an epic is a great lyrical hymn in praise of Portugal, with splendid episodes such as the descriptions of the death of Inés, the battle of Aljubarrota, the storm, Adamastor, the Island of Venus. Apart from the style, its originality consists in the skill with which in a poem but half the length of Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_ and a fifth of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_ the poet works in the entire history of his country. It is this which gives unity to his ten cantos of _oitavas_, this and the wonderfully transparent flow of the verse, which carries the reader over many weaknesses and inequalities of detail. It is a nobler poem than the crowded garden of flowers in a high wind that is the _Orlando Furioso_, and at once more human and intense than the _Gerusalemme Liberata_. Camões, with a wonderful memory and intimate knowledge of the legends of Greece and Rome, read everything, and we find him gathering his material from all sides[418] like a bird in spring, from a Latin treatise of the antiquarian Resende, from the historians Duarte Galvão, Pina, Lopez, Barros, or Castanheda, or literally translating lines of Virgil, as in his shorter poems he imitated Petrarca, Garci Lasso, and Boscán. Tasso used the _mot juste_ when in a sonnet addressed to Camões he called him _dotto e buon Luigi_.[419] If, as seems probable, he had early wished to sing the deeds of the Portuguese, the first volumes of Castanheda and Barros must have been an incentive as powerful as the destiny which made him personally acquainted with the scenes of Gama’s voyage and of the Portuguese victories in the East. It seems probable that cantos iii and iv, containing the early history of Portugal, were already written, and that around them he wove the epic grandeur revealed in the histories of the discovery of India. The poem opens with an invocation to the nymphs of the Tagus and to King Sebastian, and then, in a wonderful stanza of the sea (_Já no largo oceano navegavam_, i. 19), Gama’s ships are shown in mid-voyage. The gods of Olympus take sides, and Venus protects the daring adventurers in seas never crossed before, while Mars stirs up the natives of Mozambique and of Mombaça to treachery (i-ii). In contrast to the natives farther south, the King of Melinde receives them with loyal friendship, and Gama rewards him by relating the history of Portugal (iii-iv). He then continues his voyage, and after weathering a terrible storm brewed by Bacchus, arrives at Calicut (v-vi). After a visit to the Samori (the King of Calicut), the Catual (the Governor) accompanies Gama on board, and Paulo da Gama explains to him the warlike deeds of the Portuguese embroidered on the silken banners of the ships (vii-viii). On the return voyage they are entertained by Tethys and her nymphs in the island of Venus, supposed to be one of the Azores (ix-x), and the poem ends with a second invocation to King Sebastian (x. 145-56). Thus the time of the poem occupies a little over two years (July 1497-September 1499). Into this the previous four centuries had been ingeniously worked, but in order to include the sixteenth century fresh devices were adopted, by which Jupiter (canto ii), Adamastor (v), and Tethys (x) foretell the future. Almost every land and city connected with Portuguese history finds a place in the poem. Small wonder that it was well received by the Portuguese, combining as it did intense patriotism with hundreds of exotic names. The extraordinary number of 12,000 copies is said to have been printed within a quarter of a century of Camões’ death,[420] and by 1624 the sale had increased to 20,000 and his fame had spread throughout the world. It would have been still stranger if the _murmuradores maldizentes_ had been silent. As early as 1641 we find a critic, João Soares de Brito (1611-64), defending Camões against the charges of plagiarizing Virgil and of improbabilities of time and place.[421] Not every one apparently was of the opinion of the Conde de Idanha, who considered that the only fault of the _Lusiads_ was that it was too long to learn by heart and too short to be able to go on reading it for ever. Montesquieu found in it something of ‘the fascination of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid’, and Voltaire, while objecting to its _merveilleux absurde_, adds: ‘Mais la poésie du style et l’imagination dans l’expression l’ont soutenu, de même que les beautés de l’exécution ont placé Paul Véronèse parmi les grands peintres.’

In 1820 appeared José Agostinho de Macedo’s _Censura dos Lusiadas_, in which he noted with some asperity Camões’ _erros crassissimos_. Prosaic lines, hyperbole, the use of the supernatural, lack of proportion,[422] absence of unity, and historical improbabilities are the main heads of his indictment, and he quotes Racine as to Camões’ ‘icy style’. He also has much petty detailed criticism, for he finds in Camões a _notavel falta de grammatica_. And Macedo was certainly right. Most of the faults he attributes to Camões do exist in the _Lusiads_. Macedo himself could write more correctly. When he says that the line _Somos hum dos da ilha, lhe tornou_ (i. 53) is unpoetical (_não tem tintura de poesia_), we agree; it is sheer prose. We can add other instances: the line _as que elle para si na cruz tomou_ (i. 7) is as unmusical as the rhyming of _Heliogabalo_, _Sardanapalo_ (iii. 92), or _impossibil_, _terribil_ (iv. 54). Only Macedo forgot that genius is justified of its children, and that these details are all merged in the incomparable style, imaginative power, and lofty theme of the poem. If a man is unable to feel the heat of the sun for its spots, we will vainly try to warm or enlighten him, but it is not pedantic grammarians such as Macedo[423] who could obscure the fame of Camões. That could only be done by those whom Macedo calls _os idolatras camoneanos_. Lope de Vega[424] effusively professed to place the _Lusiads_ above the _Aeneid_ and the _Iliad_, and Camões’ fellow-countrymen have eagerly followed suit. He has also suffered much at the hands of translators. Since the _Lusiads_ is clearly not the equal of the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_, it may be worth while to consider by what reasons Camões really is one of the world’s greatest poets. There is celestial music in much that he wrote, in incidents of the _Lusiads_ such as the death of Inés de Castro,[425] in his eclogues and _canções_ and elegies, in many of the sonnets, and in the _redondilhas_, most of all perhaps in the seventy-three heavenly _quintilhas_ beginning _Sobolos rios que vam_. But other Portuguese poets have been musical; Diogo Bernardez in this respect vies with Camões: Camões excels them all in the vigour and transparent clearness that accompany his music. But his principal excellence is that, still without losing the music of his _versos deleitosos_, he can think in verse[426]--the thought in some of his elegies and _oitavas_ is remarkable--and describe with scientific precision, as in the account of the _tromba_ (_Lus._ v. 19-22). Like Milton, he could transform an atlas into a fair harmony of names. His influence on the Portuguese language has been very great. Whether it was wholly for good may be open to doubt--a doubt mentioned by one of his earliest biographers, Severim de Faria, in 1624. The _Lusiads_, he says, ‘greatly enriched the Portuguese language by ingeniously introducing many new words and expressions which then came into common use, although some severe critics have censured him for this, considering the use of latinized forms a defect in his poem’.[427] An inch farther than he went in this direction, or in that of _furia grande e sonorosa_, and _estilo grandiloquo_, would have been an inch too far, and subsequent writers did not always observe his restraint, the sobriety due to his classical education. But his poem certainly helped to fix the language, and he cannot be blamed for the excesses of his followers, or for a change which had begun before his time.[428]

Couto records the theft of the _Parnaso_ in which Camões was collecting his lyrics with a view to publishing them. He must have written many more lyrics than we possess, but even so the number existing is not small. Successive editors have added to them from time to time, and often clumsily. Faria e Sousa, a century after Camões’ death, declared that he had added 200, and, while upbraiding Diogo Bernardez for his _robos_, was himself the thief. Camões might have been somewhat surprised to find in the first edition of his lyrics (1595) two poems which had been in print in the _Cancioneiro de Resende_ eight years before he was born. This 1595 edition contained but 65 sonnets, but their number grew to 108 (1598), 140 (1616), 229 (1668), 296 (1685), 352 (1860), 354 (1873). D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has already contributed much towards a critical edition, and it is to be hoped that before long it may be possible to read the genuine lyrics of Camões in a complete edition by themselves.[429] That would certainly cause him to be more widely read abroad. It is perhaps inevitable that a comparison should arise between Camões and Petrarca (although it must be remembered that they are separated by two centuries), yet he would be an extremely bold or extremely ignorant critic who should place the one of them above the other. In genius they were equal, but a different atmosphere acted on their genius, the artistic atmosphere of Italy and the natural atmosphere of Portugal. Petrarca was the more scholarly writer, so that if he perhaps never attains to the rapturous heights occasionally reached by Camões, he also keeps himself from the blemishes which sometimes disfigure Camões’ work. Camões’ life was far more varied, many-coloured as an Alentejan _manta_,[430] and this is reflected in his poems. Intensely human, he is swayed by many moods, while Petrarca is merged in the narrower flame of his love. Petrarca excels him in the sonnet, for although many of those by Camões are beautiful, and nearly all contain some beautiful passage, he was not really at his ease in this scanty plot of ground. His genius required a larger canvas for its expression. The following lines from his long and magnificent _canção Vinde cá_ are worth quoting because they triumphantly display many of the noblest characteristics of his poetry:

No mais, canção, no mais, que irei fallando, Sem o sentir, mil annos; e se acaso Te culparem de larga e de pesada, Não pode ser, lhe dize, limitada A agoa do mar em tão pequeno vaso. Nem eu delicadezas vou cantando Co’ gosto do louvor, mas explicando Puras verdades ja por mi passadas: Oxalá foram fabulas sonhadas!

Here we see the force and precision, the amazing ease and rapidity, the crystalline transparency, the sad _saudade_, and above all the deep sincerity that mark so much of his work. Both Petrarca and Camões are representative of their country, the latter not only in his poems, in which almost every Portuguese hero is included, but in his character and his life. In his wit and melancholy, his love of Nature, his passionate devotion, his persistency and endurance, his independence and sensitive pride, in his lyrical gift and power of expression, in his courage and ardent patriotism, he is the personification and ideal of the Portuguese nation.

