CABINET OF BIOGRAPHY. (continued 7)

He then sums up, by quoting Pliny and Trajan on the merits of mercy, and the preferability of being loved rather than feared.

This memorial had the effect of drawing attention to his cause and sufferings. The accusation on account of which he was imprisoned was examined, and it was discovered that he had been calumniated, and the real author of the libel came to be known; on this he was set at liberty, and allowed to return to court. His first labour was to recover his property, the whole of which, except the portion he had entrusted to his powerful friend, doctor Francisco de Oviedo, had been sequestered. It was a work of difficulty; and, meanwhile, he found himself too poor to live with becoming respectability at court, so he retired to his country seat. Here he soon fell ill from the effects of neglect during his last, long, and cruel imprisonment; and he was obliged to remove to Villa Nueva de los Infantes, for the sake of medical treatment. He was long confined to his apartment, suffering great pain and annoyance, all of which he endured with exemplary patience. He made his will, and prepared his soul for death. He named his nephew his successor, on condition that he took the name of Quevedo. His death was lingering. To the last he displayed fortitude and a tranquil spirit of resignation. He died the 8th of September, 1647, at the age of sixty-five.

In person, Quevedo was of middle height, and robust, though his feet were deformed. He was handsome in face, fair, and with curly hair inclined to red. He was short-sighted—but his countenance was full of animation. Notwithstanding his deformity, he was vigorous,—addicted to, and excelling in, manly exercises.

His life was spent in a series of vicissitudes; at one time enjoying power and reputation; at another, a prisoner, suffering all the evils of poverty and neglect. He bore all with fortitude: his active mind gave him employment, his genius caused him to find a resource in writing;—and the vivacity and energy of his works display the unabated vigour of his soul. Nearly fifteen years of his life he spent in prison, as he mentions in his letter above quoted. Meanwhile his character remained uninjured by adversity. His disposition was magnanimous, so that he never revenged himself on any of his enemies: he was generous and charitable to those in need; and so diffident of his own merit, that the only poems he published saw light under a feigned name.

His integrity had been put to the proof at Naples, where bribes were offered him to conceal the frauds practised on the royal revenue; but he was far above dishonesty and peculation. The only slur on his character is his possible complicity in the Bedmar conspiracy; but in those days the advantage of the state to which a man belonged was deemed preponderant to all the suggestions of justice and right. Quevedo also acted on this occasion (if he did act) under the command of his superiors; and believed that fidelity to his patron was his first duty.

Of his "Affaires du Cœur," the great subject with poets, we know little. Several ladies are celebrated in his verses; but a great proportion of his erotic poetry is dedicated to one, whom he names Lisi, and to whom he appears to have been faithfully attached for a considerable space of time. In one of his sonnets to her, he says that ten years had taken their swift and noiseless flight since first he saw her; and for these ten years the soft flame had warmed his veins, and reigned over his soul; "for the flame," he says, "that aspires to immortal life, neither fears to die with the body, nor that time should injure or extinguish it." Many of his poems express great aversion to matrimony, and when, at last, in advanced age, he did marry, we have seen that he was widowed almost as soon as wed.

With the never-to-be-omitted exception of Cervantes, Quevedo is the most original prose writer Spain has produced; but at the same time he is so quaint, referring to local peculiarities, and using words unknown, except colloquially, that he is often unintelligible, especially in his burlesque poetry, to a foreigner. His countrymen esteem him highly. One of the most pleasing stanzas of Lope de Vega's Laurel de Apolo is dedicated to his praise. He speaks of him as "Possessing an acute but gentle spirit; agreeable in his wit, and profound in his serious poetry." He adopted something of the culto style and conceits blemish his verses. Quintana says of him, "Quevedo was every thing in excess; no one in the same manner displays in the serious, a gravity so rigid, and morals so austere; no one in the jocose, shows a humour, so gay, so free, and so abandoned to the spirit of the thing. His imagination was vivid and brilliant but superficial and negligent; and the poetic genius that animates him, sparkles but does not glow, surprises but does not move deeply, bounds with impetuosity and force, but neither flies nor supports itself at the same elevation. I am well aware that Quevedo often diverts with what he writes, and raves because it is his pleasure. I know that puns have their proper place in such compositions, and that no one has used them more happily than he. But every thing has its bounds; and heaped together with a prodigality like his, instead of pleasing they only create weariness.

"His verse, however, is for the most part full and sonorous, his rhyme rich and easy. His poetry, strong and nervous, proceeds impetuously to its end; and if his movements betray too much of the effort, affectation and bad taste of the writer, their course is yet frequently seen to have a wildness, an audacity, and a singularity hat is surprising.[121]"

To give some idea of Quevedo's style to the English reader we may liken him to Butler; but it is Butler rather in his fragments than in Hudibras, for a more elevated poetic tone is displayed in those. Quevedo could be sublime, though only by snatches. Serious he could be, to the depths of grave and profound disquisition, as his ethical and religious treatises testify.

One singular circumstance appertains to Quevedo's literary career—that he published none of his poetry himself, except that portion which he gave to the world under the feigned name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre. These are the choice of all. Being more elevated, more sweet, more pure in their diction and taste, several critics would deprive Quevedo of the merit of being their author. But who Torre was, if he were not Quevedo, nobody can tell: while, these poems appearing under his editorship, and the very name—Francisco being his own, and the surname, "of the Tower," appropriate to his position, as the verses were written while he was living secluded in his patrimonial villa of Torre Juan Abaci, seems to fix them unquestionably on him. Of the rest, a friend of Quevedo assures us that not a twentieth part of what he wrote has escaped destruction. His dramas and historical works have perished; by which he has lost the right to being considered the universal writer his contemporaries name him. This friend, and afterwards his nephew and heir, published his poems, distributed under the head of six muses, pedantically headed with mottos from Seneca. There is Clio the historic, consisting chiefly of sonnets on great events addressed to great people; Polyhimnia the sententious; Melpomene, composed chiefly of epitaphs; Erato the erotic, or as it is styled, "singing of the achievements of love and beauty:" the greater part of which is dedicated to Lisi. Terpsichore the light, gay and satirical, a large portion of which are written in the jargon of the gypsies, and are unintelligible on this side of the Pyrenees; and Thalia, longest of all, which sings, "de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis."

It is as a prose writer, however, that Quevedo has acquired fame out of his own country. And this not from his serious works; nor from his "picaresco," in which he relates the life of the great Tacaño, or captain of thieves, the type of a Spanish rogue. This tale, by its familiarity with vice, squalid penury, and vulgar roguery, becomes tiresome; nor is it to be compared in richness of humour to Mendoza's history of Lazarillo de los Tormes. The letters of the "Cavallero de Tenaza," or knight of the pincer, are very whimsical. They are in ridicule of avarice, a sin, which Quevedo declares in another work to be the most unnatural of all. They are addressed to a lady; and are lessons to teach how little can be given, and how much preserved, by a man on all occasions. This sort of dry humour turning on one idea amuses at first, but at last becomes wearisome.

It is on his Visions however, his most original work, that his European reputation rests. Nothing can be more novel, singular and striking. They consist of various visions of the other world; where he sees the end of earthly vanities and the punishments that await crime. They are full of knowledge of human nature, vivacity, wit and daring imagination; they remind the reader of Lucian; and if they are less airy and fanciful, they are bolder and more sarcastic. They have the fault, it is true, of dwelling too exclusively on subjects of mean and vulgar interest—alguazils, attornies, ruffians, and all sorts of rogues of both sexes; among which, tailors figure preeminently. Now that tailors provide their own cloth, we have lost that intense notion of "cabbaging," which was so deeply impressed on the minds of our ancestors, when they only fashioned cloth sent to them. Tailors are with Quevedo the very ne plus ultra of a thief. As lord Byron styles a pirate "a sea-solicitor," so Quevedo calls a robber "a tailor of the highways." Several of these visions were written while their author was comparatively young: (one, dedicated to the duke of Osuna, is dated 1610, when he was thirty years of age), and possess the glow and spirit of early life. Nothing can be more startling and vivid than the commencement of the "Vision of Calvary." The blast of the last trump is described, and then he goes on to say: "The sound enforced obedience from marble, and hearing from the dead. All the earth began to move, giving permission to the bones to seek one another. After a short interval, I beheld those who had been soldiers arise in wrath from their graves, believing themselves summoned to battle: the avaricious looked up with anxiety and alarm fearing an attack, while men of pleasure fancied that the horns sounded to invite them to the chase. Then I saw how many fled with disgust or terror from their old bodies, of which some wanted an arm, some an eye; and I laughed at the odd figures they cut, while I admired the contrivance of Providence, that all being confounded together, no mistake was made. In one churchyard only, there was some confusion and exchanging in the appropriation of heads; and I saw an attorney who denied that his own soul belonged to him. But I was most frightened at seeing two or three merchants who put on their souls so awry, that all their five senses got into their fingers."

