III The Sixteenth Century [1502-80]

§ 1 Gil Vicente

In Portugal a splendid dawn ushered in the sixteenth century. The discovery of the sea route to India, while it gave an impulse to science and literature, also increased religious fervour, since the Portuguese who contended against the Moors in India were but carrying on the work of their ancestors five centuries earlier in Portugal. Old-fashioned Portugal thus only gradually welcomed the Renaissance and stood firm against the Reformation. But in the reign of João III (1521-57) the University of Coimbra came to be one of the best-known universities in Europe. André de Gouvêa (†1548), whom Montaigne called ‘sans comparaison le plus grand principal de France’,[219] and Diogo de Teive returned from the Collège de Sainte-Barbe to inaugurate its studies, and many of its chairs were offered to distinguished Portuguese and foreign scholars, such as Ayres Barbosa (†1540) and George Buchanan (1506-82), as well as to Portuguese humanists such as Antonio de Gouvêa and Achilles Estaço (†1581). Nicholas Cleynarts or Nicolaus Clenardus (1493 or 1494-1542), Professor of Greek and Hebrew at Louvain, came to Portugal from Salamanca as tutor to the Infante Henrique in 1533, and from Portugal wrote some of his wittiest letters.[220] He found Coimbra a second Athens, and few great Portuguese writers of the century had not spent some years there or at the University before it was transferred to Coimbra from Lisbon in 1537. King João III and especially his son, the young prince João (1537-54), Cardinal Henrique (1512-80), and the many-sided Infante Luis (1506-55), favorecedor de toda habilidad, himself a poet of no mean order[221] and pupil of Pedro Nunez, eagerly patronized letters; the household of the accomplished Infanta Maria (1521-77) became the ‘home of the Muses’[222]; learned Luisa Sigea (†1560), of French origin, but born at Toledo and brought up in Portugal, wrote a Latin poem in praise of Syntra; her sister Angela, Joana Vaz, and Publia Hortensia de Castro were likewise noted for their learning, and D. Lianor de Noronha (1488-1563), daughter of Fernando, Marques de Villareal, did good service to Portuguese prose by her encouragement of translations. But Portuguese literature lost something by its latinization, and it is pleasant to turn back half a century to a time when it was humbler and more national. The ‘very prosperous’ Manuel I, Lord of the Ocean,[223] Lord of the East,[224] had been seven years king, Vasco da Gama had returned triumphantly from Calicut (1497-9), Cabral had discovered Brazil for Portugal (1500), Afonso de Albuquerque (†1515) stood on the threshold of his career of conquests and glory, the Portuguese Empire was advancing from North Africa to China,[225] the gold and spices were beginning to arrive in plenty from the East, and hope of honour and riches was drawing nobleman and peasant to Lisbon, when Gil Vicente (c. 1465-1536?) introduced the drama into his

Dressed as a herdsman on the night of June 7, 1502, he congratulated the queen on the birth of the Infante, later King João III (born during the night of June 6), in a Spanish monologue of 114 lines. This speech gives promise of two qualities apparent in his later work: extreme naturalness (the embarrassed peasant wonders open-mouthed at the grand palace and his thoughts turn at once to his village) and love of Nature (mountain and meadow are aflower for joy of the new prince born). But, it may reasonably be asked, where is the drama? It consists principally in the vaqueiro, who is restless as one of the wicked in a Basque pastorale. He rushes into the queen’s chamber, has a look at its luxuries, turns to address the queen, declares that he is in a hurry and must be going, leaps in gladness, and finally introduces some thirty courtiers in herdsman’s dress who offer gifts of milk, eggs, cheese, and honey. There is little in this simple piece—the Visitaçam, or Monologo do Vaqueiro—to foreshadow the sovereign genius,[226] the Plautus, the Shakespeare[227] of Portugal that was Gil Vicente. His life is wrapped in obscurity, and the known existence of half a dozen contemporary Gil Vicentes makes research a risky operation. There was a page (1475) and an escudeiro (1482) of King João II, an official at Santarem, a Santarem carpenter (†1500), there was a Gil Vicente in India in 1512,[228] and a Gil Vicente goldsmith at Lisbon. We know that the poet spoke of himself as near death (visinho da morte) in 1531, although apparently in good health. This would seem to place his birth a few years before 1470.[229] Unfortunately the Auto da Festa, in which he says that he is over sixty, is undated. As, however, it was written before the Templo de Apolo (1526) we may place it probably about 1525. We are thus brought back to about the same date (c. 1465). Almost certainly he was not of exalted parentage.[230] Indeed, he would appear to have been slighted for his humble birth, and sarcastically spoke of himself as the son of a pack-saddler and born at Pederneira (Estremadura).