Many of Camões’ friends were also lyric poets, but their poems have mostly vanished. One of them, Luis Franco Corrêa, compiled a _cancioneiro_ of contemporary poems which still exists in manuscript. A few later poets, chiefly pastoral, have already been mentioned, but after Camões’ death the star of lyric poetry waned and set, and the only compensation was a brilliant noonday in the realm of prose. Camões was a learned poet, but he also plunged both hands in the songs and traditions of the people. The later poets withdrew themselves more and more from this perennial spring of poetical images and expression, till at last in the ripeness of time Almeida Garrett turned to it again for inspiration, even Bocage, devoted admirer of Camões though he was, having neglected this side of his genius, as was inevitable in the eighteenth century.

Epic poetry scarcely fared better than the lyric, despite a hundred honest efforts to eclipse the _Lusiads_. A favourite legend of Portuguese and other folk-lore tells how the step-daughter comes from the fairies’ dwelling speaking flowers for words or with a star on her forehead, but her envious half-sister, who then visits the fairies, returns uttering mud and toads or with an ass’s head. If the epic poems of those who emulated the fame of Camões are something better than mud they nevertheless fail for the most part lamentably in that inspiration which Portuguese history might have been expected to give.

Alguns (misera gente) inutilmente Compõem grandes Iliadas,

wrote Diniz da Cruz (_O Hyssope_, canto 1). The epic-fever had not abated even in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Madeira poet Francisco de Paula Medina e Vasconcellos (_c._ 1770-1824) alone wrote two: _Zargueida_ (1806), _Georgeida_ (1819); and José Agostinho de Macedo in his _Motim Literario_ imagines himself at the mercy of a poet with an epic in sixty cantos entitled _Napoleada_, and himself became the mock-hero of one in nine: _Agostinheida_ (Londres, 1817), written by his unfortunate opponent Nuno Alvares Pereira Pato Moniz (1781-1827). The strange poet of Setubal, Thomaz Antonio de Santos e Silva (1751-1816), published a _Braziliada_ in twelve cantos in 1815. Of the earlier epics Camillo Castello Branco wrote sarcastically: ‘They contain impenetrable mysteries of dullness and inspire a sacred awe, but they are the conventional glory of our literary history, untouched and intangible.’[431]

Of the two long epic poems of JERONIMO CORTE REAL (_c._ 1530-1590?): _Svcesso do Segvndo Cerco de Div_ (1574) and _Naufragio, e Lastimoso Svcesso da Perdiçam de Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda_, &c. (1594), we may perhaps say that they are excellent prose. He dwells more than once upon the inconstancy of fortune, and this may be something more than a platitude. Of his life little is known. He is by some believed to have been born in the Azores in 1533. A document in the possession of the Visconde de Esperança shows that he died before May 12, 1590. He may have been a musician as well as a poet and a painter. It is probable, but not certain, that he accompanied King Sebastian to Alcacer Kebir and was taken prisoner. Faria e Sousa says that he was too old to go. After varied service by land and sea he wrote these poems when living in retirement on his estate near Evora, and his own experiences stood him in good stead for his descriptions, which are often not without life and vigour, as the account of the battle in canto 18 of the _Segundo Cerco de Diu_, or of the storm in canto 7 of the _Naufragio_. The former poem records the famous defence of Diu by D. João de Mascarenhas and its relief by D. João de Castro (1546), in whose mouth is placed a long and tedious speech. The last two cantos (21, 22) are tacked on to the main theme and occupy more than a quarter of the whole. They tell from paintings the deeds of past captains and prophesy future events and the ‘golden reign’ of King Sebastian. The prophetic vision, although it included a generation beyond the nominal date of the poem (1546), did not extend to the battle of Alcacer Kebir (1578). The hendecasyllables of the blank verse have an exceedingly monotonous fall and the lines merge prosaically into one another.[432] The use of adjectives is excessive, and generally there is an inclination to multiply words without adding to the force of the picture.[433] The same plethora of epithets, elaborate similes, and slow awkward development of the story mark the seventeen cantos--some 10,000 lines of blank verse, with some tercets and _oitavas_--which constitute the _Naufragio_. In cantos 13 and 14 a learned man tells from sculptures the history of the Portuguese kings, from Afonso I to Sebastian. The remaining cantos have a more lively interest, ending with the death of D. Lianor in canto 17, but the poet could not resist the temptation to round off with an anticlimax, in which Phoebus, Proteus, and Pan make lamentation. His short _Auto dos Quatro Novissimos do Homem_ (1768) in blank verse is written with some intensity, but the style is the same.[434] His _Austriada_, composed to commemorate Don John of Austria’s _felicissima victoria_[435] of Lepanto, consists of fifteen cantos in Spanish blank verse.

LUIS PEREIRA BRANDÃO, born at Oporto about 1540, was present at Alcacer Kebir, and after his release from captivity is said to have worn mourning for the rest of his life. That later generations might also suffer, his epic _Elegiada_ (1588)--in spite of his professed _temor de ser prolixo_--was published in eighteen cantos. Beginning with the early years of King Sebastian, it recounts the king’s dreams and ambitions, his first expedition to Africa, and the later disastrous adventure. Not even the story of D. Lianor de Sousa (canto 6) nor the excessively detailed description of the battle of Alcacer Kebir (canto 17) rouses the poet from his implacable dullness. The defects of his style have perhaps been exaggerated, but it is certainly inferior to that of Andrade, with whom he shares the inability to distinguish a poem from a history. The introduction of contemporary events in India (cantos 6, 10, 14), however legitimate in a history, is singularly out of place in an epic.

If the author of the history of King João III’s reign, FRANCISCO DE ANDRADE (_c._ 1535-1614), brother of the great Frei Thomé de Jesus, regarded his epic _O Primeiro Cerco ... de Diu_ (1589) merely as a supplementary chapter of that history, we can only regret that he did not write it in prose. It is a straightforward account, in excellent Portuguese, of the first siege of Diu (1538), but _oitava_ follows prosaic _oitava_ with a relentless wooden tread, maintaining the same level of mediocrity throughout and rendering it unreadable as poetry. The author begins by imploring divine favour that his song may be adequate to his subject (i. 1-3). It is only when he has passed his two-thousandth stanza that he expresses some diffidence as to whether his ‘fragile bark’ was well equipped for so long a voyage, but he consoles himself, if not his reader, with the sincere conviction that his rude verse cannot detract from the greatness of the deeds which he describes (xx. 1-6).

FOOTNOTES:

[401] _Seu quarto avò foi um Gallego nobre_ (Diogo Camacho, _Jornada ás Cortes do Parnaso_).

[402] Dr. Wilhelm Storck, the author of the most elaborate life of Camões in existence, considered that the words _quando vim da materna sepultura_ in one of Camões’ poems could only mean that his mother (Anna de Macedo) died at his birth, and that he was survived by Anna de Sá, his stepmother. It may have been so, but there is not a scrap of evidence in favour of the theory nor were the words _materna sepultura_ anything more than a conventional phrase. Cf. Antonio Feo, _Trattados Quadragesimais_ (1609), pt. 1, f. 2: _Como Nazianzeno diz ... e tumulo prosiliens ad tumulum iterum contendo, em nacendo saimos de hũa sepultura que foi as entranhas da mãi e morrendo entramos noutra._ So Pinto, _Imagem_, pt. 2, 1593 ed., f. 342 v.: _tornar nu ao ventre de sua mãi, o qual é a sepultura da terra_, and Bernardes, _Nov. Flor._ i. 122: _A terra e nossa mãe, de cujo tenebroso ventre que é a sepultura_, &c.

[403] She may have been a distant relation of the poet’s: the name was a common one, but Camões was connected with the Gamas, and the wife and granddaughter of the first Conde de Vidigueira were both named Catherina de Athaide.

[404] According to Dr. Storck he was banished in 1549, and in the same year, after the sentence of banishment had been commuted to service in Africa, left Portugal, returning to Lisbon in the autumn of 1551. Others believe that he was in Lisbon again in 1550 and that his two years in Africa must be placed between 1546 and 1549.

[405] The important document containing his pardon is printed in Juromenha’s edition of his works, i. 166-7.

[406] This quotation is assigned to various other persons, as to Nuno da Cunha when arranging that he should be buried at sea.

[407] _O poeta Simonides fallando._

[408] Cf. _Lus._ i. 19, 43; ii. 20, 67; v. 19-22; vi. 70-9.

[409] _Desejei tanto._

[410] Couto, in the _Dialogo do Soldado Pratico_, remarks that if a man is given a post at the age of twenty he only receives it at the age of sixty (p. 99). The soldier, who wishes _ter logo em tres annos vinte mil cruzados_, suggests, among other posts for himself, that of _Provedor dos Defuntos: porque com qualquer destes ficarei mui bem remediado_. To which the _Desembargador_ objects: _he necessario que quem houver de servir esses cargos seja letrado e visto em ambos os Direitos_.

[411] _Vinde cá._ It is advisable to give the first words of his poems without the number until there is a definitive edition of his works.

[412] It is uncertain whether Camões’ ship was the _Santa Clara_ or the _Fe_.

[413] Barros, _Decada_, III. ix. 1.

[414] It is about the sum (apart from any grant of _pimenta_) which a common soldier on active service might earn in India (see Barros, I. viii. 3: 1,200 × 12 = 14,400); _environ huit cents livres de notre monnoie d’aujourd’hui_ (Voltaire). It would scarcely correspond to more than £50 of to-day.

