III The Sixteenth Century [1502-80] (continued 3)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More interesting personally than as historian, the humanist Damião de Goes (1502-74[489]) was one of the most accomplished men of his time,[490] and, thanks partly to his trial before the Inquisition, partly to the not unpleasant egotism with which he chronicled autobiographical details, not only in his Genealogia[491] but in many of his other works, we know more of his life than we know of most contemporary writers. Traveller and diplomatist, scholar, singer, musician, he was a man of many friends during his lifetime, and the tragic circumstances of his last years have won him fresh sympathizers after his death. Born at Alenquer and brought up at the Court of King Manuel, he became page to the king in 1518, and five years later was appointed secretary at the Portuguese Factory at Antwerp. In 1529 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Poland, and in this and the following years, on similar missions or for his own pleasure, ‘saw and conversed with all the kings, princes, nobles and peoples of Christendom’.[492] He made the acquaintance of Montaigne’s aubergistes allemands, ‘glorieux, colères et ivrognes’, turned aside to visit Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg,[493] and was for several months the guest of Erasmus at Freiburg. In Italy he lived with Cardinal Sadoletto at Padua (1534-8) and met Cardinal Bembo and other celebrated men of the day. At Louvain, too, mihi intime carum et iucundum, as throughout Europe, he had many devoted friends. A senator of Antwerp welcomed him in Latin verse on his return from his Scythian travels,[494] Luis Vives addressed affectionate letters to mi Damiane, Albrecht Dürer painted his portrait, Glareanus in his Dodecachordon included music of his composition.[495]

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

§ 6 Quinhentista Prose

Had latinization and the Renaissance come to Portugal in a quiet age it is not pleasant to think what havoc they might have wrought on Portuguese prose in the unreal atmosphere of the study. Fortunately they found Portugal in turmoil. Stirring incidents and adventures were continually occurring which needed no heightening of rhetoric or Latin pomp of polysyllables. A scientific spirit of accuracy was abroad, and the missionaries and adventurers, travellers, mariners, merchants, officials, and soldiers who recorded their experiences wrote as men of action, with life and directness.

Few stories are more intense and affecting than those told by the Portuguese survivors of shipwreck in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Twelve of these appeared in the original collection edited by Bernardo Gomes de Brito (born in 1688): Historia Tragico-Maritima (2 vols., 1735, 6).[507] The earliest and most celebrated is the Relaçam da mui notavel perda do galeão grande S. João [June 24, 1552], an anonymous narrative based on the account of a survivor, Alvaro Fernandez, probably the ship’s mate, which tells of the death of D. Lianor de Sepulveda and her husband with a simple pathos and dramatic power unattained by the many poets who later treated the same theme. But the accounts of the wreck of the S. Bento (1554), the Conceição (1555), the S. Paulo (1561), of D. Jorge de Albuquerque (1565), and others, are scarcely less moving. The ships, of 1,000 tons, as the Aguia, ‘the largest vessel that had hitherto sailed to India’ (1558), and under, often with rotten rudder, or the whole ship rotten, sepulturas dos homens, with few boats, careless and ignorant pilots, badly careened, overloaded, overcrowded, ill-supplied with worm-eaten biscuit, ‘poisonous’ wine, and insufficient water, seemed to invite destruction. Between 1582 and 1602 alone thirty-eight ships were lost. The sea was not the only enemy: corsairs off the coast of Portugal, French, Dutch, and English, Lutheran heretics who threw overboard beads and missals, or a Turkish fleet ‘in sight of Ericeira’, exacted their toll when all other dangers had been successfully overcome. The story is told immediately after the event, sometimes almost in the form of a diary or log, or years later, by survivors or based on the account of survivors, and it varies according as the narrator is the captain of the ship, a landsman with a dislike of sailors, a plain soldier, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan monk, a distinguished Lisbon chemist (Henrique Diaz in i. 6), or a famous historian (ii. 3 by Diogo do Couto,[508] ii. 4 by João Baptista Lavanha[509]). All or most of their accounts are masterpieces of vivid phraseology. We follow as in a novel their adventures as the sea ‘breaks into flower—quebrando em frol’, as they are stranded on a desert island, boarded in sight of home, entrapped by savages, devoured by wild beasts, tottering, arrimados em paos, exhausted by thirst and hunger, or prostrated by heat, in comparison with which the calmas of Alentejo ‘are but as Norwegian cold’: toils and perils borne with heroic courage, told with the simplicity of heroes, without adorno de palavras nem linguagem floreada.

Many books of travel were the natural consequence of the discovery of India. The historian João de Barros’ passion for knowledge, especially geographical knowledge, was the first cause[510] of the learned and instructive Chorographia (1561) of his nephew Gaspar Barreiros (†1574), a description of the places through which he passed on his way to Rome in 1545 to thank the Pope on behalf of the Infante Henrique, Cardinalem amplissimum, for his cardinal’s hat. But this work (edited by his brother, Lopo Barreiros) was an exception. Most of the travel books were concerned with the far East.

The Livro em que da relação do que viu e ouviu no Oriente (1516) by Duarte Barbosa of Lisbon, brother-in-law of Fernam de Magalhães, exists in a Portuguese manuscript in the Public Library of Oporto, but was first published in Portuguese in 1821 as a translation from the Italian Libro di Odoardo Barbosa Portoghese, itself a translation from a copy at Seville. The author had spent the greater part of his youth in India, and his work contains vivid and accurate notes on Eastern lands and cities, especially Malabar.