[231] He may have been the son of Luis Vicente or of Martim Vicente, ‘said to have been a silversmith of Guimarães’ (Minho).[232] The frequent mention of the province of Beira is, however, noticeable in his plays. If it were only that his peasants use words such as nega, nego, which according to the grammarian Fernam d’Oliveira were peculiar to Beira (in 1536),[233] it might pass for a dramatic device, since Oliveira remarks that old-fashioned words will not be out of place if we assign them to an old man of Beira or a peasant.[234] Indeed, the grammarian seems to have had Gil Vicente especially in view (he mentions him in another connexion) since three of the six words that he notes—abem, acajuso, algorrem—occur in three successive lines of the Barca do Purgatorio, and another, samicas, is as great a favourite with Vicente as at first was soncas,[235] derived from Enzina. But it is impossible to explain all the references to Beira by the supposition that beirão is equivalent to rustic and Beira to Boeotia, for Beira and the Serra da Estrella intrude constantly and indeed pervade his work. He shows personal knowledge of the country between Manteigas and Fundão, and we may suspect that it was in order to connect ‘Portuguese Fame desired of all nations’ with Beira ‘our province’ rather than with rusticity that he makes her keep ducks as a mocinha da Beira. We do not know when Vicente came to Lisbon, nor whether, as José de Cabedo de Vasconcellos, another (17th c.) genealogist, would have us believe, he became the tutor (mestre de rhetorica) of King Manuel, then Duke of Beja. Of his life at Lisbon our information is almost as meagre. We know, of course, that he accompanied the Court to Evora, Coimbra, Thomar, Almeirim, and other towns to set up and act in his plays, that besides acting in his plays he wrote songs for them and music for the songs. We know that he received considerable gifts in money and in kind both from King Manuel and from João III, in whose reign he complains of being penniless and neglected. Some hold that he married his first wife, Branca Bezerra, in 1512, that he owned the Quinta do Mosteiro near Torres Vedras (a supposition no longer tenable), that the name of his second wife was Melicia Rodriguez, but we have no certainty as to this, nor as to the number of his children. The accomplished Paula became musician and lady-in-waiting to the Infanta Maria before the death of her father, whom she helped—runs the legend—in the composition of his plays,[236] as she helped her brother Luis in editing them in 1562. From a document concerning another brother, Belchior, we know that Gil Vicente (seu pae que Deus haja) died before April 16, 1540. There is some reason to believe that he died in the year of his last play (1536) or early in 1537. From his assertion that the mere collection of his works was a great burden to his old age[237] we might judge him to have been very old, but he may have been worn out with labour in many fields and his health had not always been good. He suffered from fever and plague, which brought him to death’s door in 1525, and he had grown stout with advancing age. An incident at Santarem on the occasion of the great earthquake of 1531, so vividly described by Garcia de Resende, shows him in a very attractive light, for by his personal prestige and eloquent words he succeeded in restraining the monks and quieting the half-maddened populace, and thus saved the ‘new Christians’ from ill-treatment or massacre.

We know a little more about him if we identify him with Gil Vicente, the goldsmith of Queen Lianor (1458-1525), sister of King Manuel and widow of King João II, whose most famous work is the beautiful Belem monstrance, wrought of the first tribute of gold from the East (from Quiloa or Kilwa).[238] The probabilities in favour of identity are so convincing that we are bound to assume it unless an insuperable obstacle presents itself. Our faith in manuscript documents and genealogies is not increased by the fact that one investigator, the Visconde Sanches de Baena (1822-1909), emerges with the triumphant conclusion that the two Gil Vicentes were uncle and nephew, while another, Dr. Theophilo Braga, declares that they are cousins. Perhaps we may be permitted to believe in neither and to restore Gil Vicente to himself. For indeed this was a singular instance of cousinly love. The goldsmith wrote verses; the poet takes a remarkable interest in the goldsmith’s art.[239] The goldsmith is appointed inspector (vedor) of all works in gold and silver at the convent of Thomar, the Lisbon Hospital of All Saints, and Belem. The poet is particularly fond of referring to Thomar,[240] and in its convent in 1523 staged his Farsa de Inés Pereira (who lived at Thomar with her first husband), while at the Hospital of All Saints was played the Barca do Purgatorio in 1518. The goldsmith was in the service of the widow of João II, Queen Lianor, who mentions two of his chalices in her will; the poet at the request of the same Queen Lianor wrote verses, probably in 1509, in a poetical contest about a gold chain and was encouraged by her to write his early plays.