[415] _Lus._ V. 45.

[416] Prophetically he had echoed (_Lus._ X. 23) the complaint of the historians of India: _Morrer nos hospitaes em pobres leitos Os que ao Rei e á lei servem de muro_.

[417] _Todos hasta oy, y principalmente en Castilla, tuvieron siempre a mi Maestre por mayor en estes Poemas que en el Heroyco_ (_Varias Rimas_, Prólogo, 2 vols., 1685, 1689). Cf. the praise of his _versos pequenos_ in Severim de Faria, _Vida_, p. 121.

[418] See the important work by Dr. Rodrigues: _As Fontes dos Lusiadas_ (1904-1913). Cf. Camões’ _Vão os annos decendo_ (x. 9) and _Leal Conselheiro_ (cap. 1, p. 18), where the words are used in the same connexion. With Virgil he was obviously acquainted at first hand, with Homer perhaps in the translation of the Florentine scholar Lorenzo Valla (1405-57). In _As Fontes dos Lusiadas_ is also discussed the origin of the word Lusiads, as by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in _O Instituto_, vol. lii (1905), pp. 241-50: _Lucius Andreas Resendius Inventor da palavra Lusiadas_. It was one of the Latin words acclimatized by Camões. It occurs in a Latin poem by André de Resende, _Vicentius Levita et Martyr_ (1545), and in his _Encomium Erasmi_ written, but not published, in 1531; in a Latin poem by Jorge Coelho, perhaps written in 1526 but touched up before its publication in 1536; and is twice used by Manuel da Costa (in and about 1537).

[419] The word is undoubtedly _dotto_ in the facsimile of the text given in Antonio de Portugal de Faria, _Torquato Tasso a Luiz de Camões_ (Leorne, 1898) although there, as always, it has been transcribed as _colto_. Diogo Bernardez calls Tasso _culto_, perhaps mistaking the reference in Garci Lasso, whose _culto Taso_ is not Torquato but Bernardo. Lope de Vega called Camões _divino_ and reserved _docto_ for Corte Real.

[420] His works are _ja muitas vezes impressas_ in 1594. In 1631 Alvaro Ferreira de Vera speaks of twelve Portuguese editions (_Breves Lovvores_, f. 87).

[421] _Apologia em qve defende_, &c. (1641).

[422] The instance he gives is the long story of _Magriço e os Doze de Inglaterra_ (vi), which he admits is in itself very fine.

[423] One of the best instances of his pedantry is his comment on the lines _E tu, nobre Lisboa, que no mundo Facilmente das outras es princesa_. The ordinary reader is content to understand ‘cities’ after _outras_. But no, says Macedo, you can only understand Lisbons. Princess of all the other Lisbons!

[424] _Laurel de Apolo: Postrando Eneidas y venciendo Iliadas._

[425] Even here some of the lines are a literal translation of Virgil, but if we compare

Para o ceo crystallino alevantando Com lagrimas os olhos piadosos, Os olhos, porque as mãos, &c.,

with the passage

Ad coelum tendens, &c.,

it is not at all clear that the picture of the older poet is more beautiful than that of _il lusiade Maro_.

[426] He is thus an exception to Macedo’s axiom in the _Motim Literario_ that Portuguese poets (most of whom, it must be admitted, are, like Byron, children in thought) either have _versos sem cousas_ or _cousas sem versos_.

[427] _Discursos politicos varios_ (1624), f. 117: _& com esta obra ficou enriquecida grandemente a lingua Portuguesa; porque lhe deu muitos termos nouos & palauras bem achadas que depois ficárão perfeitamente introducidas. Posto que nesta parte não deixárão algũs escrupulosos de o condenar, julgandolhe por defeito as palauras alatinadas que vsou no seu poema._

[428] Cf. Fr. Manuel do Sepulchro, _Reflexão Espiritual_ (1669): _Não ha duvida que maior mudança fez a lingua Portuguesa nos primeiros vinte annos do reinado de D. Manuel que em cento e cincoenta annos dahi para ca_. Barros, however, in his _Dialogo em lovvor_ (1540), says latinization had not yet begun: _se o nos usáramos_.

[429] The authorship of the fine sonnets _Horas breves do meu contentamento_ (attributed to Camões, Bernardez, the Infante Luis, &c.) and _Formoso Tejo meu, quam differente_ (attributed to Camões, Rodriguez Lobo, &c.) is still under dispute.

[430] _Filodemo_, v. 3.

[431] _Os Ratos da Inquisição_, Preface, p. 97.

[432] e. g. _D. Alvaro de Castro e D. Francisco De Meneses_, or _hum grave Prudente capitam_.

[433] e. g. _valor, esforço e valentia; mar sereno e calmo; abundosa e larga vea; a dura defensa rigurosa; açoutando e batendo_. The line often consists of three adjectives and a noun.

[434] Between Corte Real’s _cruel molesto duro mortal frio_ and Dante’s _eterna maladetta fredda e greve_ (_Inf._ vi) is all the difference between a heap of loose stones and a shrine. The conception of the _Auto_, especially the third _novissimo_, _que he o Inferno_, was no doubt derived from Dante.

[435] These are the first words of the original title of the poem (1578).

§ 5

_The Historians_

It was a proud saying of a Portuguese _seiscentista_ that the Portuguese discoveries silenced all other histories.[436] Certainly this was so in the case of the history of Portugal, which was neglected while writer after writer recorded the history of the Portuguese in India. Nor need we quarrel with a vogue which has preserved for us so many striking pictures in which East and West clash without meeting, new countries are continually opening to our view, and heroism and adventure go hand in hand. Sometimes the pages of these historians seem all aglow with precious stones, emeralds from Peru, turquoises from Persia, rubies, cat’s-eyes, chrysolites, amethysts, beryls, and sapphires from Ceylon, or scented with the opium of Cairo, the saffron of Cannanore, the camphor of Borneo, sandalwood from Timor, pepper from Malabar, cloves from the Moluccas. Blood and sea-spray mingle with the silks from China and ivory from Sofala, and among the crowd of rapacious governors and unscrupulous adventurers move a few figures of a simple austerity and devotion to duty, Albuquerque, Galvão, Castro, St. Francis Xavier.

Little is known of ALVARO VELHO except that he was one of the immortals (unless he was the _degredado_ (convict) from whose _caderno_ Couto derived his account of the discovery) who accompanied Vasco da Gama on his first voyage. To him is attributed the simple, clear narrative contained in the log or _Roteiro da Viagem de Vasco da Gama em 1497_, filled with a primitive wonder, which pointed the way to the historians of India. Indeed, it provided material for the first book of a writer who may perhaps be called the first[437] historian of the discoveries ‘enterprised by the Portingales’. FERNAM LOPEZ DE CASTANHEDA (_c._ 1500-59) was born at Santarem, and in 1528 accompanied his father, appointed Judge at Goa, to India. For the next ten years he diligently and not without many risks and discomforts consulted documents and inscriptions in various parts of the country with a view to writing a history of the discovery and conquest of India, making himself personally acquainted with the ground and with many of those who had played a part in the half-century (1498-1548) under review. After his return to Portugal he continued his life-work with the same devotion for twenty years, during which poverty constrained him to accept the post of bedel at Coimbra University. When he died, worn out by his _continuas vigilias_, his history was complete, but only seven books had been published: _Historia do Descobrimento e Conqvista da India_ (1551-4). He had at least the satisfaction to know that a part had already been translated into French and Italian. The eighth book, bringing the history down to 1538, was published by his children in 1561, but books nine and ten never appeared. This history of forty years, which has less regard to style than to sincerity and the truth of the facts, is written in great detail. It is a scrupulous and trustworthy record of high interest describing not only the deeds of the Portuguese, ‘of much greater price than gold or silver’, ‘more valiant than those of Greek or Roman’, but the many lands in which they occurred. The narrative can rise to great pathos, as in the account of Afonso de Albuquerque’s death (iii. 154), and is often extremely vivid.[438] The interest necessarily diminishes after 1515, and the seventh book is largely concerned with dismal contentions between Portuguese officials. But the great events and persons, the capture of Goa or Diu, the characters of Gama or Albuquerque, Duarte Pacheco Pereira or Antonio Galvão, stand out the more clearly from the deliberate absence of rhetoric.