The commencement of the "Alguazil possessed" is equally spirited. A spectator calling him a man bedevilled, the bad spirit, within, cries out that "He is not a man but an alguazil; and you must know that it is against their will that devils possess alguazils; so that you ought rather to call me a devil be-alguazilled than an alguazil bedevilled." He is almost as inveterate against duennas, a race of people peculiar to Spain, and he disposes of them ludicrously enough in the infernal regons. "I went a little further," he says, "and came to an immense and troubled swamp, where there was so much noise that my head was bewildered: I asked what it was, and was told that it proceeded from women who had turned duennas on earth. And thus I discovered that those who are duennas in this life, are frogs in the next, and like frogs, are for ever croaking amidst the wet and mud; and very properly do they act the parts of infernal frogs, since duennas are neither fish nor flesh. I laughed to see them turned into such ugly things, with faces as care-worn and wrinkled as those of duennas here on earth."

Such is the sort of wit that Quevedo indulges in; terse, pointed, bitter, and driven home with an unsparing hand. Extravagant in its imaginations, yet so proportioned to the truth of nature as to excite admiration as well as surprise, and to be the model of a variety of imitations, none of which come up to him in penetration, vivacity and subtle felicity of expression.

CALDERON

1601-1687.

We draw to a close. Misrule and oppression had their inevitable results, crushing and destroying the spirit and intellect of Spain; and after, by an extraordinary harvest of writers, the soil had shown what it could do, it became waste and barren. For a long time, the purists, the Gongorists, the partisans of a glittering and false style, exerted their influence. A critic and poet of eminence, Luzan, exerted himself to restore Spanish poetry. He succeeded in exploding the false taste; and Moratin, the author of some excellent dramas, followed in his steps: but, latterly, the state of the country has been too distracted for literature to gain any attention.

Before we close the series of Spanish Lives, however, one more is to be added, and it is that of the greatest poet of Spain. Little, very little, however, is known of him. We regret that we have not fuller accounts of Cervantes. We search the voluminous works of Lope de Vega to acquire knowledge of his character and of the events of his life; while the career of one far greater than he, and, as a poet, infinitely superior to Cervantes himself, is wrapped in such obscurity that we can discern only its bare outline, and no one has endeavoured to fill up the sketch, nor by seeking for letters and other documents, to give us a fuller, and as it were coloured picture, of what Calderon was. This partly arises from the prosperity of his life: adversity presents objects that catch the attention and demand research: an even course of happiness, like a campaign country, eludes description. The only account we have of him proceeds from a friend[122], who commences with blowing a trumpet, as if he were going to tell us much. "How can his limited powers," he says, "describe him who occupies all the tongues of fame? and ill will a short epilogue befit the man whose merits endless ages cannot limit." And then he goes on to tell us that "his swift pen shall comprise a brief sigh in a long regret, and raise an honourable tomb to his sacred ashes; adopting for the purpose one of the many pens which his fame furnishes, until others better cut than his shall publish eulogies worthy of his name."

Don Pedro Calderon de la Barca was born in 1601[123]; thus coming into the world of poetry at the moment when the plays of Lope de Vega were in vogue, and when Cervantes was calling the attention of mankind to his immortal work. His biographer takes the pains to preserve the intelligence that he wept before he was born; "thus to enter the world enshadowed by gloom, which he, like a new sun, was to fill with joy." And he tells us that he collected "this important information from Donna Dorotea Calderon de la Barca, his sister, a nun in the royal convent of St. Clara at Toledo." The family of Calderon was illustrious, and enjoyed an ancient hidalgoship (or solar) in the valley of Carriedo among the mountains of Burgos; the very place, we may observe, where Lope de Vega's ancestors resided, and whence his father emigrated, when, driven by straitened means, he removed to Madrid. The family of Calderon had migrated many years before, and were settled at Toledo. His mother's name was Donna Ana Maria de Henao y Riaña, and her origin was derived from an ancient family in the Low Countries, descended from the Seigneur de Mons, and which had been settled in Spain for many years.

His childhood was spent under the paternal roof, and even as a hoy he was conspicuous for his intelligence and acquirements. At the age of fourteen he entered the university of Salamanca. He remained there for five years, and rendered himself conspicuous by his ardour for study, and by the progress he made in the most abstruse and difficult sciences. Already also had he begun to write plays, which were acted with applause in several Spanish theatres.

1620. Ætat. 19.

At the age of nineteen he left Salamanca. These dates are given us, but the intermediate spaces are unfilled up. We are not told whether he resided at Madrid or with his family at Toledo. His fame became established as a poet, and began to rival that of Lope, whom indeed he far transcended in the higher gifts of poetry, creative imagination, sublimity, and force.

1626. Ætat. 25.

At the age of five and twenty he entered the military service, and served his king first in the Milanese and afterwards in Flanders, the old fields of war for Spain, whereon had fought and fallen so many heroes of both countries, and so many human beings had fallen victims to religious and political persecution. He spent ten years in this manner. Sismondi says, that his life is sprinkled with few events. How do we know this? Throughout these campaigns, during these years of youthful ardour and enterprise, how much may have occurred, what dangers he may have run—what generosity, what valour he may have displayed—how warmly he may have loved, how deeply have suffered! As a poet and a master of the passions he must have felt them all. But a blank meets us when we seek to know more of these things. A poet's life is ever a romance. That Calderon's was such we cannot doubt; but we must find its traces in the loves, the woes, the courage, and the joys of his dramatic personages: he infused his soul into these; what the events might be that called forth his own personal interest and sympathy we are totally ignorant. 1637. Ætat. 36. An order from his sovereign recalled him to court. Philip IV. was passionately fond of the theatre, and himself wrote plays. Innumerable dramas appeared under his patronage, the names of the authors being utterly unknown; and even of those of acknowledged writers few have been collected and published under the name of their author. Single plays, in pamphlets, we find in plenty, all very similar the one to the other; a better arrangement in the plot, more or less poetry or spirit in the dialogue, being almost all the difference we find among them. Several of the most entertaining are given forth as by a Wit of the Court (un Ingenio de esta Corte), and attributed to Philip IV. himself; though this honour has been disputed him. Moreto also, the gayest and most comic of the Spanish dramatists, flourished at this time. Lope was dead; but his place was filled up, not by one, but by many, who, under royal patronage, were eager to pay the tribute of a play to the theatre of Spain.

Philip IV. saw Calderon's dramas represented. He perceived their merit, and thought he might serve his king much better by residing in Spain and writing for the theatre, than by bearing arms in Flanders, where there were so many men who could not write plays, much more fit to be knocked on the head. He summoned Calderon to court, by a royal order, for the sake of writing a drama for a palace festival; bestowed on him also the habit of Santiago, and excusing him his military duties commanded him, instead, to furnish a play. Calderon wrote the "Certamen de Amor" (the Combat of Love), and "Zelos" (Jealousy), which were acted at the palace of Buen-Retiro. Calderon wrote as he was commanded; but, unwilling to leave the army, he obtained a commission in the company of the count-duke of Olivarez, which he followed to Catalonia, and remained till the peace, when he returned to court; when the king conferred on him the pay of thirty crowns a month in the artillery.

1650. Ætat. 49.

On another occasion, while staying in the country with the duke of Alva, the king sent for him to celebrate the festivals that occurred on his marriage with Maria Ana of Austria.

At the age of fifty-one he quitted the military career, to which for many years he had been passionately attached, and, being ordained, he became a priest. The king, who always favoured him, made him chaplain of a royal chapel at Toledo, of which he took possession on the 19th of June of the same year. 1654. Ætat. 53. But the king, dissatisfied with his distance from court, and his consequent inability to assist properly at the royal feasts, gave him a royal chaplaincy, and recalled him to Madrid; bestowing on him besides a pension, derived from the revenues of Sicily, besides other presents and rewards, the ever-renewing recompence of his labours. Calderon now wrote a play at each celebration of the king's birth-day, not only for Madrid, but for Toledo, Seville, and Granada. As he advanced in age, he obtained other church preferments. 1687. Ætat. 86. He died on the 29th of May, 1687, at the age of eighty-six. He left the congregation of St. Peter heir to all he possessed.

In describing his character, his biographer indulges in Spanish hyperbole instead of original traits. He calls him the oracle of the court, the envy of strangers, the father of the Muses, the lynx of learning, the light of the drama. He adds, that his house was ever the shelter of the needy; that his modesty and humility were excessive; attentive in his courtesy; a sure friend, and a good man.