One of the causes that most moved Portugal to curiosity and acted as an incentive to discovery were the vague rumours of the existence of a mighty Christian prince, the half-mythical Prester John, Negus of Abyssinia. The priest Francisco Alvarez (c. 1470?-c. 1540) set out with Duarte Galvam, first Portuguese Ambassador to Abyssinia, in 1515, but Galvam’s death delayed the mission, and it was not till 1520 that Alvarez and the new ambassador, D. Rodrigo de Lima, reached the Court of Prester John. They remained for six years in the country, and during this time Alvarez recorded in straightforward notes every detail of the country and its inhabitants with minuteness and accuracy. He considered himself old[511] in 1520; he was certainly active: he shoots hares and pheasants, washes unsuccessfully for gold, looks after his slaves, his nine mules, his fourteen cows, and organizes a procession against locusts. On their return, in Alvarez’ friend Antonio Galvam’s ship, to Lisbon, bringing ‘the length of Prester John’s foot’, he was eagerly questioned by king, prelates, and courtiers—the whole Court trooped out along the road from Coimbra to meet them—and when he published his fascinating diary of travel, Verdadeira Informaçam das terras do Preste Joam (1540), it was soon translated into almost every language of Europe.[512] Frei Gaspar da Cruz of Evora, missionary in China, returned to Portugal in 1569, and in the same year began his Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China (1570). He calls it a singella narraçam, but it contains valuable information about China, nor did the author neglect his style. The Dominican Frei João dos Santos (c. 1550-c. 1625?)[513] was born at Evora about the middle of the sixteenth century, and went out to East Africa and India as a missionary in 1586. He returned to Lisbon in August 1600 and nine years later published his Ethiopia Oriental (1609), an attractive, curious account, written in a clear and easy style, of the natives, their land and customs. It is to be feared that some of the settlers sadly abused his credulity, as in the case of the mercador’s tale of the native sorcerer or the man 380 years old, but this does not by any means impair the interest of his book. More individual and vivid is the Itinerario (1560) of Antonio Tenreiro, who in brief, staccato sentences describes minutely what he saw (the rosaes of red, white, and yellow roses in May near Damascus, the red roses of Shiraz, the fair, white Gurgis, complexioned like Englishmen) during his travels from Ormuz to the Caspian Sea and in Palestine and Egypt, and his overland journey from Ormuz to Portugal (1529) in which, alone with an Arab guide, he spent twenty-two days in crossing the desert. A similar land journey, a generation later, is described with an equal wealth of curious detail in the Itinerario (1565) of Mestre Martim Afonso, surgeon to the Viceroy, Conde de Redondo,[514] while the Franciscan Frei Pantaleam de Aveiro in his Itinerario da Terra Santa, &c. (1593) described his journey to the Holy Land. Not less adventurous were the travels of another Franciscan, Frei Gaspar de S. Bernardino, who related them with greater parade of erudition in a clear, elegant style in his Itinerario da India por terra (1611), the promised second part of which was unhappily not finished or at least not published. Half a century later the Jesuit Manuel Godinho (c. 1630-1712),[515] in the Relaçam do novo caminho que fez por terra e mar (1665), gave a remarkable account, in a style not untouched by the culteranismo of the time, of his return journey in 1663 from Baçaim. But various and arresting as are the books of Portuguese travellers, they are all eclipsed by the wonderful Peregrinaçam (1614) of Fernam Mendez Pinto (c. 1510-83). This prince of travellers and adventurers was born at Montemôr o Velho. His parents were of humble station, and at the time of King Manuel’s death (1521) he was brought by an uncle to Lisbon in order to earn his living. Although he remained in Portugal for sixteen years, in the service first of a lady of Lisbon and later of D. João de Lencastre,[516] lord of Montemôr o Velho, at Setubal, he was but just in his teens when, crossing in a boat from Alfama, he was captured off Cezimbra by a French corsair as a foretaste of pleasures to come. In March 1537 he set out for India and his odyssey began in earnest. He had no sooner reached Diu than he re-embarked on an expedition to the Straits of Mecca. His hope was to make a rich prize and become muito rico em pouco tempo. He went next with three others on a mission to Ethiopia, and on the return voyage he was captured by the Turks, placed in a subterranean dungeon, and then sold to a Greek renegade, whom he describes as ‘the most inhuman and cruel dog of an enemy ever seen’. Fortunately after three months the Greek sold him for 12,000 réis to a Jew, who brought him to Ormuz. After spending little over a fortnight there he embarked with a cargo of horses for Goa, and later was wounded in a fight with the Turks. He next proceeded to Malacca, and was sent thence on a mission to the King of the Batas, by whom he was made welcome ‘as rain to our rice crops’. After accompanying the king on a campaign he returned to Malacca, losing his cargo of tin and benjamin on the way. His next mission was to the King of Aaru. He returned to Malacca a slave, as his ship was wrecked, and after fearful sufferings he, the only survivor, was bought cheap by a poor Moorish trader. A trading expedition to Pão and Lugor ended as disastrously: after a fight with Moors he succeeded in swimming wounded to land, but returned penniless to Patane. In despair he joined the freebooting Antonio de Faria, and they preyed on Chinese junks till their ship was weighed down with silver and silk, damask and porcelain. Faria and his men are represented fighting, torturing, murdering, plundering, playing at dice on deck for pieces of silk, praying a litany, and promising rich and good spoil to Our Lady of the Hill at Malacca. After being shipwrecked they joined a Chinese pirate and again built up their fortunes. They weathered a storm by throwing overboard twelve cases of silver, sacked a Chinese city, were received in honour at Liampo (Ningpo), but again inordinate greed for gold proved their ruin, and, after a daring attempt to plunder the rich tombs of the Emperors of China in the island of Calemplui, they were finally stranded in China and arrested as vagabonds. After six weeks in the crowded prison at Nanking the Portuguese were taken to Peking and thence deported to Quansi (Kansu), where they were freed by the timely attack of the King of Tartary. He sent them to Cochin-China, but on the way they entered the service of a Chinese pirate. When they reached Japan only three Portuguese survived, the first Europeans, Mendez Pinto claims, to set foot there. When he brought news of this land to Liampo a trading expedition was hastily equipped and set out in defiance of times and seasons. Few of those who embarked in the nine junks ever saw land again. Mendez Pinto eventually reached Malacca (1544). Pedro de Faria later sent him on a mission to the King of Martavão. Martavão was, however, sacked soon after his arrival, and he was carried a prisoner to Pegu. He escaped by night and after many adventures returned to Goa. He immediately set out again ‘to challenge fortune in China and Japan’. After accompanying the King of Sunda on a war expedition he was again wrecked and spent thirteen days on a raft. Of the eleven survivors three were eaten by crocodiles and the rest sold as slaves. Released by the King of Calapa, Mendez Pinto served under the King of Siam and returned to Pegu and thence to Malacca. Once more he set out for Japan, and this time his voyage prospered and he came back with a fair profit. At Malacca he was eagerly questioned by St. Francis Xavier (1506-52) as to the conditions in Japan. He seems to have been infected with the saint’s enthusiasm, as were most of those who met him, and after his death he perhaps gave up a considerable fortune in order to return as missionary and ambassador to Japan. Before leaving Goa (April 1554) with St. Francis Xavier’s successor, Padre Belchior, he had been received into the Company of Jesus. After many hardships they landed in China in July 1556. In the spring of 1558, a few weeks after returning to Goa, Mendez Pinto sailed for home and arrived at Lisbon on September 22. The Lisbon officials dallied with his pretensions to reward for his services. During his wanderings in India, Ethiopia, China, Japan, Tartary, and Arabia he had persevered through captivities, battles, and shipwrecks, but four or five years of official evasions broke his spirit, and he retired to live in poverty at Almada. Philip II, stirred to interest in this legendary figure, granted him two bushels of wheat in January 1583, and in July of the same year he died. He had long before left the Company of Jesus, either of his own free will or expelled, perhaps on suspicion of Jewish descent.[517] His name was erased from the Company’s records and letters. Of his twenty-one years of trader, envoy, pirate, and missionary in the far East he wrote for his children a narrative of breathless interest, and, speaking generally, it bears the stamp of truth. We gather that he was brave and adventurous, despite a natural timidity, of a consuming curiosity which often got the better of his fears, pious, temperate, apt to be carried away by fugitive enthusiasms, but persistent, gay, and optimistic in defeat and disappointment. He appears not to have been particularly vain. He does not disguise some of his less creditable actions, and he certainly does not exaggerate his services in Japan.[518] He may possibly have been one of the three Portuguese who discovered it in 1542: their names are given by Couto (V. viii. 12) as Mota, Zeimoto and Peixoto. Gifted with keen imagination, he could exaggerate[519] when expediency required, but he knew that in the account of his travels exaggeration was not expedient, and he was constantly on guard against the notorious scepticism of his fellow-countrymen.[520] He may have heightened the colour occasionally, but as a rule he writes with restraint, although with delight in a good story and skill in bringing out the dramatic side of events. It is one of the charms of his work that it is very definite in dates and figures, but this also, through inevitable errors and misprints, afforded a handle to the pedantry of critics. The fatal similarity of Mendez and mendacity gave rise to the play on his name: Fernam, mentes? Minto (‘Fernam, do you lie?—I lie’), and Congreve, in Love for Love, by calling him ‘a liar of the first magnitude’ clinched the matter in England. But comparatively early a reaction set in,[521] and modern travellers have unequivocally confirmed the more favourable verdict and corroborated his detailed descriptions of Eastern countries. The mystery of the East, the heavy scent of its cities, its fervent rites and immemorial customs, as well as the magic of adventure, haunt his pages. A hundred pictures refuse to fade from the memory, whether they are of silk-laden Chinese junks or jars of gold dust, vivid descriptions of shipwreck (the hiss and swell of the waves are in his rich sea-Latin) or the awful pathos of the Queen of Martavão’s death, the sketch of a supercilious Chinese mandarin or of St. Francis Xavier tramping through Japan.