LOURENÇO DE CACERES, in his _Doutrina_ addressed to the Infante Luis in twenty short chapters on the parts of a good prince, showed that he could write excellent prose. His death in 1531 prevented him from undertaking a more ambitious work, which was accordingly entrusted to his nephew JOÃO DE BARROS (1496?-1570).[439] But much earlier and a generation before Lopez de Castanheda’s work began to appear, the most famous of the Portuguese historians had resolved to chronicle the discovery of India. Born probably at Viseu, the son of Lopo de Barros, he came of ancient Minhoto stock and was brought up in the palace of King Manuel. When the Infante João received a separate establishment Barros became his page (_moço da guardaroupa_). It was in this capacity, _por cima das arcas da vossa guardaroupa_, that with the active encouragement of the prince he wrote his first work, _Cronica do Emperador Clarimundo_ (1520). It is a long romance of chivalry crowded with actors and events, and contains affecting, even passionate episodes. But the most remarkable feature of this work, written in eight months when the author was little over twenty, is its inexhaustible flow of clear, smooth, vigorous prose, entirely free from awkwardness or hesitation. One may also note that he regarded it merely as a parergon, a preparation for his history, _afim de apurar o estilo_, that despite its length he assures his readers that he omits all details in order to avoid prolixity, that much of its geography is real--all his works prove the truth of Couto’s assertion that he was _doutissimo na geografia_--and that each chapter ends with a brief moral. King Manuel, to whom he read some chapters, encouraged him to persevere in his intention to write the history of India, but the king’s death in 1521 delayed the project. In the following year Barros, who meanwhile had married Maria, daughter of Diogo de Almeida of Leiria, is said to have gone out as Captain of the Fortress of S. Jorge da Mina (although probably he never left Portugal) and later became Treasurer of the _Casa da India_ (1525-8), and its Factor in 1532, a post which he retained for thirty-five years. Although he lost a large sum of money in an unfortunate venture in Brazil, this was partly made good by the king’s munificence, and when in 1568, the year after his resignation, he retired to his _quinta_ near Pombal _sibi ut viveret_ he went as a _fidalgo_ of the king’s household and with a pension over twenty-five times as large as that of Camões.[440] In old age he is described as of a fine presence, although thin and not tall, with pale complexion, keen eyes, aquiline nose, long white beard, grave, pleasant, and fluent in conversation. Before beginning his history he wrote several brief treatises of great interest and importance, _Ropica Pnefma_ (1532), a dialogue written at his country house in 1531 in which Time, Understanding, Will, and Reason discuss their spiritual wares (_mercadoria espiritual_), and incidentally the new heresies; three short works on the Portuguese language, a _Dialogo da Viçiosa Vergonha_ (1540), and a _Dialogo sobre preceptos moraes_ (1540) in which he reduced Aristotle’s _Ethics_ to a game for the benefit of two of his ten children and of the Infanta Maria. He also wrote two excellent _Panegyricos_ (of the Infanta Maria and King João III) which were first published by Severim de Faria in his _Noticias de Portugal_ in 1655. As a historian he chose Livy for his pattern both in style and system. The first _Decada_ of his _Asia_ appeared in 1552, the second in 1553, and the third ten years later (1563). Their success was immediate, especially abroad--in Portugal, like other historians of recent events, he was accused of partiality and unfairness[441]--copies soon became extremely rare, the first two Decads were translated into Italian before the third appeared, and Pope Pius IV is said to have placed Barros’ portrait (or bust) next to the statue of Ptolemy.[442] Barros had prepared himself very thoroughly for his task. His work as Factor seems to have been exacting--he says that it was only by giving up holidays and half the night and all the time spent by other men in sleeping the _sesta_, or walking about the city, or going into the country, playing, shooting, fishing, dining, that he was able to attend to his literary labours. Yet he read everything, pored over maps and chronicles and documents from the East, and even bought a Chinese slave to translate for him. With this enthusiasm, his unfailing sense of order and proportion, and his clear and copious style he necessarily produced a work of permanent value. His manner is lofty, even pompous, worthy of the great events described. If his history is less vivid and interesting than Castanheda’s, that is because he wrote not as an eyewitness[443] or actor in them but as Court historian. He was a true Augustan, and the great edifice that this Portuguese Livy planned and partly built was of eighteenth-century architecture. He was fond of comparing his work to a building in which each stone has its appointed place. The material to his hand must be moulded to suit the symmetry of the whole--Albuquerque had never in his life used so many relative sentences as are attributed to him by Barros (II. v. 9)--and with a pedantic love of definitions and systematic subdivisions we find him measuring out the proportions of his stately structure, while picturesque details are deliberately omitted.[444] The merits of his style have been exaggerated. It is never confused or slovenly, but is for use rather than beauty; its ingredients are pure and energetic but the construction is inartistic and monotonous.[445] It is rather in the forcible, crisp sentences of his shorter treatises than in the _Asia_ that Barros displays his mastery of style. His great narrative of epic deeds is interrupted by interesting special chapters or digressions on trade, geography, Eastern cities and customs, locusts, chess, the Mohammedan religion, sword-fish, palm-trees, and monsoons. It was planned in four _Decadas_ and forty books, to embrace 120 years to 1539, but the fourth was not written and the third ends with the death of D. Henrique de Meneses (1526). Probably he did not find the dispute as to the Governorship of India a very congenial subject, especially as the feud was resumed in Portugal. Material and notes were however ready, and these were worked up into a lengthy fourth _Decada_ by João Baptista Lavanha (†1625) in 1615, which covers the same ground as, but is quite distinct from, the fourth Decad of Couto. The _Asia_ was only a block of a vaster whole. _Europa_, _Africa_, and _Santa Cruz_ were to treat respectively of Portugal from the Roman Conquest and Portuguese history in North Africa and Brazil, while Geography and Commerce were to be the subjects of separate works, the first of which (in Latin) was

## partly written.

Inseparably connected with the name of Barros is that of DIOGO DO COUTO (1542-1616), who continued his _Asia_, writing _Decadas_ 4-12. He was born at Lisbon, and at the age of ten entered the service (_guardaroupa_) of the Infante Luis, who sent him to study at the College of the Jesuits and then with his son, D. Antonio, under Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres, afterwards Archbishop of Braga, at S. Domingos, Bemfica. When thirteen he was present at the death of his talented patron Prince Luis, and remained in the palace as page to the king till the king’s death two years later.[446] Couto then went to seek his fortune in India, and there as soldier, trader, official (in 1571 he was in charge of the stores at Goa),[447] and historian he spent the best part of the following half-century, his last visit to Portugal being in 1569-71. At the bidding of Philip II (I of Portugal), who appointed him _Cronista Môr_ of India, he undertook the completion of Barros’ _Asia_. Probably he needed little inducement--his was the pen of a ready writer, and the composition of his history was, he tells us, a pleasure to him in spite of frequent discouragement. He had received a classical education; as a boy in the palace he had listened to stories of India[448] and had been no doubt deeply impressed by the vivid account of the Sepulveda shipwreck.[449] In India he won general respect. At Goa he married the sister of Frei Adeodato da Trindade (1565-1605), who in Lisbon saw some of his _Decadas_ through the press; he became Keeper of the Indian Archives (Torre do Tombo) and more than once made a speech on behalf of the City Councillors, as at the inauguration of the portrait of Vasco da Gama in the Town Hall in the centenary year of the discovery of India, before Gama’s grandson, then Viceroy, and a gathering of noblemen and captains. Couto knew every one--we find him conversing with Viceroy, Archbishop, natives, Moorish prisoners, rich merchants from Cambay or the Ambassador of the Grand Mogul. This personal acquaintance with the scenes, events, and persons gives a lively dramatic air to his work. The sententious generalities of the majestic Barros are replaced by bitter protests and practical suggestions. He is a critic of abuses rather than of persons.[450] He writes from the point of view of the common soldier, as one who had seen both sides of the tapestry of which Barros smoothly ignored the snarls and thread-ends. He displays a hatred of _semjustiças_, treachery, and ‘the insatiable greed of men’, with a fine zest in descriptions of battles, but he has not Barros’ skill in proportion and the grand style.[451] He can, however, write excellent prose, and he gives more of graphic detail[452] and individual sayings and anecdotes than his predecessor. Nor is he by any means an ignorant chronicler. A poet[453] and the friend of poets, he read Dante and Petrarca and Ariosto, was old-fashioned enough to admire Juan de Mena, consulted the works of ancient and modern historians, travellers, and geographers, and was deeply interested in the customs and religions of the East. The inequality of his _Decadas_ is in part explained by their history, which constitutes a curious chapter in the _fata_ of manuscripts. He first wrote _Decada_ X, which is the longest and most resembles those of Barros: this was only sent to Portugal in 1600 and was not immediately published, apparently because the period, 1580-8, was too recent. It remained in manuscript till 1788. Meanwhile Couto, working with extraordinary speed, sent home the fourth and fifth _Decadas_ in 1597, the sixth in 1599, and the seventh in 1601. Noting the fact that the last two books (9 and 10) of Castanheda’s history had been suppressed by royal order as being excessively fond of truth (_porque fallava nelles verdades_), he remarks that, should this happen to a volume of his, another would be forthcoming to take its place. Friends and enemies, indeed the very elements, took up the challenge, but fortunately Couto’s spirit and independence continued to the year of his death. The fourth _Decada_ was at once printed, but the text of the fifth was tampered with and its publication delayed, the sixth was destroyed by fire when ready for publication and recast by Frei Adeodato, the seventh was captured at sea by the English and re-written in 1603 by Couto and sent home in the same year, the eighth and ninth, finished in 1614, were stolen from him in manuscript during a severe illness. This was a crushing blow, but he partially reconstructed them _a modo de epilogo_ and, writing in old age from memory, dwelt, to our gain, on personal recollections: his literary bent appears--his friend Camões, Cristovam Falcão, and Garcia de Resende are mentioned. Finally _Decada_ xi (1588-97), which, writing to King Philip III in January 1616, he says ‘survived this shipwreck’, has disappeared and _Decada_ xii is incomplete, although the first five books bring the history to the end of the century (1599). His successor in the Goa Archives, Antonio Bocarro, took up the history at the year 1612, in a work which was published in 1876: _Decada 13ᵃ da Historia da India_. The manuscript of his _Dialogo do Soldado Pratico na India_ (written before the fourth _Decada_) was also stolen. The indomitable Couto re-wrote it and both versions have survived. They were not published till 1790, the title given to the earlier version being _Dialogo do soldado pratico portugues_. With its _verdades chans_, this dialogue between an old soldier of India, an ex-Governor, and a judge forms a most valuable and interesting indictment of the decadence of Portuguese rule in India, where the thief and rogue escaped scot-free, while the occasional honest man was liable to suffer for their sins, and the sleek soldier in velvet with gold ribbons on his hat had taken the place of the bearded _conquistadores_ (_Dialogo_, pp. 91-2).

