III The Sixteenth Century [1502-80] (continued 2)

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

FOOTNOTES:

§ 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:

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

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:

§ 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:

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.

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:

§ 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).