Five years after Mendez Pinto’s return to Portugal a book scarcely less strange than his Peregrinaçam, of atmosphere as oriental and of interest as absorbing although more scientific, was printed at Goa. Its author, Garcia da Orta[522] (c. 1495-c. 1570), born at Elvas, the son, perhaps, of Jorge da Orta, owner of a shop (temdeiro) in that town, studied medicine for ten years (1515-25) at Salamanca and Alcalá, and in 1526 began to practise as a doctor at Castello de Vide. From 1532 to 1534 he was Professor at the University of Lisbon, and in March 1534 sailed with his friend and patron, the insatiable Governor Martim Afonso de Sousa,[523] to India as king’s physician. The East cast its spell over his curious and inquiring mind; he remained under twelve or more Governors and died at a good old age, probably at Goa. There, on the veranda of his beautiful garden, in this land of bellissimi giardini,[524] served affectionately by many slaves, and with the books of his well-stocked library ready to his hand,[525] he would regale his guests with strange fruits—all the maneiras á gula of India—and with still stranger knowledge. His knowledge was based on personal observation, for although he respected Galen and Dioscorides as the princes of medicine and was possessed of great erudition, he was not disposed to bow blindly to the authority of any writer, Arab or Greek, least of all to Scholasticism, he went to Nature and in his Coloquios dos Simples (1563) recorded what he had seen and heard, the truth without rhetoric, setting aside the mil fabulas of Pliny and Herodotus. These fifty-nine dialogues, arranged in alphabetical order, pay more regard to facts than to style. They are full of varied information and give us a most pleasant insight into the writer’s character, strong, humorous, obstinate, and into his life at Goa. From a scientific point of view they are of great importance: not only did they provide the first description of cholera[526] and of many unknown plants, but after three and a half centuries they retain their scientific interest and value. Begun many years earlier in Latin,[527] they were published in the author’s old age, with an introductory ode by his friend, the poet Camões. Unhappily they became known to Europe chiefly in a garbled Latin version by Charles de l’Écluse (Clusius)—a fifth edition appeared in 1605—from which the Italian and French translations were made. It was not until the nineteenth century that the skilful and eager care of the Conde de Ficalho enabled a larger number of those who read Portuguese to appreciate Orta at his true worth.

Born at Alcacer do Sal, the celebrated scientist Pedro Nunez (1492?-1577?), whose name lives in the instrument of his invention, the nonius,[528] was Cosmographer to Kings João III and Sebastian and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra (1544-62). Prince Luis and D. João de Castro were his pupils. He wrote indifferently in Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, declared that as science treats of concrete things it can be expressed in any language however barbarous,[529] and, in order to secure for it a wider public, translated into Portuguese the Latin treatise (libellus) De Sphaera by John of Halifax (Joannes de Sacro Bosco): Tratado da Sphera (1537),[530] and into Spanish his own Libro de Algebra en arithmetica & geometria (1567), originally written in Portuguese and addressed to his pupil and friend the Cardinal-King Henrique. His other works, including the De Crepusculis (1542), were written in Latin.

The Homeric hero Duarte Pacheco Pereira (1465?-1533?), about whose life, apart from the hundred days at Cochin (1504) and a fight off Finisterre (1509) with the French pirate Mondragon, singularly little is known,[531] on his return from India in 1505 wrote a work entitled Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis [1505-6?]. This curious and important survey of the coast of Africa, the work of one more accustomed to wield sword than pen, but sometimes as picturesque and interesting as Duarte Barbosa, was to have consisted of five books, but only three and a part of the fourth were written. It remained in manuscript for nearly four centuries.

The three Roteiros (logs)[532] written by the famous Viceroy D. João de Castro (1500-48) on his voyages (1) from Lisbon to Goa in 1538, (2) from Goa to Diu, 1538-9, (3) from Goa to the Red Sea in 1541, are decked out with no literary graces. He wrote, he said, for seamen, not for ladies and gallants. Yet the scientific curiosity and enthusiasm of this keen-eyed, broad-minded observer give his descriptions force and truth, the same practical lucidity that marks his letters, which according to his friend Prince Luis contained todas as cousas necessarias e nenhũas superfluas, and they were early prized in Spain as harto notables, muy curiosos.[533] The third Roteiro would seem to have been originally written in Latin, and perhaps translated by Castro at his beloved Sintra home. The manuscript was bought by Sir Walter Raleigh, and it appeared in English in 1625, 208 years before it was published in Portuguese.

Greater historical interest attaches to the letters of an earlier Governor, Afonso de Albuquerque (1461-1515). That grim conqueror of the East might have smiled somewhat sardonically to be numbered among Portugal’s writers. He merely said what he had to say, and there was an end of it, would be his comment. But it is precisely this directness—the powerful grasp of reality and the horror of useless rhetoric—which gives excellence to the prose of his Cartas. These incomparable reports, written to King Manuel in moments snatched from his many occupations as Governor of India (1509-15), sometimes rise to a biblical grandeur and eloquence, as in the splendid passage beginning Goa é vossa; Onor, o rei dele paga-vos pareas. Perhaps, after all, he was not wholly unconscious of his art, and certainly the source of it is clear: as Osorio[534] notices, he was a devoted student of the Bible. In more familiar mood he can give a vivid sketch in a few emphatic words, as when he describes the judge, ‘a little man dressed in a cloak of coarse cloth with a crooked stick under his arm’, or the impostors who will practise ‘a thousand wiles and deceits for one ruby’.

To turn to lesser men, Fernam Rodriguez Lobo Soropita (born c. 1560), a distinguished Lisbon advocate and the first editor of the Rythmas (1595) of Camões, was a poet celebrated for his wit in his day. That of his letters is perhaps a little forced, and the obscurity of the allusions now interferes with our enjoyment. The interest of the extracts from a manuscript in the British Museum written by Francisco Rodriguez Silveira (1558-c. 1635) in 1608, published under the title Memorias de um Soldado da India (1877), consists both in the record of his thirteen years’ service in India (1585-98) and in the account during the succeeding ten years of Portugal and especially Beira, the condition of the roads, the land, the peasants, and the sway of the local caciques—thief, Turk, Pasha, tyrant, he calls them—and his indignation gives a pleasant vigour to his prose. The Arte da Caça da Altanaria (1616) of Diogo Fernandez Ferreira (born c. 1550), page of the Pretender D. Antonio, is a work of great interest. The writer evidently delights in his theme and has a real love of birds, the migratory habits of which he describes in Part 6; and he treats ‘of swallows and of the swallow-grass which restores sight’, of the food made of sugar, saffron, and almonds for nightingales, and other alluring topics. Among the rare and curious books of the time we may notice that on the prerogatives of women, Dos priuilegios & prœrogatiuas q ho genero femenino tẽ por dereito comũ & ordenações do Reyno mais que ho genero masculino (1557), by Ruy Gonçalvez, Professor of Law at Coimbra in 1539 and subsequently Court Advocate at Lisbon.