GASPAR CORRÊA (_c._ 1495-_c._ 1565) claims, like Fernam Lopez de Castanheda and Barros, to have been the first historian of the Portuguese in the East.[454] He went to India sixteen years before Lopez de Castanheda and no doubt soon began[455] to take notes and collect material, but he was still working at his history in 1561 and 1563, and his _Lendas da India_ were not published till the nineteenth century. In the year 1506 Corrêa entered the king’s service as _moço da camara_,[456] and six years later went to India, where he became one of the six or seven secretaries of Afonso de Albuquerque.[457] They were young men carefully chosen by the Governor from among those who had been brought up in the palace and to whom he felt he could entrust his secrets.[458] Theirs was no humdrum or sedentary post, for they had to accompany the Governor on foot or on horseback, in peace and war, ever ready with ink and paper. Thus Corrêa had occasion vividly to describe Aden in 1513, and helped with his own hands to build the fortress of Ormuz in 1515. After Albuquerque’s death Corrêa seems to have continued to fight and write. In 1526 he was appointed to the factory of Sofala,[459] and in the following year the _moço da camara_ has become a _cavaleiro_ and is employed at the customs house at Cochin.[460] He cannot have remained much longer at Cochin than at Sofala, since he signed his name in the book of _moradias_ at Lisbon in 1529, and in 1530-1, in a ship provided by himself (_em um meu catur_), went with the Governor of India’s fleet to the attack of Diu. Later he was commissioned by the Viceroy, D. João de Castro, to furnish lifesize drawings[461] of all the Governors of India, so that he must then have been living at Goa. The ever-growing abuses in India and the scanty reward given to his fifty years of service and honourable wounds[462] embittered his last years, and if his spoken comments were as incisive as the indictment of the Governors and Captains contained in the _Lendas_[463] he must have made enemies in high positions: it seems, at least, that his murder one night at Malacca went unpunished, as if to prove the truth of his frequent complaint that no one ever was punished in India. At the time of his death he may still have been at work, as in 1561 and 1563, on the revision of his _Lendas_ or _Cronica dos Feytos da India_,[464] originally completed in 1551.[465] The first three books relate the events from 1497 to 1538; the last carries the history down to 1550. The account of the discovery is based on the narrative of one, and the recollections of others, of Vasco da Gama’s companions, and the subsequent events are drawn largely from Corrêa’s own experience. He spared no trouble to obtain first-hand information, from aged officials, Moors, natives, captives, a Christian galley-slave, or a woman from Malabar, distrusting mere hearsay. He lays frequent stress on his personal evidence.[466] Without necessarily establishing the trustworthiness of his work on every point, this method had the advantage of rendering it singularly vivid, and it contains many a brilliantly coloured picture of the East. In many respects he is the most remarkable of the historians of India. It was not for nothing that he had written down some of Albuquerque’s letters to King Manuel.[467] If Albuquerque’s words are still striking when read after four centuries, we may imagine their effect on the boy still in his teens to whom he dictated them. _Tinha grande oratoria_, says Corrêa, and many years afterwards some of the phrases remained in his memory.[468] He no doubt learnt from Albuquerque his direct, vigorous style, his love of concrete details, his regard for truth. His account of the sack of Malacca--the rifled chests of gold coins and brocades of Mecca and cloth of gold, the narrow dusty streets in shadow in the midday _calma_--must, one thinks, be that of an eyewitness; yet Corrêa was not in India at the time. The explanation is that it was largely the account of Albuquerque.[469]

Corrêa writes in even greater detail than Lopez de Castanheda. There is no trace of literary leanings in his work; he is sparing of descriptions as interrupting the story.[470] Whole pages have scarcely an adjective, and this gives his narrative clearness and rapidity, yet he is careless of style. It has been called redundant and verbose, but that is true mainly of the prefaces, which show that Corrêa in a library might have developed into a rhetorical Zurara of _boas oratorias_. It is, however, no longer the fashion to sneer at this ‘simple and half barbarous chronicler’, this ‘soldier adventurer in whose artless words appears his lack of culture’.[471] His _Lendas_ are infinitely preferable to the sleek periods of Barros and often as reliable, being legendary in little beyond their title, as understood by the ignorant (for the word _lenda_ meant not legend but record or log). They have a harsh flavour of religious fervour and of lust for gold[472] and an intense atmosphere of the East--_sangre e incenso, cravo e escravaria_, St. James fighting for the Christians, St. Thomas transformed into a peacock, all in a region of horror and enchantment. Corrêa was aware that it was dangerous to write history in India (iii. 9)--_periculosae plenum opus aleae_--but although he had no intention of immediately publishing it[473] he evidently expected some recognition of his work. The appearance of Lopez de Castanheda’s _Historia_ and Barros’ _Decadas_ must have been a blow almost as cruel as the daggers of his assassins a few years later.

The events of India from 1506-15, chronicled by Castanheda and Barros, necessarily centred round the great figure of Afonso de Albuquerque, and they were recorded afresh by his illegitimate son BRAS DE ALBUQUERQUE (1500-80), whom the dying Governor recommended to the king in his last letter. King Manuel in belated gratitude bestowed his favour on this son and bade him assume the name of Afonso in memory of his father. His _Commentarios de Afonso de Alboquerque_ (1557) were revised by the author in a second edition (1576) four years before his death. They are written in unassuming but straightforward style and furnish a very clear and moderate account based on letters written by Albuquerque to King Manuel.[474] The author seems to have realized that Albuquerque’s words and deeds speak sufficiently for themselves, but the reflection produced is somewhat pale.

The gallant and chivalrous apostle of the Moluccas, ANTONIO GALVAM (_c._ 1490?-1557), ‘as rich in valour and knowledge as poor in fortune’,[475] printed nothing in his lifetime but his manuscripts were handed over after his death to Damião de Goes as _Cronista Môr_.[476] We have only a brief treatise by him published posthumously. Copious in matter rather than in length, for it has but eighty small folios in spite of its lengthy title, this _Tratado_ (1563), or, if we adopt the briefer title from the colophon, this _Lyvro dos Descobrimentos das Antilhas & India_, is remarkable for the curious observation shown and its vivid, concise style of a man of action. Written in the form of annals, it begins with the Flood, and on f. 12 we are still in the age of Merlin; but the most valuable part consists in the writer’s direct experience--he tells of buffaloes, cows and hens ‘of flesh black as this ink’, of mocking parrots, fires made of earth ‘as in Flanders’. Goes, who had certainly handled the manuscript, may have added this comparison; he evidently interpolated the account of his own travels (ff. 58 v.-59 v.). The life of Galvam gives a further interest to this rare book, for, a man of noble and disinterested character, himself a prince by election, he has always been regarded as a stock instance of the ingratitude of princes. Born in the East, the son of Albuquerque’s old friend, the historian Duarte Galvam, he won fame by his courage and martial qualities, both as soldier and skilful mariner. After subduing the Molucca Islands he, as their Governor (Captain), spent his energies and income in missionary zeal and in developing agriculture. On the expiry of his term as Governor (1536-40) he refused the position of Raja of Ternate, which the grateful natives besought him to accept. He arrived penniless in Portugal and penniless died seventeen years later in the Lisbon hospital.

Besides the general histories many briefer records of separate regions or events were written, and these are often of great value as the accounts of men who had seen and taken part in what they describe.

LOPO DE SOUSA COUTINHO (?1515-77), father of Frei Luis de Sousa and one of the captains in the heroic siege of Diu (1538)--he is said to have died by accidentally running himself through with his sword when dismounting from his horse--wrote a striking account of the siege, especially of its last incidents, in his _Livro Primeiro do Cerco de Diu_ (1556). The siege of Mazagam (1562) was similarly described in clear, vigorous prose by AGOSTINHO GAVY DE MENDONÇA: _Historia do famoso cerco qve o Xarife pos á fortaleza de Mazagam_ (1607). JORGE DE LEMOS, of Goa, wrote a careful _Historia dos Cercos ... de Malaca_ (1585), and ANTONIO CASTILHO, the distinguished son of the celebrated architect João, published a _Commentario do Cerco de Goa e Chaul no anno MDLXX_ (1572). Events in the Moluccas were briefly recorded in an _Informaçam das cousas de Maluco_ (1569) by GABRIEL DE RABELLO, who went out as factor of Tidore in 1566.

The anonymous gentleman of Elvas who wrote the _Relaçam verdadeira_ (1557) of Soto’s discovery of Florida was a keen observer and related what he saw in direct language. His publisher, André de Burgos, in a short preface washes his hands of the style as insufficiently polished (_limado_).

The deeds of D. Cristovam da Gama, his conquest of a hundred leagues of territory in Ethiopia, his defeat, torture, and beheadal, are recounted with the vivid details of an eyewitness by MIGUEL DE CASTANHOSO, of Santarem, who accompanied him on his fatal expedition. This _Historia_ (1564) was published by João da Barreira, who dedicated it to D. Cristovam’s nephew, D. Francisco de Portugal.