[241] The goldsmith was Mestre da Balança from 1513 to 1517; the poet goes out of his way to refer to os da Moeda, familiarly but not as one of them, in 1521. He henceforth devoted himself more ardently to the literary side of his genius, speaks of himself as Gil Vicente who writes autos for the king, and with an occasional sigh[242] that he can no longer afford to stage his plays as splendidly as of old (in King Manuel’s reign) produces them with increasing frequency. ‘Had Gil Vicente been a goldsmith and a goldsmith of such skill,’ said the late Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856-1912), ‘it would have been impossible for him to leave no trace of it in his dramatic works and for all the contemporary writers who speak of him to have kept complete silence as to his artistic talent.’[243] But his work is essentially that of an artist (Menéndez y Pelayo himself well calls him an alma de artista)[244]: involuntarily one likens his sketches to some rough terra-cotta figure of Tanagra or sculpture in early Gothic, and his lyrics are clear-cut gems, a thing very rare in Portuguese literature. Intensely Portuguese in his lyrism and his satire, he is almost un-Portuguese in the extreme plasticity of his genius. Concrete, definite images spring from his brain in contrast to the vaguer effusions of most Portuguese poets. And if Queen Lianor’s goldsmith, like the troubadour ourives Elias Cairel, or, to come to the fifteenth century, like Diogo Fernandez and Afonso Valente of the Cancioneiro de Resende,[245] set himself to write verses, this would call for no comment. Every one wrote verses. Had a celebrated poet—say the Gil Vicente of 1520—wrought the custodia his contemporaries might have recorded the fact, but Gil Vicente was not a famous poet when the custodia was begun in 1503. Stress was therefore naturally laid on the plays of Gil Vicente the goldsmith, not on the art of Gil Vicente the poet. The historian Barros refers in 1540 to Gil Vicente comico,[246] and since 1517 he had certainly been more comico than ourives. But the comico who was dramatist and lyric poet, musician, actor, preacher in prose and verse, may also have been a goldsmith. His versatility was that of Damião de Goes a little later or of his own contemporary Garcia de Resende, with genius added. The fact that the official document in which Gil Vicente lavrador da Rainha Lianor is appointed to his post in the Lisbon Casa da Moeda (Feb. 4, 1513[247]) has above it a contemporary note Gil Vᵗᵉ trouador mestre da balãça should in itself be conclusive evidence that the poet was the goldsmith of the queen. This modest but intimate position at Court accords well with what we know of the poet and with the production of his plays. The offerings at the end of the Visitaçam seem to have suggested to Queen Lianor the idea of its repetition on Christmas morning, but Gil Vicente, considering its matter inappropriate, wrote a new play with parts for six shepherds. This Auto Pastoril Castelhano is four times as long as the Visitaçam. The shepherds pass the time in dance and song, games, riddles, and various conversation (the dowry of the bride of one of them is catalogued in the manner of Enzina[248] and the Archpriest of Hita). To them the Angels announce the birth of the Redeemer, and they go to sing and dance before aquel garzon. The principal part, that of the mystic shepherd Gil Terron, ‘inclined to the life contemplative’, well read (letrudo) in the Bible, with some knowledge of metaphysics and perhaps of the Corte Imperial, devoted to Nature and the sierras benditas, was evidently played by Gil Vicente himself. A fortnight later, for the Day of Kings, he had ready the Auto dos Reis Magos (1503), again at the request of Queen Lianor, who had ‘been very pleased’ with what Vicente himself called a pobre cousa. This brief interval of time limited the length of the new play. Its action is as slight. A shepherd enters who has lost his way to Bethlehem. He meets another shepherd and then a hermit, whom they ply with irreverent problems. To them enters a knight of Araby, and finally the three kings, singing a vilancete. The Auto da Sibila Cassandra has been assigned to the same year, but is probably a later play (1513?). Nearly twice as long as the Auto Pastoril Castelhano, it combines the ordinary scenic display—todo o apparato—of a Christmas representação with a presentment of the early prophecies now to be fulfilled, and introduces Solomon, Isaiah, Abraham, and Moses, who describes the creation of the world. The play includes a profane theme, since Cassandra in her mystic aversion from marriage realistically portrays the sad life of married women in Portugal. Although Cassandra appears as a shepherdess and her aunt Peresica as a peasant, they speak a purer, more flowing Castilian than the toscos, rusticos pastores of the preceding autos, and the play is remarkable for the beauty of its lyrics—Dicen que me case yo, Sañosa está la niña, Muy graciosa es la doncella, and A la guerra. For the Corpus Christi procession of 1504 was provided, at short notice from Queen Lianor, the Auto de S. Martinho. The subject of this piece, merely ten dodecasyllabic oitavas followed by a solemn prosa, is that of El Greco’s marvellous picture—St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar, whom Vicente treats with characteristic sympathy and insight:

The Auto dos Quatro Tempos, of uncertain date, acted before the Court in the Lisbon palace of Alcaçova on Christmas morning in or after 1511, opens with a mystic ode on the Nativity and a vilancete (A ti dino de adorar) and proceeds rapidly with snatches of song in a splendid rivalry between the four seasons. The praises of Spring are sung with a delightful freshness, as are Winter’s rages, while Summer in a straw hat appears sallow and fever-stricken. Jupiter comes with countless classical allusions and David with much Latin, and they all worship together the new-born King. Very different is the Auto da Alma, written for Queen Lianor and acted in King Manuel’s Lisbon palace of Ribeira on the night of Good Friday, 1518 (Snr. Braamcamp Freire’s plausible suggestion in place of the commonly accepted 1508). It represents the eternal strife between the soul and sin. The soul, slowly journeying in the company of its guardian angel, is alternately tempted by Satan with the delights of the world, with fine dresses and jewels, and exhorted by the Angel, till it arrives at the Church, the Innkeeper of Souls, and confesses its guilt, imploring protection (Ach neige, du schmerzenreiche!). Then, while Satan in a restless fury of disappointment makes a last effort to secure his victim, the ransomed soul is fortified with celestial fare served by St. Augustine and other doutores. The whole theme, to which the language rises fully adequate, is treated with great delicacy and with a mystic fervour.

In 1505 King Manuel and his Court in his Lisbon palace had witnessed the first of those farsas in which Gil Vicente has sketched for all time Portuguese life in the first third of the sixteenth century. It rapidly became popular and went from hand to hand as a folha volante, receiving from the people the name of Quem tem farelos? i.e. the first three words of the play. The plots of the twelve farsas written from 1505 to 1531 are so slight that only one calls for detailed notice, the Farsa de Inés Pereira[250] (1523), which in its carefully defined characters and developed story more closely resembles a modern comedy. It tells how the hapless Inés, having rejected a plain suitor for a more romantic lover, a poor but deceptive escudeiro presented to her by two Jewish marriage agents, learns by bitter experience the truth of the old proverb that ‘an ass that carries me is better than a horse that throws me’. But the types and persons in all these farces are etched with so much realism and humour that they bite into the memory and rank with the living malicious sketches of Lazarillo de Tormes. Who can forget the famished escudeiro Aires Rosado with his book of songs (cancioneiro) and guitar, continuing to sing beneath the window of his love while the curses of her mother fall thick as snowflakes on his head,[251] or the lady of his affections, vain and idle Isabel, or his servant (moço) Apariço who draws so cruel a picture of his master, or that other penniless escudeiro who considers himself ‘the very palace’ and calls up his moço Fernando at midnight to light the lamp and hold the inkstand while he writes down his latest verses?[252] Equally well sketched is the splendid poverty-plagued fidalgo who walks abroad accompanied by six pages, but cannot pay his chaplain or his goldsmith; his ill-used, servile, ambitious chaplain[253]; the witch Genebra Pereira mixing the hanged man’s ear, the heart of a black cat, and other grim ingredients: Alguidar, alguidar, que feito foste ao luar[254]; the household of the Jewish tailor who delights in songs of battles-at-a-distance and is filled with pride when the Regedor salutes him in the street[255]; M. Diafoirus’ lineal ancestors Mestres Anrique, Felipe, Fernando, and Torres[256]; the sporting priest[257]; the unfaithful wife of the Portuguese who has embarked for India with Tristão da Cunha; the vainglorious, grandiloquent Spaniard who takes the opportunity to pay his court to her.[258] They are all drawn from life with a master hand, even the more insignificant figures, the girl keeping ducks, the moços, the gipsy horse-dealers,[259] the old man amorous,[260] the carriers faring leisurely along with their mules, the braggart who disables six of his fourteen imaginary opponents, the Frenchman and Italian with their stock phrases Par ma foi, la belle France, tutti quanti,[261] the wily and impudent negro, the poor ratinho[262] Gonçalo, who loses his hare and capons and his clothes as well, the page of peasant birth ambitious to become a cavaleiro fidalgo, the roguish and pretentious palace pages. Side by side with these farces Vicente continued to write religious autos as well as comedies and tragicomedies. The difference between these various pieces is less of kind than of the occasion on which they were produced, the obras de devação on Christmas morning or other solemn day,[263] the farsas de folgar, comedias, &c., at the evening parties—those famous serões of King Manuel’s reign to which the courtiers thronged at dusk, and which Sá de Miranda remembered with regret.