Two writers especially attract attention even in the feast of interest which Portuguese prose in this century offers so abundantly. The son of a distinguished Dutch illuminator and painter settled in Portugal, Antonio de Hollanda, who painted Charles V at Toledo and may have illuminated the Book of Hours of Queen Lianor, Francisco de Hollanda (1518-84), born in Lisbon, painter, illuminator, and architect, in his short treatises Da fabrica que fallece á cidade de Lisboa and Da sciencia do desenho, showed an enthusiasm for his subject almost out of place in the Portugal of the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he nearly ran into trouble with the Inquisition by seeming to make painting ‘divine’, but prudently altered the passage. His curious and celebrated treatise Da Pintvra Antigva (1548) is written in a style which may be rather rejoiced in than imitated, for, as he tells us, he was more at home with the brush than with the pen, but it is full of ingenious and original remarks. The first part deals in forty-four brief chapters with painting generally, and opens with a fine passage describing the work of God as the greatest of all painters. The second part contains the Quatro dialogos, in the first three of which he records the conversations of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo, Lattanzio Tolomei, and himself in the church of St. Sylvester or in a garden overlooking Rome; conversations which, despite their Portuguese dress, bear the stamp of truth and will retain their fascination so long as interest in art endures. Francisco worked first in the household of the Infante Fernando and then in that of the Archbishop of Evora. In 1537 he set out on a journey to Rome by land (Valladolid, Barcelona, Provence), and in Italy remained from 1538 to 1547. His friendship with Michelangelo continued after his return to Portugal, as a letter from Hollanda to Michelangelo in 1553 proves. The last part of his life he spent in the country between Lisbon and Sintra among the Portuguese whom he had called desmusicos, and despite his comfortable circumstances—he received a pension of 100,000 réis from Philip II—he must often have looked back with regret to the fullness of those nine years in Italy. But his countrymen, thanks largely to the scholarly researches and studies of Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos, are now fully alive to his merits. And, indeed, even in the sixteenth century a passage in Frei Heitor Pinto’s Imagem da Vida Christam sets him side by side with the great Italian.[535] Philipe Nunez, who professed as a Dominican in 1591, wrote on painting in the next century: Arte poetica e da pintura e symmetria (1615). A work on music by Antonio Fernandez of about the same date, Arte de Mvsica de canto dorgam e canto cham (1626), consists of three treatises which do not profess to be original. Manuel Nunez da Silva wrote on the same subject in his Arte Minima (1685).

In the preface (1570) to his Regra Geral, written in 1565, Gonçalo Fernandez Trancoso[536] (c. 1515-c. 1590) professed not to have sufficient literary skill even for this simple calendar of movable feasts. Yet in the previous year (1569), in which at Lisbon he lost both wife and children in the great plague (a beloved daughter of twenty-four, a student son, and a choir-boy grandson), in order to distract his mind from these sorrows,[537] he wrote a remarkable work, unique of its kind in Portuguese literature; or at least he wrote then the first two books, which appeared under the title Contos e historias de proveito e exemplo (1575).[538] A third part was published posthumously in 1596. The number and kind of the editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to its popularity, but since the eighteenth century no new edition has been printed and the book has fallen into a strange neglect.[539] Trancoso did not claim originality: he merely collected stories from what he had heard or read.[540] The stories, only thirty-eight in number, are very various. The subjects of many of them resemble those of Franco Sacchetti’s Novelle or Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le xiii Piacevoli Notti, and some are directly imitated from Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone or Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s Gli Ecatommiti or from Matteo Bandello (†1565).[541] But often they are traditions so widespread that they occur in many authors and languages, as that (ii. 7) which corresponds to Straparola’s third Notte and of which Dr. F. A. Coelho recorded twenty-one other foreign versions, besides four popular variants in Portuguese; or i. 17, in which the cunning answers to difficult questions are similar to those in Sacchetti, No. 4 (Mestre Bernabò signor di Milano), and Dr. Braga’s Contos tradicionaes do povo portuguez, No. 71 (Frei Joam Sem Cuidados). Others are apparently of oriental origin, as the judge’s verdict, worthy of Sancho Panza (i. 15), or the king and the barber (iii. 3). But the subject and place (Lisbon, Oporto, Evora, Coimbra, &c.) of most, although not of the longest, of these tales are Portuguese.[542] Some are trifling anecdotes which acquire a charm and vividness through their popular character and the author’s simple details of description, as the picture of the peasant family near Oporto sitting round the fire after their supper of maize-bread and chestnuts (i. 10). The author is not content that we should draw our own moral, but this scarcely spoils the reader’s pleasure in these malicious and ingenious tales.

Despite inroads of the exotic and all the chances and changes of life and literature in this century, the Portuguese maintained their interest in the romances of chivalry, in which indeed they saw a reflection of their own prowess in the East. Dull as Clarimundo may now seem, it made a great impression in its day, and was eagerly read, from Lisbon to the Moluccas.[543] Even as late as 1589 Bishop Arraez considers it necessary to say that a prince should have better ways of spending his time than ler por Clarimundo,[544] while Rodriguez Lobo, thirty years later, brackets it with Amadis and Palmeirim.[545] Many a young page and escudeiro must have aspired not only to pore over the cronicas but to write one of his own.[546] The facility of a Barros is, however, given to few, and both Jorge Ferreira’s Memorial and Moraes’ Palmeirim de Inglaterra were written later in life. Francisco de Moraes (c. 1500-72),[547] a well-known courtier in the reign of King João III, whose Treasurer he was, and a Comendador of the Order of Christ, in 1540 accompanied the Portuguese Ambassador, D. Francisco de Noronha, to Paris as Secretary, and at the French Court he fell passionately in love with one of the ladies-in-waiting of Queen Leonor (sister of the Emperor Charles V and widow of King Manuel of Portugal) named Claude Blosset de Torcy. His love was not returned: there was a great discrepancy of age between them, his knowledge of French was very slight, and his passion robbed him of wit and reason. If the Duc de Châtillon was favoured, or if the English Ambassador gave Mademoiselle de Torcy his arm, Moraes would flare up in jealousy, and when in the presence of the queen the elderly lover went down on his knees la belle Torcy (to whom Clément Marot had addressed one of his Étrennes and who eventually married the Baron de Fontaines) prayed him not to continue to make her as well as himself ridiculous. Moraes, after leaving France in 1543, or early in 1544, recovered from his passion and married in Portugal. Of his subsequent life little is known; he appears to have returned to France, and in 1572 he was murdered at the entrance of the Rocio, the central square of Evora. His Cronica de Palmeirim de Inglaterra, written in France or Portugal or both, was probably published in 1544, but the earliest existing Portuguese edition is that of Evora, 1567, which contains the dedication to the Infanta Maria, written over twenty years earlier (1544). Chiefly remarkable for the excellence of its style, Palmeirim will always retain its place in Portuguese literature as a masterpiece of prose, musically soft, yet clear and vigorous. Cervantes considered it worthy to be preserved in a golden casket like the works of Homer,[548] but few of its readers will now differ from the more modern and moderate opinion of Menéndez y Pelayo that ‘it requires a real effort’ to read the whole of it. The effort required to read the miserable Spanish translation of 1547-8 is infinitely greater. The fact that this translation is of earlier date than any surviving Portuguese edition gave rise to the theory that Moraes had translated his work from the Spanish. No competent critic now believes this; any doubts that may have lingered were dispelled wittily and for ever in Mr. Purser’s able essay (1904). The Spanish version, with its painful efforts to avoid lusitanismos and its palpable mistranslations (such as suavidad or alegria for saudade), shows less knowledge of the sea, of Ireland,[549] and of Portugal. Moreover, the preference of the author of Palmeirim for Portugal is obvious, and the passage in which ladies of the French Court are introduced corresponds to Moraes’ Descvlpa de hvns amores,[550] first published with the Dialogos in 1624. Moraes himself would probably not have been greatly troubled by the impudent claim set up for Luis Hurtado and Miguel Ferrer. To have made a masterpiece out of their book would have been an achievement as great as to have made it out of old French and English legends in Paris. Palmeirim’s predecessors, Palmerin de Oliva (1511), Primaleon (1512), and Platir (1533), were probably all genuinely Spanish, although some doubts have been raised as to the first of the line, Palmerin de Oliva attributed to a cryptic lady, a femina docta called Agustobrica.[551] Its successors were as genuinely Portuguese: to Moraes’ parts 1 and 2 Diogo Fernandez added parts 3 and 4 (1587), concerned with the deeds of Palmeirim’s son, Dom Duardos,[552] and Balthasar Gonçalvez Lobato parts 5 and 6 (1602), in which are told those of his grandson, Dom Clarisol de Bretanha. Three brief but very lively and natural Dialogos (1624) show that Moraes was not only an excellent stylist but a keen observer. The fidalgo and escudeiro, the lawyer and the love-lorn moço, are all clearly and wittily presented.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 7. Religious and Mystic Writers