MANUEL DE ABREU MOUSINHO wrote in Spanish a brief account of the conquest of Pegu by Salvador Ribeiro de Sousa, of which a Portuguese version appeared in the 1711 edition of Mendez Pinto’s travels: _Breve discurso em que se contem a conquista do reyno de Pegu_, nearly a century after the original edition, _Breve Discvrso en qve se cventa_, &c. (1617). The _Jornada do Maranhão feita por Jeronymo de Albuquerque em 1614_ is ascribed to DIOGO DE CAMPOS MORENO, who took part in that _conquista_. It was published in the _Collecção de Noticias para a Historia e Geographia das Nações Ultramarinas_.[477] The second volume of this collection contains several re-translations of _Navegações_ (by Thomé Lopez and anonymous Portuguese pilots) surviving in Italian in Ramusio. It would require a separate volume to give an account of all the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century narratives of newly conquered countries written in Portuguese and often immediately translated into many European languages, e.g. the _Novo Descobrimento do Grão Cathayo_ (1626) by the Jesuit ANTONIO DE ANDRADE (_c._ 1580-1634), or the _Relaçam_ of the Jesuit ALVARO SEMMEDO (1585?-1658) written in Portuguese but published in the Spanish translation of Faria e Sousa: _Imperio de la China_ (1642). However unliterary, they are often so vividly written as to be literature in the best sense.

PEDRO DE MAGALHÃES DE GANDAVO, of Braga, whose _Regras_ (1574) ran into three editions before the end of the century, described Brazil and its discovery in two short works: _Historia da prouincia Sãcta Cruz_ (1576) and _Tratado da terra do Brazil_ first published in 1826 in the _Collecção de Noticias_. This collection also prints works of the following century, such as the _Fatalidade historica da Ilha de Ceilão_[478] by Captain JOÃO RIBEIRO, who had served the king as a soldier for eighteen years in the _preciosa ilha de Ceilão_. His manuscript, written in 1685, was translated and published in French (1701) 135 years before it was printed in Portuguese. Gandavo’s _Historia_ (48 ff.), his first work (_premicias_), was introduced by _tercetos_ and a sonnet of Luis de Camões, who speaks of his _claro estilo_, and _engenho curioso_. The author himself in a prefatory letter says that he writes as an eyewitness, content with a ‘plain and easy style’ without seeking _epithetos exquisitos_.

The Jesuit BALTHASAR TELLEZ[479] (1595-1675) won considerable fame as an historian and prose-writer in his _Cronica da Companhia de Iesus_ (2 pts., 1645, 1647) in which he forswears what he calls the artifices and liberties of ordinary _seiscentista_ prose. He also edited the work of the Jesuit missionary MANUEL DE ALMEIDA (1580-1646), recasting it in an abbreviated form: _Historia Geral da Ethiopia a Alta ov Preste Ioam_ (1660), for which Tellez’ friend, Mello, provided a prefatory letter. Almeida, born at Viseu, had gone to India in 1601 and in 1622 was sent to Ethiopia, where he became the head of the mission. He died at Goa after a life of much hard work and various adventure. In writing his history of Ethiopia he made use of the _Historia da Ethiopia_ of an earlier (1603-19) head of the mission, PEDRO PAEZ (1564-1622), who had started for Ethiopia in 1595 but was captured by the Turks and only ransomed in 1602. Although a Spaniard by birth (born at Olmeda), Paez wrote in Portuguese. A third Jesuit missionary, MANUEL BARRADAS, born in 1572 at Monforte, who went to India in 1612, was also a prisoner of the Turks for over a year at Aden. In 1624 he went to _Ethiope, terre maldite_, and remained there some ten years. Of his three treatises the most important is that entitled _Do Reyno de Tygrê e seus mandos em Ethiopia_. The modern editor of these works, P. Camillo Beccari, considers that their authors’ simple style caused their treatises to be regarded rather as the material of history than in themselves history,[480] but their value for us is in this very simplicity and in the detailed observation which bring the country and its inhabitants clearly before us. Scarcely less important, as material for history and as human documents, are the _Cartas_ from Jesuits in China and Japan, especially the collection of 82 letters (Coimbra, 1570), and that of 206 letters (Evora, 1598). The Jesuit FERNAM CARDIM at about the same time rendered a like service to Brazil in his _Narrativa epistolar_, edited in 1847 by F. A. de Varnhagen. A more important work on Brazil was that of GABRIEL SOAREZ DE SOUSA (_c._ 1540-92)--the _Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587_, which its modern editor, F. A. de Varnhagen, described in a moment of enthusiasm as ‘the most admirable of all the works of the Portuguese _quinhentistas_’. Two other works of interest, half history, half travels, are the _Jornada do Arcebispo de Goa Dom Frey Aleixo de Meneses_ (1606) by ANTONIO DE GOUVEA, Bishop of Cyrene (_c._ 1565-1628), in three parts, describing the archbishop’s life and visits in his diocese; and the _Discvrso da Iornada de D. Gonçalo Covtinho á villa de Mazagam e sev governo nella_ (1629). The writer--the admirer of Camões and alleged author of the 1614 life of Sá de Miranda--who, as he says, had grown white in the council-chamber, lived on till 1634. He here relates with much directness his voyage and four years’ Governorship (1623-7).

The _Saudades da Terra_ (1873) of GASPAR FRUCTUOSO (1522-91), who was born at S. Miguel in the Azores, was written in 1590 and waited three centuries in manuscript for an editor. Both its title and the ‘preamble’, in which Truth says that she will write of nothing but sadness, are misleading, since the book is an account--in good, straightforward style after the manner of Castanheda and other historians--of the discovery and subsequent conditions of various islands, especially of Madeira and the lives of its Governors. ANTONIO CORDEIRO (1641-1722), Jesuit, of Angra, wrote at the age of seventy-six an uncritical but interesting work entitled _Historia Insulana das Ilhas a Portugal sujeitas no Oceano Occidental_ (1717), based partly on Fructuoso’s manuscript.

It was only as it were by an afterthought that the historians turned to consider the history of Portugal as apart from separate chronicles of the kings or episodes of Eastern conquest. The historical scheme of João de Barros was too vast to be executed by one man and the European part was never written. André de Resende likewise failed to carry out his project of a history of Portugal. PEDRO DE MARIZ (_c._ 1550-1615), son of the Coimbra printer, Antonio, in the last four of his _Dialogos de Varia Historia_ (1594) between a Portuguese and an Italian, embraces the whole history of Portugal, but these dialogues, although industriously written in good plain style, were eclipsed by the appearance three years later of the first part of the _Monarchia Lusitana_ (1597). Its author, a young Cistercian monk of Alcobaça, FREI BERNARDO DE BRITO (1569-1617), in the world Balthasar de Brito de Andrade, at once became known as one of the best writers of his time, and he is still reckoned among the masters of Portuguese prose. His style, clear, restrained, copious, proved that the mantle of Barros had fallen upon worthy shoulders. But, despite his rich vein of humanity, as a historian he is far inferior to Barros and even more uncritical than Mariz. The value of evidence seems to have weighed with him little when it was a question of exalting his language, literature, religion, or country, and he used and incorporated documents entirely worthless. Whether he deliberately manufactured spurious documents to serve his purposes cannot be known, but he seems at least to have quoted authorities which had never existed.[481]

In a word he failed to make good use of the incomparable material which the library of Alcobaça afforded. His was a misdirected erudition, and we would willingly exchange the knowledge of where Adam lies buried, or on what day the world began, or how Gorgoris, King of Lusitania, who died 1227 years after the Flood, invented honey, for accurate details of more recent Portuguese history. Yet he had the diligence and enthusiasm of the true historian and made use, sometimes a skilful use,[482] of coins and inscriptions. His brief _Geographia antiga da Lusytania_ also appeared in 1597, and in the same year the Cistercian Order appointed him its chronicler. Thus he interrupted his main work--the second part of the _Monarchia Lusitana_ was only published in 1609--in order to write the _Primeira Parte da Cronica de Cister_ (1602).[483] This, in many ways his best work, runs to nearly a thousand pages, and treats of the saints of the Order and especially of the life of the charming St. Bernard, with contemporary events in Portugal.[484] It was to be followed by two other parts, but Brito’s early death at his native Almeida on his way back to Alcobaça from Spain, a year after he had been appointed _Cronista Môr_ (1616), left his work unfinished. He is remembered as a fine stylist, a poet who wrote history rather than as a great historian. Mariana, the Latin original of whose _Historia de España_ (1592) he knew and quoted, is by comparison almost a scientific writer--at least he is not, like Brito, pseudo-scientific.

The two parts of the _Monarchia Lusitana_ written by Brito ended with the beginning of the Portuguese monarchy. Parts 3 and 4, by FREI ANTONIO BRANDÃO (1584-1637), to whose sincerity and skill Herculano paid tribute, appeared in 1632 and carried it down to the year 1279. Brandão had spent nearly ten years collecting and sifting documentary evidence for his work and is a far better historian than Brito, although in style he is not his equal. His nephew FREI FRANCISCO BRANDÃO (1601-80), _vir modestus, diligens et eruditus_, succeeded Frei Antonio as _Cronista Môr_ and wrote Parts 5 and 6 (1650), describing the reign of King Dinis. The style was less well maintained in Part 7 (1633) by FREI RAPHAEL DE JESUS (1614-93). Part 8 (1727), the last to be published, was added by FREI MANUEL DOS SANTOS (1672-1740) over a century after the publication of the first Part, but only brought the history to the battle of Aljubarrota (1385). Santos’ Part 7 as well as Parts 9 and 10 remained in manuscript. His prose is worthy of a work which is a monument of the language, not of the history of Portugal. Perhaps the truest epitaph of this history as a whole--after allowance has been made for Brito’s style and the excellent work of Antonio Brandão--is a severe sentence from the preface of the author of Part 7: ‘There are histories whose tomes are tombs.’