Calderon never collected nor published his plays. The duke of Veragua at one time addressed him a flattering letter, requesting to be furnished with a complete list of his dramas, as the booksellers were in the habit of selling the works of other writers under his name. Calderon, who was then in his eightieth year, supplied the duke with a list only of "Autos Sacramentales." He added, in a letter, that with regard to his temporal dramas, of which he had written an hundred and eleven, he felt offended, that in addition to his own faulty works, those of other authors should be ascribed to him; and besides that his writings were so altered, that he himself could not recognise even their titles. He also expressed his determination of following the example of the booksellers, and to pay as little regard to his plays as they did. He observed, that on religious grounds, he attached more importance to his "Autos."

Several collections of Calderon's plays appeared during his life; one of them being edited by his brother, and another by his friend and biographer, Don Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel, who published a hundred and twenty-seven plays, and ninety-five autos; but it is doubted whether all these are really his. This doubt, of course, appertains to the more mediocre ones. In the best, the stamp of Calderon's original genius cannot be doubted.

Bouterwek and Sismondi have both entered into considerable detail with regard to Calderon's plays, but we have no space to indulge in a similar analysis, although, with our admiration for this great poet, we should be glad to enter with minute detail on his merits; but we must confine ourselves to some description of his characteristics.

Schlegel is an enthusiastic admirer of Calderon; and his observations on his works are replete with truth. Other writers—among them the author of an article on the Spanish theatre, in the twenty-fifth volume of the "Quarterly Review"—are less willing to attribute high merit to him. We confess that our opinion more nearly coincides with Schlegel. He carries too far, we allow, his theory of the ideal of Calderon's morality, piety, and honour. It is true, that these are too deeply founded on the bigotry and falsehood of inquisitorial faith, and a false point of honour; but with all this, within the circle which his sentiments and belief prescribe, he is a master of the passions and the imagination. There is a wild and lofty aim in all his more romantic plays, which put barely down, despoiled of the working of the passions and the magic of poetry, seems monstrous, but which, however different from our notions of the present day, strike a chord that vibrates to the depth of the heart. We may give as an instance, that supernatural machinery is introduced into very many of Calderon's plays; and Shakespear himself cannot manage the agency of the spiritual world as Calderon has done. He enlists a sort of belief on his side, which it is difficult to describe, but impossible to withstand. It is not a mere ghost that walks the earth, but an embodying, at the same time, of the conscience and fears of the person thus visited. Thus in the "Purgatory of St. Patrick:" Ludovico Ennio, the villain of the piece, has for many years resolved to assassinate an enemy. He has travelled through many countries, nourishing the idea of vengeance, and returns to Ireland resolved to accomplish it. He wraps himself in his mantle, and thus disguised, he goes for three successive nights to the street where his enemy lives, resolved to stab him: but, at the moment that he fancies that he shall attain his aim, he is met by a man similarly disguised (embozado—muffled up in a cloak) who calls to him; but when he follows, the embozado disappears so quickly, it seems as if the wind were in his feet. Ludovico enraged, on the fourth night lays in wait again, and takes his servant with him, that the disguised intruder may not escape. He arrives again at the street, resolved on the death of his enemy. At this moment the cloak-wrapped figure appears before him. Exasperated by his appearance, he declares that he will take two vengeances; one on his ancient enemy, the other on the intruder: the figure calls him by his name, and bids him follow. Ludovico draws on him, but pierces only the empty air; at once astonished and indignant, he still pursues till they come to a desert place, when Ludovico exclaims, "Here we are, body to body, alone, but my sword cannot injure thee: tell me, then, who thou art; art thou a man, a vision, or a dæmon! You answer not—then thus I dare throw off your mantle!" But, hidden by the cloak is a skeleton only; and aghast with terror, he exclaims, "Great God! what dreadful spectacle is this! Horrible vision!—Mortal terror! what art thou—stark corse—that crumbled into earth and dust, yet live? The figure replies, "Knowrest thou not thyself?—I am thy portraiture—I am Ludovico Ennio!" These words, this fearful sight, awaken horror and remorse in the criminal's mind; his heart perceives the truths and how his crimes, indeed, had made him but an image of death itself. He is thus prepared for the purgatory where his sins are to be expiated. Many of the plays thus turn upon visions, portions of the mind itself personified; while, at the same time, the affections and the passions find a voice all truth and poetry, that charms, agitates, and interests.

His autos are conceived in the same spirit. It is true, there is too much theological disquisition and doctrine in them, and that "God the Father plays the school-divine;" but, on the other hand, the poet often appears to open a new world before us, which we view tremblingly at first, till he leads us on by that mastery of the human imagination which he possesses—knowing so well what it can believe, and what it cannot disbelieve—and thus bringing heaven and hell palpably and feelingly before us. The auto of "Life is a dream." (La Vida es Sueño) more than any other, is an instance of that peculiarity, which we imperfectly endeavour to describe, of clothing in sensible and potent imagery, the thoughts of the brain, the feelings of the heart. Yet this is not done in the German style. The Germans subtilise, mystify, and cloud the real and distinct: they dissolve flesh and blood into a dream. Calderon, on the contrary, turns a dream into flesh and blood: he gives a pulse to a skeleton; he breathes passion from the lips of ghosts and spectres. Which is the greater power, others must decide. The influence of Calderon is greatest to us; he is master of a spell to which our souls own obedience.

Calderon, as a poet, is diffuse and exaggerated at times, but he is highly imaginative; and as he gives human sympathies to the impalpable and visionary, so does he inform the visible universe with a soul of beauty and feeling. A poet alone could translate Calderon. The only translation we have, is a few scenes from the "Magico Prodigioso" by Shelley. These breathe at once the Spaniard's peculiarities—his fantastic machinery—his incomparable sweetness. Justina is one of the most beautiful of his creations; a maiden, vowed to chastity, who being in vain tempted by the love of many admirers, is assailed by the seductions of hell itself. Nature—the birds, the leaves, and wandering clouds, breathe of love, and endeavour to soften and corrupt her heart.[124] The "Principe Costante" (the Constant Prince) seems to be the most popular of Calderon's plays with his critics. "La Vida es Sueño" (Life is a Dream)—not the auto, but the play—is another, full of wild strange interest, original and sublime. "The Schism of England" is among the most striking of his plays. One passage, where a cavalier describes how he fell in love with Anna Bullen, is fraught with touching sweetness and tender deep-felt passion.

Calderon is, besides, a great master of comedy. His "Gracioso" (or Clown), is different from Lope's—more poetic and fanciful, more vivacious and humorous. In the "Señora y la Criada" (the Lady and her Maid), where a country girl is carried off in mistake for her mistress, there is a comic mistake, most amusingly wrought.

It will be seen that we consider that, while Schlegel refines too much upon the perfection of the art and the sublimity of the moral of the poet, we think that the critic of the Quarterly Review rates his merits at too low a standard. We do not agree that he "cannot admit us within the gates of horror and thrilling fear." On the contrary, we think that much of his power results from his mastery over these emotions. We can scarcely allow that "the sacred source of sympathetic flows not at his command." The simply pathetic is certainly not his characteristic; but the tears may start forth in sympathy for the grandeur of soul exhibited by the Constant Prince; the heart be charmed and interested by the sweetness of Justina, and he touched by the fatherly sorrows of David, in "Los Cabellos de Absolom."

Calderon is much more readable, much more interesting than Lope. He rises higher. It is not only complexity of plot, endless variety of situations, and well sustained dialogue, there is interest of a higher kind; and, though it is true that perfect harmony is wanting in his compositions, and that he riots too much "without constraint or control," yet the colours of his poetry are so bright, and the music of his verse so grand and enthralling, that we feel as we read that he is one of the master geniuses of the world.

THE EARLY POETS OF PORTUGAL

RIBEYRA, GIL VICENTE, SAA DE MIRANDA, FERREIRA.

The same spirit that inspired the Spanish Cancionero, and animated the people of Castile with the love of song, spread itself to the western portion of the peninsula; and; from the earliest times, Portuguese poets composed, and the population of Portugal sang, in their native dialect: and thus using it as the medium for conveying their dearest feelings, caused it to be perpetuated as a national language. Originally the Portuguese tongue was the same as the Gallician; and, had Portugal remained a province of Spain, its peculiar dialect had, like that of Arragon and of Gallicia, been driven from the fields of literature by the Castilian, and while (to use an appropriate metaphor) it might creep in tiny rivulets here and there over the country, the Castilian had flowed a mighty river, receiving all minor streams as tributaries. But at quite the close of the eleventh century Alphonso VI., a Spanish sovereign, celebrated for his victories over the Moors, gave the county of Portugal as a dowry to his daughter on her marriage with Henry of Burgundy, a prince of the royal family of France. The son of this prince, Alphonso Henriquez, was the founder of the Portuguese monarchy. He conquered all that portion of the peninsula that forms Portugal, with the exception of the Algarve. He took Lisbon, and thus became possessed of a powerful and rich capital, and he signalised his successes, by changing the appellation of what had hitherto been a province, and by naming his dominions a kingdom. From this time the Portuguese became a separate nation from the Castilian; their institutions became national, and their language asserted for itself a distinct existence.