Amador Arraez in one of his dialogues defines mysticism thus: ‘There is a theology called mystic, as being hidden and unintelligible to those who have no part in it. It is attained by much love and few books and with much meditation and purity of heart, which alone suffices for its exercise, and consists mainly in the noblest part of our will inflamed in the love of God, its full and perfect good.’[553] ‘Our will inflamed’: perhaps these words explain the excellence of the style, the intensity and directness, of the writers in this mystic theology. Style, so shy and elusive to Flaubert and his disciples, came unsought to the religious writers of the sixteenth century, because they wrote not with an eye on verbal artifices but out of the fullness of the heart, ‘self-gathered for an outbreak’; and their works can still be read with pleasure by priest and pagan. Mysticism, inherent in the character of the Portuguese, runs through a great part of their literature; we find it, for instance, in the merry poetry of Gil Vicente or in the precious accents of Soror Violante do Ceo. Strength of character, aloofness, rapt enthusiasm, singleness of purpose: these are the qualities of mysticism at its best, and if it also manifests itself in vagueness and confusion, this was not so with the great mystic and religious writers of the golden age of Portuguese literature. To them mysticism was not a cloudy goodness or an abstract perception-dulling humanity, not a mist but a pillar of fire, in the light of which the facts and details of reality stood out the more clearly. But if the intensity of many of the mystics has its natural complement in the fervour and directness of their prose, this was not always the case, and it was not only in profane works that the Portuguese language fell into the pitfalls of culteranismo. All the more remarkable is the purity, the exquisite taste, the simplicity and charm of some of the later, seventeenth century, prose. The secret of this prose lay in fact in culteranismo itself, the points and conceits of which were based on a recognition of the value of words. All the seiscentistas set to playing with words as with unset stones of price. The more critical or inspired writers joined in the game but selected the genuine stones, leaving the rest to those who did not care to distinguish between gems and coloured glass.

A faint vein of mysticism is to be found in the work of Frei Heitor Pinto (c. 1528-1584?), who was born at the high-lying little town of Covilhan and professed in the famous Convento dos Jeronimos at Belem in 1543. After taking the degree of Doctor of Theology at Siguenza he in 1567 competed for a Chair at Salamanca University, but came into collision with Fray Luis de Leon, and in a bitter contest between the Hieronymite and Augustinian Orders Pinto was defeated. He returned to Portugal, became Professor of the new Chair of Scripture at Coimbra University in 1576, Rector of the University and Provincial of his Order.[554] After the death of the Cardinal-King he appears vehemently to have espoused the cause of the Prior of Crato. King Philip accordingly invited Pinto to accompany him to Spain—he was one of the fifty excluded from the amnesty of 1581—and scandal added that the king had him poisoned there in 1584. Pinto was an eminent divine, a man of wide learning, a master of Portuguese prose, and he appears to have inspired his pupils with affection; but King Philip could scarcely have considered him worth poisoning, especially when removed from his sphere of influence. No doubt he went to Spain with extreme reluctance—on other occasions of his busy life when the affairs of his Order drove him to France and Italy he had sighed in tears (in spite of his interest in travel, his love of Nature, and especially his antiquarian curiosity[555]) for his quiet cell at Belem, ‘where he had lived many years in great content’. Perhaps too he had not forgotten his defeat at Salamanca. ‘King Philip’, he now said sturdily, ‘may put me into Castille but never Castille into me.’ Pinto wrote commentaries on various books of the Old Testament, which were published in Latin, but his principal work consists in the dialogues, a maneira dos de Platão, of his Imagem da Vida Christam (1563), followed by the Segunda Parte dos Dialogos (1572). The first part has six dialogues, the subjects being true philosophy, religion, justice, tribulation, the solitary life,[556] and remembrance of death. The five of the second part treat of tranquillity of life, discreet ignorance, true friendship, causes,[557] and true and spurious possessions. It is impossible to read a page of these dialogues and not be struck by the extraordinary fascination of their style. It is concise and direct without ever losing its harmony. Perhaps its best testimonial is that its magic survives the innumerable quotations, although one may regret that the work was not written, like the Trabalhos de Jesus, in a dungeon instead of in a well-stocked library.[558] Apart from the proof it affords of the exceptional capacity of the Portuguese language for combining softness and vigour, the work contains much ingenious thought, charming descriptions, and elaborate similes. Some twenty editions in various languages before the end of the century show how keenly it was appreciated. It was certainly not without influence on the Dialogos (1589) of the energetic and austere Bishop of Portalegre, Amador Arraez (c. 1530-1600), who spent his boyhood at Beja and professed as a Carmelite at Lisbon a year after Frei Thomé de Jesus and two years after Frei Heitor Pinto had professed in the same city. Like the former he studied theology at Coimbra.[559] Cardinal Henrique, when Archbishop of Evora, chose Arraez to be his suffragan, and in 1578 appointed him to the see of Tripoli. Three years later he was made Bishop of Portalegre by Philip II. He resigned in 1596, and spent the last four years of his life in retirement, in the college of his Order at Coimbra. A few weeks before his death he wrote the prefatory letter for the revised edition of his great work.[560] It consists of ten long dialogues between the sick and dying Antiocho and doctor, priest, lawyer, or friends. The longest, over a quarter of the whole, is a mystic life of the Virgin, and of the others some are purely religious, as Da Paciencia e Fortaleza Christam, some historical or political (Da Gloria e Triunfo dos Lusitanos; Das Condições e Partes do Bom Principe). That on the Jews (Da Gente Judaica) is marred by a spirit of bitter intolerance; on the other hand there is an outspoken protest against slavery. The whole of this interesting miscellany, which incidentally discusses a very large number of subjects,[561] is tinged with mystic philosophy, and at the same time shows a keen sense of reality. In style as in degree of mysticism it stands midway between Pinto’s Imagem and the Trabalhos de Jesus. It is evident that its composition, although less artificial than that of the Imagem, has been the subject of much care, and the author declares in his preface that while adopting a ‘common, ordinary style’, to the exclusion of forced tricks and elegances, he has striven after clearness and harmony (the two postulates of his contemporary, Fray Luis de Leon). The result is a treasury of excellent prose, in which the harmonious flow of the sentences in nowise interferes with precision and restraint, that grave brevity which Arraez notes as one of the principal qualities of Portuguese. It can rise to great eloquence (as in the lament of Olympio) without ever becoming rhetorical or turgid.