It could hardly, perhaps, be expected that the historians of the reigns of King Manuel and King João III should pass over events in the East as already fully related, and in Damião de Goes’ _Cronica do Felicissimo Rey Dom Emanvel_ and Francisco de Andrade’s _Cronica de Dom João III_ (1613), although they lose much by compression, they still occupy a disproportionate space. Andrade wrote most correct prose, even in his poems, and the style of his history is excellent, but neither of these works gives any adequate account of the internal history of Portugal, any more than does that of Frei Luis de Sousa on João III’s reign, in which there should have been more scope for originality. The same prominence is given to India in the history of JERONIMO OSORIO (1506-80), Bishop of Silves, _De Rebvs Emmanvelis Regis Lvsitaniae_ (1571), written in Latin in order to spread the knowledge of these events _per omnes reipublicae Christianae regiones_.[485] Osorio, whose father, like Lopez de Castanheda’s, had been a judge (_ouvidor_) in India, was born at Lisbon, but studied abroad, at Salamanca, Paris, and Bologna. After occupying the Chair of Scripture at Coimbra for a brief space, he went to Lisbon and became secretary to the Infante Luis. In 1560 he was made Archdeacon of Evora and four years later Bishop of Silves. (The see was removed to Faro three years before his death and his title is sometimes given as Bishop of Algarve.) A few remarkable letters in Portuguese, in one of which (1567) he attempted to convert Queen Elizabeth, show that he was skilled in the use of his native tongue; his countrymen delighted to call him the Portuguese Cicero. According to Sousa de Macedo ‘many people came from England, Germany and other parts with the sole object of seeing him’.[486] In England certainly his book was highly prized, and both Dryden and Pope praised Gibbs’ translation, although Francis Bacon noted the diffuseness of Osorio’s style: _luxurians et diluta_, certainly not a just verdict on the style as a whole; we have but to think of the concise sketches of Albuquerque (_De Rebus_, p. 380) and King Manuel (p. 478). Osorio acknowledged his ample debt to the chronicle of Goes, which he describes as written ‘with incredible felicity’. FREI BERNARDO DA CRUZ, who accompanied King Sebastian to Africa in 1578 as chaplain, in his _Cronica de El Rei D. Sebastião_ wrote the history of his life and reign and happily describes him as ‘a young king without experience or fear’. The _Cronica do Cardeal Rei D. Henrique_ (1840) completed the history of the house of Avis. It chronicles in fifty-four diminutive chapters the eighteen months’ reign of the _pouco mimoso e severo_ Cardinal King Henry. It was written in 1586,[487] and, although anonymous, is ascribed with some probability to the Jesuit Padre ALVARO LOBO (1551-1608).

The _Jornada de Africa_ (1607) by JERONIMO DE MENDOÇA, of Oporto, is divided into three parts, describing the expedition and the battle of Alcacer Kebir, the ransoms and escapes of the captives, and the death of Christian martyrs in Africa. Its object was to refute certain statements in Conestaggio’s recent work _Dell’unione del regno di Portogallo alla corona di Castiglia_, but Mendoça had fought at Alcacer Kebir and had been taken prisoner; he thus writes as an eyewitness, and his excellent style and power of description give more than a controversial value and interest to his book and make it matter for regret that this short history was apparently his only work.

MIGUEL DE MOURA (1538-1600), secretary to five kings and one of the three Governors of Portugal in 1593, set an example too rarely followed by those who have played an important part in Portuguese history by composing a brief autobiography: _Vida de Miguel de Moura_. It was written on the eve of St. Peter’s Day, 1594, except a few pages which were added in the year before the author’s death. Incidentally it has the distinction of containing one of the longest sentences ever written (114 lines--1840 ed., pp. 126-9).

The painstaking and talented DUARTE NUNEZ DE LEAM (_c._ 1530-1608), born at Evora, son of the Professor of Medicine João Nunez, besides genealogical and legal works, _Leis extravagantes_ (1560, 1569), wrote two valuable treatises on the Portuguese language and an interesting _Descripção do Reino de Portugal_ (1610), which he finished in 1599. He also found time to spare from his duties as a magistrate to recast the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal. The _Cronicas dos Reis de Portugal_ (1600) contain those from Count Henry to King Fernando, and the _Cronicas del Rey Dom Ioam de gloriosa memoria_ those of Kings João I, Duarte, and Afonso V. Shorn of the individuality of the early chroniclers, they yet retain much of interest, and Nunez de Leam would be accorded a higher place as historian were it not for our knowledge of the inestimable value of the originals which he edited and ‘improved’. Two generations earlier Cristovam Rodriguez Azinheiro (or Acenheiro), born in 1474 (he tells us that he was sixty-one in May 1535), had treated the early chronicles in the same way, but only succeeded in retaining all that was jejune without preserving their picturesqueness in his _Cronicas dos Senhores Reis de Portugal_.[488]

More interesting personally than as historian, the humanist DAMIÃO DE GOES (1502-74[489]) was one of the most accomplished men of his time,[490] and, thanks partly to his trial before the Inquisition,

## partly to the not unpleasant egotism with which he chronicled

autobiographical details, not only in his _Genealogia_[491] but in many of his other works, we know more of his life than we know of most contemporary writers. Traveller and diplomatist, scholar, singer, musician, he was a man of many friends during his lifetime, and the tragic circumstances of his last years have won him fresh sympathizers after his death. Born at Alenquer and brought up at the Court of King Manuel, he became page to the king in 1518, and five years later was appointed secretary at the Portuguese Factory at Antwerp. In 1529 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Poland, and in this and the following years, on similar missions or for his own pleasure, ‘saw and conversed with all the kings, princes, nobles and peoples of Christendom’.[492] He made the acquaintance of Montaigne’s _aubergistes allemands, ‘glorieux, colères et ivrognes’_, turned aside to visit Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg,[493] and was for several months the guest of Erasmus at Freiburg. In Italy he lived with Cardinal Sadoletto at Padua (1534-8) and met Cardinal Bembo and other celebrated men of the day. At Louvain, too, _mihi intime carum et iucundum_, as throughout Europe, he had many devoted friends. A senator of Antwerp welcomed him in Latin verse on his return from his Scythian travels,[494] Luis Vives addressed affectionate letters to _mi Damiane_, Albrecht Dürer painted his portrait, Glareanus in his _Dodecachordon_ included music of his composition.[495]

In 1542 he was on his way to Holland with his Flemish wife when he heard that Louvain was threatened by a French force commanded by Longueval and _meus ille in Academiam Louvaniensem fatalis amor_ took him back to share its perils. He played a principal part in the defence, and finally remained a prisoner in the enemy’s hands, _quasi piacularis hostia_, as he says.[496] His imprisonment in France lasted nine months, and after paying a ransom of 6,000 ducats he went back to Louvain. The Emperor Charles V rewarded him for his services with a splendid coat of arms. In 1545, after twenty-one years of European travel, he returned with his wife and children[497] to Portugal, and three years later was entrusted with Fernam Lopez’ old post, the Keepership of the Archives. He lived in the Paços d’Alcaçova with a certain magnificence, keeping open house for all foreigners, one of whom records that already in 1565 _il se faict fort vieulx_. Six years later, on April 4, 1571, he was arrested by the Inquisition and spent twenty months in prison.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should have incurred suspicion, nor is it necessary to explain his trial by the enmity of certain persons at Court due to passages in his works. His life had been out of keeping with the _gravedades de Hespanha_, and the charges against him were numerous and varied. He had eaten and drunken with heretics, he had read strange books, the sound of songs not understanded of the people and organ music had issued from his house at Lisbon, he had omitted to observe fasts, he had called the Pope a tyrant, he set no store by papal indulgences or auricular confession. Even the testimony of his grand-niece is recorded, to the effect that her mother had said of Goes, her husband’s uncle, that he had no more belief in God than in a stone wall (she seems to have had Berkeleian tendencies). As usual it is less the proceedings of the Inquisition than the bad faith of the witnesses that arouse disgust. The poet Andrade Caminha, who apparently came forward of his own accord--we are not told that he was _chamado_--admitted that certain words of Goes which he now denounced had not seemed so serious to him before he knew that Goes was in the prison of the Inquisition. Goes had already been denounced to the Inquisition in 1545 and 1550, and his book _Fides, Religio Moresque Aethiopum_ (Lovanii, 1540) had been condemned in Portugal in 1541. He was examined frequently in 1571 and 1572, was left for three months without news of his family, and complained of being old, weak, and ill, and that his body had become covered with a kind of leprosy (July 14, 1572). His sentence (October 16, 1572) pronounced him to have incurred, as a Lutheran heretic, excommunication, confiscation of all his property, and the life-long confinement of his person. He was transferred to the famous monastery of Batalha in December, but his death (January 30, 1574) occurred in his own house. His return and his death probably explain one another. He was growing very old in 1565 and we must suppose that his recent experiences had not made him younger. His last request--to die among his family--was apparently granted, and the further explanations (that he fell forward into the fire, that he died of an apoplexy, was killed by order of the Inquisition, was beaten to death by the lackeys of the Conde da Castanheira, or murdered and robbed by his own servants) are superfluous. His works consist of several brief Latin treatises crowded with interesting facts (especially his _Hispania_); and in Portuguese the _Cronica do Principe Dom Ioam_ (1567) and _Cronica do Felicissimo Rey Dom Emanvel_, 4 pt. (1566, 1567). He also found time to translate Cicero’s _De Senectute_: _Livro ... da Velhice_, (Veneza, 1534). He had not the imagination of an historian, and unless events have passed before his eyes, or happen to interest him personally, he can be bald and meagre as an annalist. But in any matter which touches him closely, as the expulsion and the cruel treatment of the Jews, or the massacre of new Christians, or the account of Ethiopia, he broadens out into moving and detailed description. The result is that this long Chronicle of King Manuel is a number of excellent separate treatises rather than a history with unity and a sense of proportion. It is the work of a scholar who likes to describe directly, from his own experience. The _Cronica do Principe_ was written some months before that of King Manuel. The latter was a difficult undertaking,[498] for many persons concerned were still alive, and subjects such as the expulsion of the Jews needed delicate handling. For thirty-one years it had hung fire in the hands of previous chroniclers when in 1558 Cardinal Henrique entrusted it to Damião de Goes. After eight years the four parts were ready for press,[499] but the difficulties were not yet over, for certain chapters met with strong disapproval at Court[500] and had to be altered, so that two editions of the first part appeared in 1566 (the first being apparently submitted as a proof and not for sale), but the publication of the work as a whole was not completed before 1567.