The Portuguese were a poetic people, and the Portuguese language adapted to poetry. It is softer than the Castilian, it discards more entirely Latin consonants; but with all, there is something truncated and incomplete in its sounds, very different from the sonorous beauty of the Spanish. It did not adopt the Arabic guttural, but it acquired, no one knows whence, a nasal twang, more decided and obtrusive even than that of the French, which considerably mars its melody. Still it is expressive, it is soft, and it is harmonious; and these qualities rendered it applicable to verse: so that a poet found no difficulty in clothing his ideas and emotions in the language of his native country. Many poets flourished therefore at an early age, though we know little of their productions. Endeavours have been made to find their ancient cancioneiro geral[125], but they were unsuccessful, and a guess only can be made as to the nature of their contents.

The Portuguese nation was as peculiar in its pursuits and character as in its language. They were not an agricultural but a pastoral people; and at the same time, their long extent of sea shore led them to the pursuits of commerce and navigation. While the Italian republics were enriching themselves by the trade of the Mediterranean, and while Spain, under Ferdinand and Isabella was, by conquering the whole of its territory from the Moors, laying the foundation of the brief grandeur of Charles V., and the despotism and national degradation that followed, the sovereigns of Portugal were encouraging their subjects in the maritime discoveries, which in a short time changed the aspect of the civilised globe: for the very expedition of Columbus was the offspring of the Portuguese voyages. It was for the sake of discovering another route to India, than the hitherto unsuccessful one along the coast of Africa, that he sailed over the illimitable Western Sea. In 1487, Bartolomeo Diaz doubled the Cape of Good Hope: many years had been previously occupied in creeping along the shores of Africa; but the moment this Cape was doubled, the navigators made a spring, and the celebrated Vasco de Gama reached the renowned and unvisited shores of India. In less than fifteen years from this time, Francisco de Almeida, and Alfonso de Albuquerque founded a Portuguese kingdom in Hindostan, of which Goa was the capital. We may imagine the spirit and enthusiasm that animated this people; they found a new world overflowing with all the precious treasures most valued in Europe; they did not content themselves with trading with the people, a people highly civilised, possessed of literature and all the appendages of an advanced state of human political association; but by their valour they conquered them and made a portion of the country their own. High notions of national importance and future national glory filled their souls; it was a period when each man could regard his native country with pride, and such a time is peculiarly favourable to the birth of genius, and, above all, to the developement of the spirit of poetry.

Bernardim Ribeyro is named the Ennius of Portugal. He was a man of an enthusiastic and tender disposition; his poems, full of passion and despair, emanated from an attachment to some unknown lady; some say the infanta Donna Beatrice, the king's daughter. His eclogues are more known than the rest of his works, and are considered the most excellent[126]; yet, though they are feeling, there is a poverty of ideas, and a want of classical correctness and compression, that speaks of the infancy of composition. But his most celebrated work is an unfinished prose romance, in which, under feigned names and obscure allusions, he narrates his own history and loves. We have not seen this work, and borrow the account of it from Bouterwek, who observes, that "such is the obscurity of the whole, that nothing can be comprehended of the circumstances without the utmost effort of attention. The monotony of incessant love complaints, renders the prolixity of the narrative still more tedious; but even amidst that monotony and prolixity, it is easy to recognise a spirit truly poetic, more remarkable however for susceptibility than energy."

Other poets succeeded to Ribeyro, who also sang of love and pastoral themes, and the poetry of Portugal as well as that of Spain, confined itself to the language of sentiment and description—instead of assuming an heroic and epic measure.

The reformation of Castilian poetry introduced into Spain by Boscan and Garcilaso, penetrated into Portugal; and, singularly enough, the poets who followed, quitted their native idiom to adopt that of the rival country. The cause of so unpatriotic an adoption can only be guessed at. Bouterwek attributes it to the more sonorous and complete sound of the Castilian. Spain, it may be observed, was the larger country and in more immediate connection with Italy; when, therefore, Italian forms of poetic composition were introduced into the peninsula, they flowed, as it were, through Spain, and arrived at the West clothed in a Spanish garb. Perceiving the superior power and charm of the Petrarchist compositions, their imitators at once adopted the very language in which they were clothed. Saa de Miranda wrote his best works, his eclogues, in Spanish, though the same spirit that led him to desert Latin, so long the favourite of educated men, also induced him to write in his native language, and Francisco Diaz names him the real founder of Portuguese poetry. Saa de Miranda was a man of strong feelings, with something too of an eccentric turn of mind. He insisted on marrying a lady neither young nor handsome, whom he had never seen; but whose reputation for discretion and goodness charmed him. He became so attached to her, that when she died some years after, he remained that most rare of all men, an inconsolable widower; giving up all the pursuits and purposes of life—neither shaving his beard nor paring his nails—and three years after following her to the grave. And Jorge de Montemayor altogether cast aside his native language, and enriched the Castilian by a new form of composition, the pastoral romance, which became a general favourite throughout Spain, imitated by every writer, but not excelled by any.

In this brief summary of the predecessors of Camoens, introduced chiefly to shew the state of national poetry when he appeared, we are unable to do full justice to any of these writers, and are obliged to omit the names of many. But we must not pass over Gil Vicente, who is styled the Portuguese Plautus. Very little is known of him—the very period of his birth only guessed at; it is supposed that he was born at the close ofthe fifteenth century. He was an indefatigable writer, and furnished the royal family and public with dramatic entertainments suited to the taste of the age. He wrote entirely in the old national manner. He appears to have been the inventor of Autos, or spiritual dramas, which raised into a regular and poetic style of play the monkish or buffoonish festive representations.

Doctor Bowring has introduced translations of several of this poet's songs; these were written in Spanish, they are characterised by a charming simplicity, and are peculiarly short; one chord of a lyre struck, as it were, one emotion of the heart breathed forth in words; without elaborate display or any attempt at imagery or metaphor beyond the one single feeling that dictates the poem.

Antonio Ferreira must be mentioned as a classic poet of Portugal. He is styled the Portuguese Horace. He was of noble family, and destined by his parents to fill some high public office in the state. He took the degree of doctor in the university of Coimbra, where he studied civil law. He was an enthusiastic lover of his native language, and resolved never to write in any other, at the same time that he founded his taste and style on the study of Horace. He admired also the excellencies of Italian poetry, and introduced the measure and structure of its verse into the Portuguese. It was the object of his ambition at once to be himself a classic poet; and to give to his native Portugal a classic style of poetry. Ferreira was nine and twenty when he published the first collection of his poetic works. He had friends who admired his genius and joined him in his pursuits. He quitted the university for the court, and filled a high place as judge, and was also appointed gentleman of the royal household; he became an oracle of criticism, and looked forward to brilliant prospects through life, when he died of the plague which raged in Lisbon in 1569, at the age of forty-one.

Ferreira, without possessing the originality of Gil Vicente, his sweetness or his genius, was eminently useful to the art of poetry in Portugal. He taught the writers of that country to aim at correctness, and to enrich their compositions by the knowledge acquired from the writings of other countries; but not, for that purpose, to adopt a foreign tongue, but to raise the Portuguese to the level of other languages, and gift it with the purest and noblest poetic measures. He is, himself, novel, however, rather in his style than in his ideas. His epistles are his best work; the sentiments he expresses are elevated, and his fancy and poetic verve graced them with a diction and imagery which raises them in the class of such compositions. The distinctive feeling however to be found in Ferreira, animating all he wrote, was patriotism. The glory, the advancement and the civilisation of Portugal, were the themes of his praise, and the objects which he furthered with his utmost endeavours. He exhorts his friends not to permit the Muses in Portugal to speak any thing but Portuguese. Of himself, he says, in very beautiful verses, that "he shall be content with the glory of loving his native land, and his countrymen." It was this enthusiasm that elevated Ferreira into a great man. He is a little misplaced here, as he was a few years younger than Camoens; but it shows the spirit that was abroad in Camoens' time—a patriotic spirit that loved to express its genuine sentiments in language warm from the heart and familiar to the tongue. In this Camoens and Ferreira were alike; they loved their native country, and were eager to adorn its literature with native flowers. In other respects they were different. Ferreira's classic pages bear no resemblance to the fire, passion, and rich fancy of Camoens, to whom we now turn as to one of the favourites of fame, though he was the neglected child of his country, and the victim of an adverse fate.