The prose of Pinto and Arraez was a very conscious art, that of the still greater Frei Thomé de Jesus (1529?-82) was the man, and the man merged in mysticism, without thought of style. He was the son of Fernam Alvarez de Andrade, Treasurer to King João III, and of Isabel de Paiva. One of his brothers was the celebrated preacher Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1528-75), another the historian Francisco de Andrade; a third, Frei Cosme da Presentação, distinguished himself in philosophy and theology, but died at the age of thirty-six at Bologna, while the work of a nephew (son of Francisco de Andrade), Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1576-1660), Casamento perfeito (1636), is counted a classic of Portuguese prose. His sister D. Violante married the second Conde de Linhares. As a boy at the Augustinian Collegio de Nossa Senhora da Graça at Coimbra he is said to have been all but drowned while swimming in the Mondego. He professed at the Lisbon convent of the same Order in 1544, went to Coimbra to study theology, and then became master of novices at the Lisbon convent.[562] Here in 1574 he planned a reform of the Order, but when all was ready for the secession of the new Recoletos an intrigue put an end to the scheme, which a kindred spirit, Fray Luis de Leon, later carried into effect. Frei Thomé was permitted to retire to the convent of Penafirme by the sea, near Torres Vedras, where he might hope to indulge his love of quiet and solitude. He was, however, appointed prior of the convent and Visitor of his Order, and in 1578 was chosen by King Sebastian to accompany him to Africa. At the battle of Alcacer Kebir, as he held aloft a crucifix or tended the wounded, he was speared by a Moor and taken prisoner to Mequinez. Here he was loaded with chains and placed in a dungeon, and as the slave of a marabout received ‘less bread than blows’. The Portuguese Ambassador, D. Francisco da Costa, intervened, and he was removed to Morocco. Frei Thomé had borne all his sufferings with the most heroic fortitude, and now, broken in health but not in spirit, he refused to lodge at the ambassador’s and asked to be placed in the common prison. During a captivity of nearly four years, regardless of his own fate,[563] with unflagging devotion he ministered to the numerous Christian prisoners, and was occupied to the last with their needs. Costa, who shared the general respect and affection for this saint and hero, visited him as he lay dying (April 17, 1582). Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella! It was during his captivity that he composed the work that has given him the lasting fame earned by his life and character, writing furtively in the scant light that filtered through the cracks of the prison door.[564] These fifty Trabalhos de Jesus (2 pts., 1602, 9) embrace the whole life of Christ, and deserve, more than Renan’s Vie de Christ, to be called a gracious fifth Gospel. Each trabalho is, moreover, followed by a spiritual exercise, and these constitute a Portuguese De Imitatione Christi. Rarely, if ever, has such glow and fervour been set in print: none but the very dull could be left cold by these transports of passionate devotion. The prose wrestles and throbs in an agony of grief or rapture, of mysticism carried to the extreme limit where all power of articulate expression ends.[565] Frei Thomé de Jesus is a master of Portuguese prose not by any arts or graces but through the white heat of his intensity. No book shows more clearly that style must always be a secondary consideration, that if there be a burning conviction excellence of style follows. It could evidently only have been written by one who had greatly suffered, indeed by one who still suffered, one who expressed in these fervid accents of heavenly communion an oblivion of self and an energy habitually employed in eager earthly service of his fellow men. In a prefatory letter (November 8, 1581) addressed to the Portuguese people he declared his intention of publishing as it stood this masterpiece of mystic ecstasy, which he believed to have been written by divine inspiration.[566]

Another celebrated treatise of a mystic character is the Voz do Amado (1579) by the learned Canon D. Hilariam Brandão (†1585). The religious works of this century are very numerous. We may mention the anonymous Regras e Cautelas de proueito espiritual (1542), which is written in biblical prose and deals with the fifteen perfections or excellences of charity and kindred subjects; the dialogues Desengano de Perdidos em dialogo entre dous peregrinos, hũ christão e hũ turco (Goa, 1573) by the first Archbishop of Goa, D. Gaspar de Leão (†1576), and the Dialogo espiritual: Colloquio de um religioso com um peregrino (1578) by Frei Alvaro de Torres [Vedras] (fl. 1550), who was drowned in the Tagus when on the way to his convent at Belem.

D. Joana da Gama (†1568), a nun of noble birth who directed a small community founded by herself at Evora, a few miles from her native Viana, published a short collection of moral sentences in alphabetical order, followed by a few poems (trovas): Ditos da Freyra (1555). She insists, perhaps a little too emphatically for conviction, on her lack of intelligence and ability, and says that these sayings were written down for herself alone and that she purposely avoids subtleties (ditos sotijs), but her aphorisms contain some shrewd personal observation. Fact and legend have combined to weave an atmosphere of romance about the life of Manuel de Sousa Coutinho, better known as Frei Luis de Sousa (1555?-1632). A descendant of the second Conde de Marialva, he early entered or was about to enter the Order of Knights Hospitallers at Malta, but was captured by the Moors in much the same way and at about the same time (1575) as was Cervantes. He was taken to Algiers, and may have known Cervantes there, or the statement that he became Cervantes’ friend may have been an inference from the latter’s mention of him in Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; they may have met in Lisbon in 1590, or at Madrid. Sousa Coutinho returned to Portugal in 1578, and some years later married D. Magdalena de Vilhena, widow of D. João de Portugal, one of all the peerage that fell with King Sebastian at Alcacer Kebir. Sousa Coutinho, at the invitation of his brother in Panama, is said to have gone thither in the hope of making a fortune, but the date is not clear. His unbending patriotism was immortalized when as Governor of Almada in 1599 he burnt down his house rather than receive as guests the Spanish Governors of Portugal. The prospect of riches at Panama may have seemed especially alluring after this rash act. He appears to have lived quietly in Portugal for some years before 1613, when both he and his wife entered a convent. Their act has been variously explained as due to melancholy disposition or to the early death of their daughter, D. Anna de Noronha. Probably after her death the example of their friend the Conde de Vimioso and the conviction that the only abiding pleasure is the renunciation of all the rest were prevalent factors in their decision. The legend, however, related by Frei Antonio da Encarnação and dramatized two centuries later by Garrett, records that D. João de Portugal, D. Magdalena de Vilhena’s first husband, had been not killed but taken prisoner in Africa, and after many years’ captivity he reappears as an aged pilgrim and bitterly reveals his identity. In the convent of Bemfica, where he had professed in September 1614, Frei Luis de Sousa was consulted on various matters by the Duke of Braganza and others who valued his fine character and clear judgement, but he did not live to see the Restoration. He was entrusted by his Order with the revision of works left by another Dominican, Frei Luis de Cacegas (c. 1540-1610). These he re-wrote, giving them a lasting value by virtue of his style. The first part of the Historia de S. Domingos, ‘a new kind of chronicle’ as he calls it in his preface addressed to the king, appeared in 1623, but the second (1662) and third (1678) parts were not published in his lifetime. A fourth part (1733) was added by Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina (1660-1740), who among other works wrote a curious miscellany of verse and prose, romance and literary criticism, entitled Seram politico (1704). In the biography of the saintly and strong-willed Archbishop of Braga, Vida de D. Fr. Bertolomeu dos Martyres (1619), the excellence of Sousa’s style is even more apparent, for it has here no trace of rhetoric and the pictures stand out with the more effect for the economy with which they are drawn—the dearth of adjectives is noticeable. The archbishop’s visits to his diocese give occasion for charming, homely glimpses of Minho. Neither of these books is the work of a critical historian (in the Vida, for instance, winds and waves obey the archbishop), but the latter, especially, is in matter and manner one of the masterpieces of Portuguese literature, a livro divino, as a modern Portuguese writer called it.[567] The Annaes de El Rei Dom João Terceiro, written at the bidding of Philip IV, was published in 1844 by Herculano, who described the work as little more than a series of notes, except in the Indian sections, which summarize Barros. It is as a stylist, not as a historian, that Frei Luis de Sousa will always be read, and read with delight.[568] The subject of his biography, Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres (1514-90), wrote in Portuguese a simple Catecismo da Dovtrina Christam (Braga, 1564), resembling the Portuguese work of his friend Fray Luis de Granada (1504-88): Compendio de Doctrina Christãa (Lixboa, 1559).