Scarcely less celebrated than Goes, the archaeologist LUCIO ANDRÉ DE RESENDE (1493?-1573),[501] friend of Goes, Clenardus, and Erasmus, left the Dominican convent of Bemfica, in which he was a novice, in order to study abroad, at Salamanca, Paris, and Louvain. ‘Tall, with very large eyes, curling hair, rather dark complexion but of a cheerful, open countenance’, living in his house (_as casas de Resende_) at Evora among his books and coins, statues and inscriptions--his small garden hedged with _marmores antigos_ as, according to Brito, too often were peasants’ vine-yards--he exercised a considerable influence on the writers of his time[502] and was held in high esteem by the Emperor Charles V and by King João III. The principal of his own works were written in Latin, but besides his _De Antiquitatibus Lusitaniae_ (1593), which was edited by Mendez de Vasconcellos with the addition of a fifth book from notes left by the author, he composed in Portuguese a ‘brief but learned’ _Historia da Antiguidade da Cidade de Evora_ (1553). In his _Vida do Infante Dom Duarte_ (1789)[503] he did not write the ‘very copious history’ which Paiva de Andrade[504] said the subject required. He did better, for this sketch of a few pages is a little masterpiece in which the vignettes, for instance, of the boatman and his figs, or the meal in the mill, must ever retain their vividness and charm. Resende had been the prince’s tutor and writes of what he saw; he shows that he could decipher a person’s character as keenly as a Latin inscription. Resende’s legitimate successor in archaeology, MANUEL SEVERIM DE FARIA (1583-1655), scarcely belongs to the sixteenth century although he wrote verses in 1598 and 1599. He succeeded his uncle as Canon (1608) and Precentor (1609) of Evora Cathedral and resigned in favour of his nephew Manuel de Faria Severim as Canon in 1633 and Precentor in 1642. Living in ancient Evora when the memory of Resende was still fresh, this antiquary of the pale face and blue eyes, ‘store-house of all the treasures of the past’,[505] with his medals and statues and choice library of rare books, soon rivalled Resende’s fame. His most important works are _Discursos varios politicos_ (1624) containing four essays and the lives of Barros, Camões, and Couto, and _Noticias de Portugal_ (1655).

A less attractive personality is that of MANUEL DE FARIA E SOUSA (1590-1649), born near Pombeiro (Minho), a most accomplished, industrious, but untrustworthy author who wrote mainly in Spanish. His _Epitome de las Historias Portuguesas_ was published in 1628 at Madrid, where he spent the greater part of his life, and where he died. He seems to have retained a real affection for his native country, but he was not a man of independent character and bestowed his flatteries as his interest required. After the Restoration of 1640 he stayed on at the Spanish Court, and there appears to be some doubt whether it was João IV, his nominal master, or Philip IV of Spain that he served best. His long historical works, _Europa Portuguesa_, _Asia Portuguesa_, _Africa Portuguesa_, appeared posthumously, between 1666 and 1681. He is most pleasant when he is not trying to ‘make’ history but is simply describing, as in his account of the various provinces of Portugal.[506] In his own not over-modest verdict in Part 4 of the same volume, _De las primazias deste Reyno_, he was _el primero que supo historiar con más acierto_. Faria e Sousa was enthusiastic but unscrupulous and he has been severely handled by the critics. With posterity he has fallen between two stools, since the Spanish are only moderately interested in his subject, Portugal, and the Portuguese consider him to belong to Spanish literature.

FOOTNOTES:

[436] Antonio Vieira, _Historia do Futuro_ (1718), p. 24: _esta historia era o silencio de todas as historias_.

[437] _O primeiro Portugues que na nossa lingoa as [façanhas] resuscitei._ João de Barros, in his preface, makes a similar claim: _foi o primeiro_.

[438] Cf. vi. 37, 38; vii. 77, 78; or vi. 100, where the ships bristling with the enemy’s arrows are likened to porcupines.

[439] 1496, the generally accepted year of his birth, is the calculation of Severim de Faria, followed by Barbosa Machado, Nicolás Antonio, &c. As he retired at the end of 1567 it is difficult not to suspect (from his love of method and the decimal system) that he was born in 1497--the year of Vasco da Gama’s expedition.

[440] 400,000 _réis_. He also obtained the privilege of trading with India free from all taxes so as to clear a profit of 1,600,000 _réis_. Innocencio da Silva adds ‘yearly’ to this sum, mentioned by Severim de Faria. In any case Barros’ complaints of his poverty seem misplaced.

[441] Faria e Sousa (_Varias Rimas_, pt. 2 (1689), p. 165), says that neither Lopez de Castanheda nor Barros was widely read, one of the reasons being the length of their histories.

[442] According to Pero de Magalhães de Gandavo (_Dialogo em defensam da lingua portvgvesa_) Barros ‘is in Venice preferred to Ptolemy’.

[443] His account of the fleet leaving Lisbon (I. v. 1) _is_ that of an eyewitness.

[444] _Mais trabalhamos no substancial da historia que no ampliar as miudezas que enfadam e não deleitam_ (I. vii. 8). Cf. I. v. 10 (1778 ed., p. 465); III. ix. 9 (p. 426); III. x. 5 (p. 489). Yet the vivid light thrown by the details recorded in other writers, such as the ‘bushel of sapphires’ sent to Albuquerque by one of the native kings, or the open boat drifting with a few Portuguese long dead and a heap of silver beside them, is of undeniable value. Goes inserts details, but is too late a writer to do so without apology, like Corrêa and Lopez de Castanheda: _pode parecer a algũa pessoa_ [e. g. his friend Barros] _que em historia grave nam eram necessarias estas miudezas_ (_Cron. do Pr. D. Joam_, cap. cii).

[445] e.g. the following mortar of conjunctions between the stones on p. 335 of _Decada_ II (1777 ed.) opened at hazard: _nas quaes ... que ... que ... qual ... que ... como ... que ... que ... o qual ... cujos ... que ... que ... que ... posto que ... como ... porque ... que_.

[446] _E sendo eu moço servindo a El Rey D. João na guardaroupa_ (_Dec._ IV. iii. 8). In _Dec._ VII. viii. 1 he speaks of having served João III for two years as _moço da camara_ (1555-7). In the same passage he embarks for India in 1559 aged _fifteen_. In _Dec._ VII. ix. 12 (1783 ed. p. 396) he is eighteen (April 1560).

[447] According to the Governor, Francisco Barreto, he was more at home with arms than with prices (_Dec._ IX. 20, 1786 ed., p. 160). Another passage in the _Decadas_ proves him to have been an excellent horseman.

[448] Cf. _Dec._ IV. iii. 8 (1778 ed. p. 234).

[449] He himself describes with great detail and pathos the wrecks of the ships _N. Senhora da Barca_ (VII. viii. 1), _Garça_ (VII. viii. 12), _S. Paulo_ (VII. ix. 16), _Santiago_ (X. vii. 1), as well as that of Sepulveda (_Dec._ VI. ix. 21, 22). In his account of the loss of the _S. Thomé_ (which was printed in the _Historia Tragico-Maritima_, in the _Vida de D. Paulo de Lima_, and no doubt in the lost eleventh _Decada_), the separation of D. Joana de Mendoça from her child is one of the most tantalizing and touching incidents ever penned.

[450] _Não particularizo ninguem_ (_Dec._ XII. i. 7).

[451] What he lacks in _gravidade_ (cf. _Dec._ X. x. 14)--he is quite ready to admit that he writes _toscamente_ (VII. iii. 3), _singelamente, sem ornamento de palavras_ (VI. ii. 3), _simplesmente, sem ornamento nem artificio de palavras_ (V. v. 6)--he makes good by directness as an eyewitness, _de mais perto_ (IV. i. 7; cf. IV. x. 4 _ad init._). When he had not himself been present he preferred the accounts of those who had, as Sousa Coutinho’s description of the siege of Diu (_Commentarios_) _em estilo excellente e grave, e foi o melhor de todos, porque escreveo como testemunha de vista_, V. iii. 2) or Miguel de Castanhoso’s _copioso tratado_ (V. viii. 7). Among the traces of his close touch with reality are the popular _romances_, _cantigas_, _adagios_, which Barros would have deemed beneath the dignity of history.

[452] As the fleets grew, long catalogues of the captains’ names were perhaps inevitable. They are certainly out of place in a biography, but Couto’s _Vida de D. Paulo de Lima Pereira_ (1765) is really a collection of those passages from the _Decadas_ which bear on the life of Couto’s old friend, a _fidalgo muito pera tudo_. As far as chapter 32 it is told in words similar to or identical with those of _Decada_ X.