CAMOENS

1524-1579.

Camoens and Cervantes encountered, in several respects, a similar destiny. They were both men of genius, both men of military valour; both were disregarded by their contemporaries, and suffered extreme misfortune. Camoens, indeed, has in this a sad advantage over Cervantes. The latter lived in poverty, but the former died in want. Posterity endeavoured to repair the injuries inflicted by ungrateful contemporaries. The circumstances of the life of Camoens were carefully collected. Several able native commentators wrote elaborate notes on the "Lusiad," and lastly a magnificent edition of that poem was published in 1817. Nor have the English been unmindful of the great Portuguese poet. Sir Richard Fanshaw translated the "Lusiad" as far back as Cromwell's time; but the present popular translation is by Mickle. He bestowed great pains on the work, and accompanied it by various essays relative to its subject, and a life of Camoens. His version has great merit, as will be hereafter mentioned, notwithstanding its want of fidelity and the signal defect of being written in heroic couplets, instead of eight-line stanzas, like the original. Lord Strangford appended a sketch of Camoens' life to his translation of a portion of his "Rimas;" and, lastly, Mr. Adamson has presented the English reader with an elaborate biography, attended by all sorts of valuable collateral information and embellishments.

The family of Camoens was originally of Gallicia, and possessed extensive demesnes in that province. The old Spanish name of the family was Caamaños—the etymology of which has occupied the commentators. We are told, among others, that it was derived from Cadmus. There is nothing extraordinary in this. All readers conversant with old national annals, are aware that they usually derive their immediate origin either from a son of Noah, or some well known Grecian hero: Ulysses, it was said, founded Lisbon. It was probably adopted from the castle of Cadmon, where they resided. The poet himself, however, refers it to a more imaginative source. In ancient times, in Gallicia, there existed a bird named the Camaõ, which never survived the infidelity of the wife of its lord. The moment the lady went astray, the bird sought its master, and expired at his feet. A matron of the house of Cadmon was unjustly accused of ill faith—she entrusted her defence to the cadmaõ, and the success of her appeal caused her husband, grateful for this restoration to honour and domestic felicity, to adopt the name of the saviour bird. This is a tale of romance and barbarism, of the days of ordeal and degrading suspicion; but Camoens himself alludes to it, and it derives interest from his mention.[127]

The family of Caamaños possessed a solar or ancestral inheritance in Gallicia, and reigned over seventeen villages near the promontory of Finisterre. One of the lords of this family having killed a cavalier de Castros, they were obliged to migrate, and settled at a fortress called Rubianes; where Faria y Sousa tells us the family still remain, great in birth, but of diminished means.[128]

Vasco Perez de Camoens, either brother or son of this Ruy, made a second migration to Portugal in 1370. Faria y Sousa conjectures that it might be from some such same cause as occasioned the first exile, while Southey attributes it to his having sided with Pedro the Cruel against his more infamous brother Henriquez II. However that may be, Fernando, king of Portugal, received him with distinction, and gifted him with the "villas" of Sardoal, Punhete, Maraõ, and Amendao, besides making him one of the principal fidalgos of his court. Nor did the favours of Fernando stop here. Vasco Perez received various other estates in gift, and filled places of political and military importance.

After the death of Fernando, Vasco Perez became involved in a dispute for succession, and he upheld the cause of the queen of Fernando, Leonor, and his daughter, the queen of Castile. His power was great, and his aid was held of importance, whichever side he espoused. Camoens considered that his ancestor assisted the wrong cause, that of Castile against Portugal. The latter was destined to triumph, and Vasco was the sufferer. He lost all command, but retained a considerable portion of his estates. A letter has been discovered by Sarmiento, written by the marquis of Santillana, which intimates that Vasco Perez was a poet as well as a warrior.

The descendants of Vasco Perez were of account, and married into the richest and most powerful families of Portugal. His second son, Joaõ Vaz, was the great-grandfather of the poet. He acquired glory by his military services under Alfonso V., and was named his vassal—a title of distinction in those days. He built a house at Coimbra, and there is a marble monument erected to his memory in the chapel of the cloister of the cathedral at Coimbra. Simaõ Vaz, the grandson of Joaõ Vaz, married Dona Ana de Sa e Macedo, of noble descent, and sprung from the Macedos of Santarem. Thus, in every way, Camoens was highly descended from nobles and warriors; but, springing from the younger branch, he inherited the blood and name without the estates of his family. As he never married this branch of the family became extinct.

Coimbra and Santarem have both contended for the glory of having been his birth-place, but without foundation; for he was born at Lisbon, most probably in the district "da Mouraria," in the parish of San Sebastiaõ, where his parents resided. The date of his birth has been disputed. A friend and contemporary, Manoel Correa, gave that of 1517; but a register, in the Portuguese India House, proves that he was really born in 1524.[129] This entry also is conclusive on another point. It was long believed that Camoens lost his father while a mere child. Simon Vaz de Camoens was a mariner; nearly all the biographers of the poet agree in stating that he lost a ship, of which he was commander, on the coast of Goa, and, escaping from the wreck, died soon afterwards in that city; though some aver that he fell in the combat in which his son lost an eye. Camoens himself does not mention his father as being with him on that occasion, nor during any of his adventures. This point, therefore, is left in obscurity.

Camoens was born at Lisbon; he celebrates with fondness the parental Tagus: "My Tagus," as he sometimes names the river. But most of his early years were spent at Coimbra, where, as has been mentioned, his father had a house. He often mentions the river Mondego in his verses. To a poet, there is something in a river that engages his affections and enlivens his imagination. Water is indeed the soul, the smile, the beaming eye of a landscape; and as Camoens' only happy days were those when he nourished hopes—hopes, as he says in a letter, which he afterwards cast aside as coiners of false money—in his youth, he might well record with fondness the hours he spent in the beautiful environs of Coimbra on the banks of its lovely river. Thus, in his poems, the nymphs of Tagus and of Mondego are both addressed; and in one remarkable and most beautiful passage of the "Lusiad" he exclaims, "What, insane and rash, am I about to do without ye, O nymphs of Tagus and Mondego, through so arduous, long, and various a way? I invoke your favour, as I navigate the deep sea with so contrary a wind, that, unless ye aid me, I fear that my fragile bark must sink!" and then he goes on to describe his misfortunes in India, turning to those streams that watered his native land, and whose very names were full of blessed recollections of life's prime, to give him fortitude and help.[130]

Camoens studied in the university at Coimbra. This university was founded by king Diniz, in 1308. Camoens introduces mention of this monarch in the "Lusiad," and alludes to the establishment of the university under his fosterage:—

The university, however, fell off, and it was don Manuel who exerted himself for its re-establishment; and dom John, his successor, took equal pains to raise it to its former prosperity, and in the first place caused it again to be restored to Coimbra—for it had been transferred to Lisbon—and founded several new colleges. The date when Camoens entered it is uncertain. It has been supposed that he was twelve years old. In that case he must have attended it while at Lisbon; for it was only transferred in 1537[132] when Camoens was thirteen or fourteen.

Saa de Miranda had studied there, and Ferreira was also a student. He was younger than Camoens by four years, and that, at a boyish age, makes the difference of, as it were, a generation. There is no token that they were known to each other, nor, indeed, are there any traces of Camoens' life or pursuits at Coimbra, except such as we find in his poems; and these are in some sort contradictory—agreeing, however, in the love they express for the picturesque scenery in which this seat of learning was placed, and affection for its beautiful river.

Mr. Adamson quotes a canzone, in which he dwells with delight on the charms of the Mondego, and dates thence his earliest passion. Lord Strangford asserts that he had never experienced the passion of love while at Coimbra, and rests his assertion on expressions of the poet. Both of course are right, and the poet is wrong. Nor is this assertion paradoxical. When the heart of Camoens became susceptible to a master feeling, that filled it and awoke its every pulse to a sense of love, he would naturally wish to throw into the back-ground any boyish fancy; and comparing its slight and evanescent emotions with the mighty passion of which he was afterwards the prey, he might well say,—

and revert to that period as the time,—

This certainly contrasts strangely with the poem quoted by Adamson, but it is a fair poetic licence, or rather a licence of the heart, which not only would bring to its selected shrine every former emotion and immolate them there, but is jealous that any such existed, and would gladly expunge all trace of them from the page of life. The verses above mentioned form his fourth canzone, and were written on taking leave of Coimbra.[134] The following is a portion of it:—

There is another sonnet, in which he takes leave of the Mondego, but its context renders it apparent that it was not written so early in life, as when he first quitted the university. As his parents had a house at Coimbra, it may be assumed that he frequently visited this place, and wrote the following sonnet in a later and sadder day:—

There is nothing so attractive to a biographer as to complete the fragments of his hero's life; and, almost as children trace the forms of animals and landscapes in the fire, by fixing the eye on salient particles, so a few words suffice to give "local habitation and a name," to such emotions as the poet has made the subject of his verse. To do this, and by an accurate investigation of dates, and a careful sifting of concomitant circumstances to discover the veiled event, is often the art of biography—but we must not be seduced too far. Truth, absolute and unshakeable, ought to be the foundation of our assertions, or we paint a fancy head instead of an individual portrait. Truth is all in all in matters of history, for history is the chart of the world's sea; and if imaginary lands are marked, those who would wisely learn from the experience of others, are led sadly astray. Petrarch has been the mark of similar conjectures to a great extent; but his letters give a true direction to our researches. We have no such guide in the history of Camoens's attachment. He loved and was beloved; was banished, and his lady died. Such is nearly all that we absolutely know.