The Historia da Vida do Padre Francisco Xavier (1600), by the Jesuit João de Lucena (1550-1600), born at Trancoso, who made his mark as an eloquent preacher and Professor of Philosophy in the University of Evora, is also one of the classics of the Portuguese language. It receives a glowing fervour from the author’s evident delight in his subject—the life of the famous Basque missionary in whose arms D. João de Castro died. His command of clear, fluent, vigorous prose, his skilful use of words and abundant power of description, enable him to convey this enthusiasm to his readers. Part of the matter of his book was derived from Fernam Mendez Pinto, but the style is his own.

Like Frei Luis de Sousa, Frei Manuel da Esperança (1586-1670) became the historian of his Order in the Historia Seraphica da Ordem dos Frades Menores (2 pts., 1656, 66). We know from remarks in the second part that he paid the greatest attention to its composition, for which he had prepared himself by reading hũa multidão notavel of books on that and kindred subjects. Similar excellence of style marks the later work of the Jesuit Francisco de Sousa (1628?-1713), O Oriente conquistado (2 vols., 1710), in which he chronicles the history of the Company in the East.

The most celebrated Portuguese preacher of his time,[569] Frei Thomé de Jesus’ brother, Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1528-75), represented Portugal at the Council of Trent in 1561. His eloquent Sermões (1603, 4, 15) were published posthumously in three parts. His mantle fell upon Francisco Fernandez Galvão (1554-1610), the prose of whose Sermões (3 vols., 1611, 13, 16) is admirably restrained and pure. Less sonorous than the periods of Paiva de Andrade, the Trattados [sic] Quadragesimais e da Paschoa (1609) and Tratados das Festas e Vidas dos Santos (2 pts., 1612, 15) of the Dominican Frei Antonio Feo (1573-1627) perhaps gain rather than lose by being read, not heard. In the clearness and precision of their prose they are scarcely inferior to the remarkable Sermões (3 pts., 1617, 18, 25) of the Augustinian Frei Philipe da Luz (1574-1633), confessor to the Duke of Braganza (afterwards King João IV), in whose palace at Villa Viçosa he died. He, too, writes sem grandes eloquencias; he is as precise as Feo in his use of words, and his vocabulary is as extensive. Purity, concision, clearness, and harmony give him, together with Feo, Ceita, and Veiga, a high place in Portuguese prose.

The sermons for which the Dominican Frei Pedro Calvo (born c. 1550) was celebrated were published in Homilias de Quaresma (2 pts., 1627, 9), and at the repeated request of a friend he wrote his Defensam das Lagrimas dos ivstos persegvidos (1618) to prove that ‘tears shed in time of trouble do not lessen merit’. The Sermões (1618) and Considerações (1619, 20, 33) of Frei Thomas da Veiga (1578-1638), like his father a Professor of Coimbra University, are written in a style of great excellence, as, although a trifle more redundant[570] and latinized, is that of his contemporary, like him a Franciscan, Frei João da Ceita (1578-1633), whose prose has a natural grace and harmony, if it is less pure and indigenous than that of Luz. His best known works are the Quadragena de Sermoens (1619) and Quadragena Segunda (1625). Two more volumes of Sermões (1634, 5) appeared after his death. Two slightly later writers were Frei Cristovam de Lisboa (†1652), brother of Manuel Severim de Faria, and Frei Cristovam de Almeida (1620-79), Bishop of Martyria. The former, author of Jardim da Sagrada Escriptura (1653) and Consolaçam de Afflictos e Allivio de Lastimados (1742), in the preface to his Santoral de Varios Sermões (1638) deplores the new fashion of certain preachers who hide their meaning under their eloquence. He is himself sometimes inclined to be florid. Bishop Almeida attained a reputation for great eloquence even in the days of Antonio Vieira.[571] His Sermões (1673, 80, 86) are simpler than those of Vieira, but for the reader their prose lacks the quiet precision of Ceita, Veiga, or Luz, whose sermons may be considered one of the sources from which a greater master of Portuguese, Manuel Bernardes, derived his magic. The Jesuit Luis Alvarez (1615?-1709?), who was born a few years after Vieira, and lived on into the eighteenth century, also had a great reputation as a preacher. The fire is absent from the printed page, but his works, Sermões da Quaresma (3 pts., 1688, 94, 99), Amor Sagrado (1673), and Ceo de graça, inferno custoso 1692), are notable for the purity of their prose.

The religious works of the seventeenth, as of the sixteenth century are very various in subject and treatment. Frei João Cardoso (†1655), author of Ruth Peregrina (2 pts., 1628, 54), also wrote a lengthy commentary on the 113th Psalm in twenty-one discourses: Jornada Dalma Libertada (1626). Ten years earlier a Jew, João Baptista d’Este, had published in excellent Portuguese a translation of the Psalms: Consolaçam Christam e Lvz para o Povo Hebreo (1616). His title was suggested by that of a far more remarkable book by another Jew, Samuel Usque (fl. 1540), Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, written probably between 1540 and 1550[572] and first printed at Ferrara by Abraham ben Usque in 1553. The author was the son of Spanish Jews who had taken refuge in Portugal, where he was born, probably at the end of the fifteenth century.[573] His famous work is an account of the sufferings of the Jewish race. In three dialogues Jacob (Ycabo), Nahum (Numeo), and Zachariah (Zicareo) converse as shepherds. Israel, in person, relates his sorrows down to the fall of Jerusalem, an event which is described in detail, and so on to the persecutions in European countries (novas gentes), and at the end of each dialogue the prophets administer their comfort. The book closes with a chorus of rapturous psalms in biblical prose, rejoicing at the coming end of Israel’s tribulations and calling for vengeance on their enemies, and thus finishes on a note of joyful faith and courageous hope, without an inkling of charity. The first dialogue, which condenses Old Testament history, has a rhythmical, luxuriant style, rich in Oriental imagery, but later, where Roman history is the authority, or in the tragic account of the persecution of Jews in Portugal[574] under João II and the two succeeding kings, the style is shorn of rhetoric. Nor is there a trace of false ornament in a long passage of wonderful eloquence, Israel’s final complaint and invocation to sky and earth, waters and mortal creatures. The agony and awful glow of indignation at these recent events had a restraining influence on the style, which loses nothing by this simplicity. Quieter descriptions are those of the shepherd’s life and of the chase in the first, and of spring and evening in the third part.