1545.[136] Ætat. 21.

To return however from remark to history, Camoens left Coimbra for Lisbon and the court. He had not lost his time at the University—he was a finished scholar. He was a poet also then when poetry was held a high and divine gift. With such acquirements and accomplishments, joined to his gentlemanly qualities, his courtesy and wit, he was favoured by the highest people at court; his handsome person also gained him the favour and estimation of the ladies. His defect was his poverty, but that defect might be remedied by the friendship of some great man, or the favour of his sovereign. Asa young noble of illustrious descent, he had a right to expect advancement. As a poet full of imagination and ardour, at the very first glowing entrance to life, while (to speak metaphorically) the Aurora of hope announced the rising sun of prosperity, he might expect an ample portion of that happiness, which, while we are young, appears to us to be our just and assured inheritance.

Soon after his arrival at court he fell in love. One of his sonnets, (commented upon by an almanack,) fixes the date when he first saw the lady, as the eleventh or twelfth of April, 1545. He mentions that it was holy week, and at the time when the ceremonies that commemorate the death of our Saviour were celebrated. This sonnet is not one of his best; but we quote Lord Strangford's translation, as it is a monument of an interesting epoch—the commencement of that attachment which shed a disastrous influence over the rest of his life—for by it his early hopes were blighted, and they never flowered again:

It is said that this occurrence took place in the church of Christ's Wounds, at Lisbon.[137] There is so much resemblance of time and place between this event and the first time when Petrarch records that he saw Laura, that we might almost suppose that the later poet imitated the earlier one; but there is no other resemblance between their attachment. The name of the lady Camoens fell in love with, was dona Caterina de Atayde, and she was a lady of the palace. Many researches have been made to discover more of her parentage and station; dom Jose Maria de Sousa made diligent search in the "Historia da Casa Real;" but he can do no more than conjecture that she was a relation of dom Antonio de Atayde, the first conde de Castanheira, a powerful favourite of John III. It is guessed that she was not more than sixteen when Camoens first saw her. She was unmarried; his attachment therefore was totally unlike the Platonic, far-off worship of the lover of Laura de Sades. Camoens loved as a youth who dedicates himself to one whom he may hope to make his own in the open face of day—with whom he might spend his life, as her protector and husband; but she was of high birth, and her relations had lofty pretensions—a pennyless, though noble and accomplished gentleman by no means suited their views. The love of Camoens was full of difficulties: his ardour was excited by them; and, while unassured of any return he was disposed to vanquish every obstacle for the sake of seeing, and endeavouring to win the heart of the beloved object.

Youth and love aided the developement of a vivid imagination. There never breathed a more genuine poet than Camoens, and now he poured forth his soul in rhymes: canzoni and sonnets are dedicated to his lady, describing her beauty, his sufferings, and the deep affection he nourished. Notwithstanding the good old proverb, commentators are fond of instituting comparisons, and the amatory poetry of Petrarch and Camoens has been compared. Camoens had doubtless read and studied Petrarch, but in no respect does he imitate him. There is more finish in the compositions of the Italian, and for this there is an obvious cause. While speaking slightingly of them, Petrarch was employed even in his last days in the correction and polishing of his Italian poetry; while the verses of Camoens, written in the first gush of inspiration, were never collected by him, or if collected, the volume was lost: and scattered over Portugal and India, it was with difficulty they were brought together, nor were they published till after his death, and some of those included in the collection are said not to be his.

There is a glow, a freshness, and a truth; a touching softness and a heart-felt eagerness, in his verses on dona Caterina, which is very winning. The language he uses does not charm the ear like Italian, but it is capable of great melody and expression. We possess translations of a small portion, but lyrics can never be translated; they have a voice of their own which cannot be transfused into another language. Lord Strangford's translations have this merit, that they read like original poetry—but something of truth has been sacrificed in consequence.

It is from these poems that we gather almost all we know of Camoens' attachment. As Petrarch did, he dedicates a sonnet to an emotion—which to a lover's heart seemed an event, or in a canzone, dwells at length on the course of his passion. One sonnet which describes the lady, is a great favourite with the Portuguese: the translation is difficult; we quote the one given by Mr. Adamson—

He describes her charms in many of his poems. Dona Caterina had mild blue eyes, and hair of a golden brown, and he dwells on the softness of the former and the splendour of the latter with fond admiration; but the poem which expresses most fervently the influence of her beauty is one of which Dr. Southey has given a very exquisite translation, and which we are irresistibly tempted to quote—

The concluding lines of the above sonnet are conceived in the very truth of love and ardour of imagination that stamps the lyrics and sonnets of Camoens with a charm almost unequalled by any other poet.

The obstacles that were in the way of all intercourse with the lady maddened his young and impatient spirit. Dona Caterina lived in the palace, and Camoens violated some rule of decorum in endeavouring to see her, and was exiled. We are not told what his fault was. Dona Caterina was not insensible to his passion. He always speaks of her as mild and retiring—modest and gentle; he never complains of her haughtiness nor her pride: indeed, several of his sonnets speak of how oft he was happy and content, and of "past sweet delights."[138] We do not venture too far, therefore, in supposing that her relations discovered that she returned her lover's attachment; and, as they were opposed to their being married, they used their influence to get the youthful and, as they deemed, presumptuous aspirant, banished.

Lord Strangford speaks decidedly of a parting interview, when the horrors of approaching exile were softened by finding his grief and his sorrow shared by her he loved. There indeed appears foundation for this, though the noble biographer uses a few fancy tints, when, quoting the twenty-fourth sonnet, he comments on it, by saying, "On the morning of his departure his mistress relented from her wonted severity, and confessed the secret of her long concealed affection. The sighs of grief were soon lost in those of mutual delight, and the hour of parting was perhaps the sweetest of our poet's existence." This may be true. The poet speaks of "a mournful and a happy morning, overflowing with grief and pity", which he desires should for ever be remembered, and he speaks of "tears shed by other eyes than his."[139]

Camoens appears to have passed his exile at Santarem (the native place of his mother), or in its neighbourhood. He was supremely unhappy; banished from her he loved, banished from the court, where all his hopes of advancement, were centred, the gates of life were closed on him. His genius and his poetical imagination were his only resource and comfort. He wrote many of his lyrics and sonnets here, and among the rest a very beautiful elegy, in which he compares himself to Ovid banished to Pontus, and separated from the country and the friends he loved. He dwells on the Roman's misery, and proceeds—

At this period also he is supposed to have conceived and begun the Lusiad. Passionately fond of his country, and proud of her heroes, he believed it to be a glorious task to celebrate their deeds; and while his heart warmed and his imagination was fired with such a subject, he might hope that it would please his sovereign, and that his patriotic labours would bear the fruit of some prosperity for himself. That he hoped much, we know, and felt all the confidence in eventual happiness which the young and ardent naturally feel is certain. How bitter and how blighting was the truth, that as it brought to light, piece by piece, year by year, the course of his life, shewed only barren tracks, storms, and hardship—to end at last in abject wretchedness!

The gleams that a little irradiate the obscurity in which this portion of the life of Camoens is enveloped, shed a very doubtful light upon his motives. Faria y Sousa says, that he returned to Lisbon, and was a second time exiled for the same cause, and then resolved on his expedition to India. But there is no proof of his being banished a second time by any royal order.

The simple facts appear to be these. In 1545 he left the university and began life. He was twenty-one, ardent in his temper, high of hope, of an aspiring but poetic temperament, that could bear all that called him forth to action and glory, but was impatient of obscurity, and the dull sleepy course of hopeless unvaried mediocrity of station and life. He loved, and he was banished.

His heart then spent itself in rhymes, and he conceived the idea of a poem which he deemed to be epic, which spoke of heroes, who were his countrymen, who were but lately dead, and whose path to glory in the east he even saw open before himself. Five years were passed since he had left Coimbra; he was still poor and unprotected: he resolved to be and to do something, and on this, formed the project of going to India. He had formed an intimacy with dom Antonio de Noronha. Dom Alfonso de Noronha (who must have been some relation to this young noble) was at this time named viceroy for India; and the entry in the Portuguese East Indian register shows that Camoens had taken his passage on board the same vessel in which the viceroy sailed. From some reason, however, he changed his intention. Dom Antonio was about to join the Portuguese army in Africa. His father had discovered an attachment between him and dona Margarita de Silva, a lady of high birth and great beauty, but from some unknown cause, not approving of it, he sent his son to Ceuta. Nothing was more natural than that dom Antonio should solicit his friend to accompany him, instead of leaving his native country for the distant clime of India. Other commentators say that the father of Camoens was at that time in Africa, and sent for his son; but facts tend to negative this. We have seen that Simon Vaz was his son's surety on his projected voyage, on board the Don Pedro; nor have we any facility afforded us of reconciling these contradictions.[141] There are several expressions in his poems which indicate that the poet, though innocent, was obliged to go to Africa.[142] These might allude to a paternal command, or simply to the evil fate that pursued him, driven by which, he might term that force, which was only a strongly impelling motive.

1550. Ætat. 20.

While with the troops at Ceuta, Camoens was actively employed, and displayed great bravery on various occasions; on one, he was destined to be a great sufferer, as he lost an eye in a naval engagement which took place in the straits of Gibraltar.

Like Cervantes, Camoens fought for his country and was mutilated in her wars, and received neither reward nor preferment. After passing some time in the burning clime of Africa, he returned to Lisbon; but no better fortune awaited him. He returned, deprived of an eye, and the unfortunate mutilation rendered him an object of ridicule to those very ladies who, eight years before, when he was in the prime of youth and beauty, had welcomed him with distinction. At this period, the biographers state that the object of his faithful and passionate attachment died: this seems a mistake, as we shall afterwards mention; but he was divided from her by obstacles as insurmountable as death. His father was no more. He had sailed to India as commander of a vessel, was wrecked on the Malabar coast, and, escaping from the wreck, arrived at Goa; but did not long survive the loss of his fortunes.

1553. Ætat. 29.

Camoens cast hope to the winds, and embarked for India. Stricken by disappointment, rendered despairing by hopeless love—his wearied fancy could build no more airy fabrics of future good fortune to which to escape during the tedious or fearful hours of a long and dangerous voyage. His resource was his poem. He occupied himself with the Lusiad; and, doubtless, found in the glow of inspiration, and in the exercise of his imagination, some relief from sorrow and care, while traversing those stormy and distant seas, which the heroes of his epic had before sailed over, even though he went towards

He sailed in the San Bento, in which the commodore Fernando Alvares Cabral, who commanded the fleet then going to the east, also embarked. It was the only one of the squadron that reached its destination; the rest being destroyed by tempests. It reached Goa in the September of the same year.

Then Camoens visited India the glorious days of Portugal were at an end. Albuquerque, Almeida, and the heroic Pacheco, who like a fabulous Paladin, withstood whole armies with his single arm, and who died unregarded and unnoticed by his ungrateful sovereign in a hospital in Lisbon, were no more; the disinterestedness, the honour and humanity, that distinguished the administration of Albuquerque, was not imitated by his successors. He had taken Goa, and founded an empire, which the corrupt government of Portugal has caused us to inherit. The local governors too often sought only to enrich themselves; the viceroys were involved in wars occasioned by their tyranny and extortion; and that which Albuquerque intended should be a political and vast dominion tributary to his native land, sunk into mere commercial or piratical speculations. In the same way, the trade with China was stained by oppressions and rapine.

Dom Alfonso de Noronha was still viceroy on Camoens' arrival. He was avaricious and tyrannical. At this time the king of Cochin had applied to the Portuguese for protection against the king of Pimenta. An armament was sent in November; and Camoens, without giving himself time to repose from his long voyage, accompanied it. The artillery of the Portuguese gained for them a signal victory, and the king of Cochin soon sued for peace. "We were to retale an island," Camoens writes in his first elegy, "belonging to the king of Porca, and which the king of Pimenta had seized; and we were successful. We departed from Goa with a large armament, which comprised all the forces there, collected together by the viceroy. With little trouble we destroyed the quiver-armed people, and punished them with death and fire. We were detained in the island only two days, which was the last for some, who passed the cold waters of Styx."

Thus he enrolled his name at once among those adventurers who sought by their gallantry to conquer fortune, and to acquire prosperity and reputation by the sword. Camoens was full of military ardour, but he was a poet, and his disposition was gentle as it was fearless; and Southey well observes, that his better nature induced him, while recording this victory, to envy those happier men whose lives were spent in the exercise of the arts of peace.

On his return to Goa, he was saddened by the news of the death of his young and dear friend, dom Antonio de Noronha. He perished in an engagement with the Moors, near Tetuan, on the 18th of April, 1553. Antonio had been driven from his native country to fall in the destructive African wars, through the obduracy of his father. He was miserable in his exile; as Camoens pathetically describes:—

Unimaginative people fancy that when a poet laments in song; his heart is cold. How false this is, persons even of the chilliest fancy can judge if they call to mind, how, in times of vehement affliction, they are more alive, and the world is more alive to them, in images that hear upon their grief, than during periods of monotony. The act of writing may compose the mind; but the boiling of the soul, and quake of heart, that precede, transcend all the sufferings which tame spirits feel. Camoens wrote a sonnet[144] and an elegy on this loss, which he sent in a letter to a friend.

"I wish so much for a letter from you," he says in this letter, "that I fear that my wishes balked themselves—for it is a trick of fortune to inspire a strong desire for the very purpose of disappointing it. But as I would not have such wrong done me, as that you should suspect that I do not remember you, I determined to remind you by this, in which you will see little more or less than that I wish you to write to me from your native land; and in anticipated payment I send you news from this, which will do no harm at the bottom of a box, and may serve as a word of advice to other adventurers, that they may learn that every country grows grass. When I left Portugal, as one bound for another world, I sent all the hopes I had nourished, with a crier before them, to be hanged, as coiners of false money, and I freed myself from all the thoughts of home, so that there might not remain in me one stone upon another. Thus situated, in the midst of uncertainty and confusion, the last words I uttered were those of Scipio Africanus—'Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea.' For without having committed any sin that would doom me to three days of purgatory, I have endured three-thousand from evil tongues, worse intentions, and wicked designs, born of mere envy,

Even friendships softer than wax have been warmed into hatred and set alight, whence my fame has received more blisters than the crackling of a roasted pig. Thus they found in my skin the valour of Achilles, who could only be wounded at the sole of the foot; for they were never able to see mine, though I forced many to show theirs. In short, Senhor, I know not how to thank myself for having escaped all the snares with which circumstances surrounded me in that country, except by coming to this, where I am more respected than the bulls of Merciana[146], and live more peacefully than in the cell of friar. This country, I say, which is the mother of rascals, and the mother-in-law of honest men. For those who seek to enrich themselves float like bladders on the water; but those whose inclinations lead them to deeds on arms, are thrown, as the tide throws dead bodies on shore, to be dried up first, and then to decay."

He then proceeds to speak of the women. The Portuguese whom he finds there, he says, are old; and of the natives he dislikes their language—"for if you address them," he continues, "in the style of Petrarch and Boscan, they reply in a language so sown with tares, that it sticks in the throat of the understanding, and would throw cold water on the most burning flame in the world. And now no more, Senhor, than this sonnet, which I wrote on the death of dom Antonio de Noronha, which I send as a mark of how much it grieved me. I wrote an eclogue on the same subject, which appears to me the best I have written. I wished also to send it to Miguel Diaz, who would be glad to see it, on account of his great friendship for dom Antonio, but being occupied by the many letters I have to write to Portugal, I have no time."

Camoens could not remain inactive; he had left a country which, notwithstanding all he had suffered, he fondly loved, because no career was open to him. He sought one in India, and when none presented itself, he cast himself in the first expedition set on foot, however dangerous or tedious it promised to be, and with all the bravery and ardour of his soul, using both pen and sword, endeavoured to fight or write himself into reputation and preferment.

1554. Ætat. 30.

The year following his arrival at Goa, Noronha was succeeded in his viceroyalty by dom Pedro Mascarenhas, who soon after died, and Francisco Barreto acted as governor. The cruising of the Mahometans in the straits of Mecca was very detrimental to the Portuguese trade, and expeditions were sent out to protect the merchantmen, under the command of Manoel de Vasconcellos. On the second occasion, Camoens offered to serve as volunteer, and accompanying Vasconcellos, shared the great hardships of the expedition.