The Jesuit Diogo Monteiro (1561-1634), when towards the end of his life he published his Arte de Orar (1631), promised, should his ‘great occupations’ allow, to print very soon the second volume dealing with the divine attributes. This did not appear in that generation: Meditações dos attribvtos divinos (Roma, 1671). The Arte de Orar contains twenty-nine treatises (604 ff.). Its subjects are various (of the virtue of magnificence; of the esteem in which singing is held by God, &c.), and they are presented with fervour and clear concision, and especially with a complete absence of oratorical effect. Quintilian takes part in one of the six dialogues which compose the Peregrinaçam Christam (1620) by Tristão Barbosa de Carvalho (†1632); he is on a pilgrimage from Lisbon to the tomb of Saint Isabel at Coimbra, but he expresses himself in excellent Portuguese, modelled perhaps on that of Arraez. The prose of the Retrato de Prvdentes, Espelho de Ignorantes (1664) by the Jesuit Francisco Aires (1597-1664) often rises to eloquence, notably in the fervent prayers. His Theatro dos Trivmphos Divinos contra os Desprimores Hvmanos (1658) is of a more practical character. The Franciscan Frei Manuel dos Anjos (1595-1653) laid no claim to originality in his Politica predicavel e doutrina moral do bom governo do mundo (1693), written in a clear and correct but slightly redundant[575] style.

Frei Luis dos Anjos (c. 1570-1625) in his Iardim de Portugal (1626) gathered edifying anecdotes of saintly women from various writers, and set them down in good Portuguese prose. The Franciscan Frei Pedro de Santo Antonio (c. 1570-1641) in his Iardim Spiritual, tirado dos Sanctos e Varoens spiritvaes (1632) contented himself with translation of his authorities, adding, he modestly says, ‘some things of my own of not much importance’. He carefully avoided interlarding his Portuguese with Latin, his object being fazer prato a todos. Even more humble is the work of the Cistercian Frei Fradique Espinola (c. 1630-1708), who compiled in his Escola Decurial (12 pts., 1696-1721) an encyclopaedia of themes so various as the fate of King Sebastian, the duties of women, and the habits of storks. Although it lacks the literary pretensions of the Divertimento erudito by the Augustinian Frei João Pacheco (1677-?1747), it contains some curious matter. A similar miscellany of anecdotes and precepts was written by João Baptista de Castro in the eighteenth century: Hora de Recreio nas ferias de maiores estudos (2 pts., 1742, 3).

The life of the ardent Frei Antonio das Chagas (1631-82) abounded in contrasts. Born at Vidigueira, of an old Alentejan family, Antonio da Fonseca Soares began his career as a soldier in 1650; a duel (arising out of one of his many love affairs), in which he killed his man, drove him to Brazil, and it was only after several years of distinguished service[576] that he returned to Portugal, perhaps in 1657. In 1661 he attained the rank of captain, but in the following year abandoned his military career, and in 1663 professed in the Franciscan convent at Evora, exchanging the composition of gongoric verse for a voluminous correspondence in prose, and his unregenerate days of dissipation for a glowing and saintly asceticism. (Trocando as galas em burel e os caprichos em cilicios are the words with which he veils the real sincerity of his conversion.) Preferring the humbler but strenuous duties of missionary in Portugal and Spain to the bishopric of Lamego, he founded the missionary convent of Varatojo, and died there twenty years after his novitiate. During those years he built up and exercised a powerful spiritual influence throughout Portugal, and it continued after his death. Few of his poems survive, since he committed the greater part of his profane verse to the flames, but some of his romances may still be read. It is, however, as a prose-writer, especially in his Cartas Espirituaes (2 pts., 1684, 7), that he holds a foremost place in Portuguese literature. There is less affectation in these more familiar letters than in his Sermões genuinos (1690) or his Obras Espirituaes (1684). The very titles of some of his shorter treatises, Vozes do Ceo e Tremores da Terra, Espelho do Espelho, show that he had not even now altogether escaped the false taste of the time, and artificial flowers of speech, plays on words, laboured metaphors and antitheses appear in his prose. But if it has not the simple severity of a Bernardes, it possesses so persuasive, so passionate an energy, and is of so clear a fervour and harmony that its eloquence is felt to be genuine.

The Jesuit Frei João da Fonseca (1632-1701), in the preface to one of his works, Sylva Moral e Historica (1696), which may have given Bernardes the idea of his Nova Floresta, rejects affected periods and new phrases, and there is no false rhetoric in his Espelho de Penitentes (1687), Satisfaçam de Aggravos (1700), which takes the form of dialogues between a hermit and a soldier, and other devotional works. Another Jesuit, Alexandre de Gusmão (1629-1724), although born at Lisbon, spent most (eighty-five years) of his long life in Brazil. He wrote, among other works, Rosa de Nazareth nas Montanhas de Hebron (1715), compiled from various histories of the Company of Jesus, and Historia do Predestinado Peregrino e seu Irmão Precito (1682). The latter is an allegory in six books which lacks the human interest of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, which it preceded. It describes the journey of two brothers, Predestinado and Precito, out of Egypt to Jerusalem (Heaven) and Babylon (Hell). The style is simpler and more direct than might be inferred from the inflated title, and often has an effective if studied eloquence.[577]

Vieira dying is reported to have said that the Portuguese language was safe in the keeping of Padre Manuel Bernardes. The aged Jesuit, who maintained his interest in literature to the end, may have received Bernardes’ Luz e Calor[578] (1696) in the last year of his life, and the Exercicios Espirituaes (2 vols., 1686) had appeared ten years earlier. Other works, Sermões e Praticas (1711),[579] Nova Floresta (5 vols., 1706-28), Os Ultimos Fins do Homem (1727), Varios Tratados (2 vols., 1737), were soon forthcoming to justify the prophecy. Manuel Bernardes (1644-1710), the son of João Antunes and Maria Bernardes, was born at Lisbon, studied law and philosophy at Coimbra University, and at the age of thirty entered the Lisbon Oratory, where he spent thirty-six years. That was all his life, yet through his books this modest, humorous, austere priest has exercised a profound influence not only, as Barbosa Machado declares, in guiding souls to Heaven, but in moulding and protecting the Portuguese language. His style is marked in an equal degree by grace and concision, intensity and restraint, smoothness and vigour.[580] With him the florid cloak, in which many recent writers had wrapped Portuguese, falls away, leaving the pith and kernel of the language; the conceits of the culteranos disappear, and the most striking effects are attained without apparent artifice. In his hands the pinchbeck and tinsel are transmuted into delicate pieces of ivory. The charm of his style is difficult to analyse, but it may be remarked that his vocabulary is inexhaustible, his precision unfailing, that he is not afraid to employ the commonest words, and that the construction of his sentences is of a transparent simplicity, as bare of rhetoric as is the poetry of João de Deus. His reputation as a lord of language has survived every test. His works are not merely the deliciae of a few distant scholars but an acknowledged glory of the nation, praised by that literary iconoclast Macedo, and quoted as an authority in the Republican Parliament of 1915. The most popular of his works are Luz e Calor, and especially the Nova Floresta, in which moral and familiar anecdote go quaintly hand in hand, but if one must choose between excellence and excellence his masterpiece is the Exercicios Espirituaes, in which thought and expression often rise to sublime heights. One may perhaps compare him with Fray Juan de los Ángeles (†1609). His simple doctrines spring from the heart and, winged by shrewd knowledge of men, touch the heart of his readers. One of his more immediate followers was Padre Manuel Consciencia (c. 1669-1739), author of a large number of works on moral and religious subjects, the best known of which is A Mocidade enganada e desenganada (6 vols., 1729-38).

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