1555. Ætat. 31.

On his return to Goa, he wrote a most beautiful canzone, the ninth, descriptive of the wretchedness he endured, in which he pourtrays that corner of the world, "neighbouring a barren, rocky, sterile mountain; useless, bare, bald and shapeless, abhorred of nature, where no bird flies, nor wild beast crouches—where no stream flows, nor any fountain springs, and whose name is Felix. Here my hapless fortune placed me; here, in this remote, rugged, and rocky part of the world, did fortune will that a short space of my short life should be spent, that it might be scattered in pieces about the world; here I wasted my sad, solitary, and sterile days, full of hardship, grief, and resentment; nor had I, as my only adversaries, life, a burning sun, and chilling waters, a thick and sultry atmosphere, — but also my own thoughts. They assailed me, bringing the memory of some passed and brief delight, which once was mine when I inhabited the world, to double the asperity of my adversity, by showing me that many happy hours may be enjoyed; and thus, in these thoughts, I wore out time and life."

Camoens returned to Goa, only to again encounter the enmity of fate and malice of men. It was natural for him, to behold with indignation and contempt the extortion and tyranny of the Portuguese government; and he is said to have been excited by these feelings to express his dislike of various individuals that composed it in a satire, which he named "Follies in India," (Disparates na India), in which, in general terms, he lashes many potent individuals for their misdeeds. This made him enemies; and being suspected of composing another satire, still more distasteful to several who were named in it, as instituting a feast of canes in honour of the new governor, and getting drunk on the occasion; the persons aggrieved, fearing Camoens' sword as well as his pen, applied for redress to Barreto, and he was glad of the pretence to arrest and banish him to China[147]; or rather, Southey says, we should express it, ordered him to another station; but this is often the worst exile; when a man has sought a new country, where he has friends and prospects, it is an arbitrary and cruel act that drives him out to seek his fortune on unknown shores, where he arrives a stranger, and may be looked on as an intruder; his name already stigmatised by the very circumstances of his removal.

1556. Ætat. 32.

Camoens departed from Goa in the fleet which Barreto despatched to the South. He felt this arbitrary act bitterly. He denounced it as unjust, and went, he says, "loaded with his recollections, his sorrows, and his fortunes, which were for ever adverse." He disembarked, at first, at one of the Molucca Isles; Ternate, as it is supposed: the term of his stay there is uncertain, but there is every reason to suppose that he soon proceeded to Macao.[148] He here held the office of "Provedor dos Defunctos," or commissary for the effects of the deceased; and here again we find a similarity with Cervantes, who was driven to maintain himself by accepting a clerkship; but in this Camoens was more fortunate than the Spaniard; the situation he held was of greater emolument, and he amassed a little fortune while holding it[149]; nor was it a place that demanded much time for the fulfilment of its duties. Camoens found leisure to retire from the details of business, and to pursue his poetical occupations. He was wont to spend much time in a grotto which commanded a view of the sea, and where, apart from the rest of the world, he wrote a great portion of the "Lusiad." This spot is still shown to strangers who visit Macao, as the grotto of Camoens; and an English visitor thus describes it: "It is pleasantly situated on the western shore of the promontory of Macao, and faces the harbour, which divides it on that side from the main land. This promontory is a narrow neck of land, whose stony and barren surface is only rendered habitable by the sea breezes, that blow from three quarters of the compass, and somewhat temper the natural heat of the climate." At this day, the English possessor has beautified it by a plantation of trees, and crowned it with a small Chinese temple, built on the rock, which is a sort of cromlech; the excavation beneath is the cave, or natural grotto, to which the poet resorted, bare in itself, but commanding a beautiful and extensive view:—"the wide sea flecked with verdant isles, the harbour busy with vessels, the line of woody and cultivated coast, bounded by the majestic Montagna, whose pyramidical form and dark aspect add no small charm to the scenery."

Here Camoens continued the "Lusiad;" here Southey supposes that the happiest years of his life were spent. It may be so, but airy and cameleon-like must that happiness have been. His imagination, his desire of fame, the grasp he held of it, as he added to his immortal work, doubtless often fired his soul with that rapture which poets only know; and, as he gathered together some of the world's pelf, he might dream of dona Caterina, of his native Lisbon, and hope to make her his own when he should return; he could look upon the sky and sea, and the beautiful earth, and feel the loveliness of the creation breathe peace and love around him. But still he was exiled and he was alone; his food was hope; far off expectation, and that too of blessings, which he was never doomed to possess; and as doubtless the human soul does unconsciously receive shadows or sunbeams from the future, so his melancholy mood may often have made him wonder, why on an earth so lovely; beneath so sublime a heaven, he should be doomed to solitude and misfortune.

Thus several years were passed. Whatever the emoluments of his place were, or whatever fortune it was that he amassed, or whatever were the charms of his abode, they did not seduce him to stay a day longer than he was obliged. He obtained leave to return to Goa from, or was invited to do so by, dom Costantino de Braganza, the new viceroy, who had known and entertained friendship for him in Portugal. He embarked carrying with him his little fortune. But here fate at once displayed her unmitigated persecution; he was wrecked at the mouth of the river Mecon, and with difficulty reached the shore; carrying in one hand the manuscript of his poem, while he swam with the other. Every thing else that he possessed in the world was lost.[150]

Camoens was kindly received by the natives who lived on the banks of the Mecon; though he says of them with some scorn—

yet this very belief may have made them more sympathetic and charitable.

He remained on this coast for a few days after his wreck. And here all commentators agree that he wrote what are called his marvellous and inimitable rendondilhas, which commence by an allusion to the Hebrew psalm of exile, "By the waters of Babylon." Southey rejects absolutely the possibility that this beautiful poem could have been written at such an hour of tumult and uncertainty, and brings as proof, that not only, he does not mention his wreck, nor the kindness he received, for which he evidently felt grateful, but speaks of himself as living in exile.

He soon pursued his voyage to Goa, where the viceroy received him with kindness and distinction; and hope might dawn again upon his heart, and he might expect preferment under dom Constantine de Braganza's patronage, who loved him as a friend. But we are almost forced to believe in the influence of a star, and that which ruled the fate of Camoens was full of storm and wreck, and miserable reverses. Dom Constantine, with whose viceroyalty, Faria tells us, ended all good government in India, the succeeding governors being unable to stem the tide and avarice of extortion, was soon replaced by don Francisco de Coutinho, Conde de Redondo. The poet's enemies took advantage of this change to urge against him an accusation of malversation in the exercise of his office at Macao. Don Francisco was said to be the friend and admirer of the poet, but Mickle, in reprobating his general character, accuses him also of deceit towards Camoens—at least he afforded him no protection on this occasion, and this thrice unhappy man was thrown into prison.

In the seventh canto of the Lusiad, the poet breaks off suddenly in the narrative, as if oppressed by the sense of his own woes; and, forced to give a voice to the anguish that wrung his soul, he recalls images of home and bids them assuage the bitterness of his grief, while he recapitulates the various disasters he had sustained—exclaiming,—

Camoens was easily enabled to prove the falsehood of the charges of which he was accused. And he would have been set free, but Miguel Rodrigues Coutinho, a man of wealth and consequence, but nicknamed Fios-seccos, detained him in prison for a trifling debt; not more, at the very largest computation, than twenty pounds. He petitioned for his release from the viceroy in some sportive verses, in which he ridicules the character of his creditor. The request was such as a man in adversity might prefer to a friend in power, without humiliation; and though the biographers are chary of attributing the merit of his release to the viceroy, and Mickle even asserts that he owed it "to the shame felt by the gentlemen of Goa," it seems likely that dom Francisco did shew his friendship by enlarging him.

He continued in India, and pursued his military career as a volunteer. On all occasions he displayed undaunted bravery; and his companions in arms loved him for the heroic as well as cheerful spirit which he displayed in all reverses, and during every hardship.

At this period he is supposed to have heard of the death of dona Catarina de Atayde[152], who, in her grave, was not more lost to him than on earth, while such far seas lay between them; yet the thought of her was dear and consolatory. When recording that two blows befell him at the same time, the one the loss of fortune, he continues:—

Of Catarina's story we may say, as Shakspeare's Viola does of her own history, it was "a blank." She loved, she wept, she died. Her lover won her heart, and then was driven by fate to other lands at an immeasurable distance, and the course of long years promised no return. He fondly laments and commemorates her loss in poems which breathe tenderness and love in all its purity and truth.[154] He addressed her in that heaven which she had reached, and adjured her:—