[264] All provide us with realistic sketches since the background is filled with the common people, the real hero of Gil Vicente’s plays as it is of Fernam Lopez’ chronicles. Thus the Auto da Mofina Mendes (Christmas, 1534), besides its heavenly gloria with the Virgin, Gabriel, Prudence, Poverty, Humility, and Faith, has a very life-like peasant scene in which Mofina Mendes, personifying Misfortune, represents a Portuguese version of Pierrette et son pot au lait. The Auto Pastoril Portugues (Christmas, 1523) is a similar scene of peasant life, relating the cross-currents of the shepherds’ loves and the finding of an image of the Virgin on the hills. The Auto da Feira, acted before King João at Lisbon in 1527, is a more elaborate Christmas play. Mercury, Time, Rome, and the Devil attend a fair, and this furnishes opportunity for a vigorous attack upon the Church of Rome, with her indulgences for others and her self-indulgence, who has not the kings of the Earth but herself to blame if she is rushing on ruin, ruin that will be inevitable unless she mends her ways. But to the fair also come the peasants Denis and Amancio, as dissatisfied with their wives as their wives are dissatisfied with them (their conversation is most voluble and natural), and market-girls, basket on head, come down singing from the hills. Another Christmas play, the Auto da Fé, was acted in the royal chapel at Almeirim in 1510, and consists of a simple conversation between Faith and two shepherds. The Breve Summario da Historia de Deos[265] (1527) and the Auto da Cananea (written for the Abbess of Odivellas in 1534) are both based on the Bible; the former, which contains the vilancete sung by Abel (Adorae montanhas), outlines the story of the Fall, of Job, and of the New Testament to the Crucifixion, sometimes in passages of great beauty. The latter develops the episode of the woman of Canaan (Matt. xv. 21-8). The great trilogy of Barcas, which ranks among Vicente’s most important works, is of earlier date. The first part, Auto da Barca do Inferno, was acted before Queen Maria pera consolação as she lay on her death-bed in 1517, the second, Auto da Barca do Purgatorio, at Christmas of the following year in Lisbon, and the Auto da Barca da Gloria at Almeirim in 1519. The plot, again, is of the simplest: the Devil, combining the parts of Charon and Rhadamanthus, ferry-man and judge, invites Death’s victims to show cause why they should not enter his boat; and the interest is in the light thus thrown upon the earthly behaviour of nobleman, judge, advocate, usurer, fool, love-lorn friar, the cheating market-woman, the cobbler who throve by deceiving the people, the peasant who skimped his tithes, the little shepherdess who had seen God ‘often and often’, of Count, King,[266] and Emperor, Bishop, Cardinal, and Pope. The first part ends with a noble invocation to the knights who had died fighting in Africa, and the second begins with the mystic jewelled romance: Remando vam remadores.

The comedies and tragicomedies vary greatly. The Comedia de Rubena (1521) is, like A Winter’s Tale, quite without unity of time or place (for this primitive humanist, although he might mention Plato, did not ‘reverence the Stagirite’), but is divided into three acts (called scenes) as in a modern play. Cismena, like Perdita born in the first scene, is conveyed by fairies to Crete, where she is wooed and won by the Prince of Syria. The Comedia do Viuvo (1514) is much more compact and has a delicate charm. Don Rosvel, a prince in disguise, serves in the house of a widower at Burgos for love of his daughters. (He is in love with both, but his brother in search of him arrives and marries the second.) On the other hand, the Comedia sobre a divisa da cidade de Coimbra, acted before King João III in his ever-loyal city of Coimbra in 1527, is a lengthy, far-fetched explanation of the city’s arms, and the Floresta de Enganos (played before the king at Evora in 1536) is a succession of scenes of pure farce—the deceit practised upon a merchant, the ludicrous predicament to which love reduced the grave old judge who had taken his degree in Paris—with a more serious theme, a Portuguese version of the story of Psyche and Eros. Of the ‘tragicomedies’ two, Dom Duardos (1525?) and Amadis de Gaula (1533), dramatize romances of chivalry: Primaleon, that ‘dulce & aplacible historia translated from the Greek’,[267] and Amadis.[268] The work is done with skill, for Vicente succeeds here as always in being natural, and in this twilight atmosphere of garden flowers and romance keeps his realism.[269] Both plays contain passages of great lyrical beauty, and Dom Duardos ends with the romance beginning Pelo mes era de Abril. Thus in his latter age he successfully adapted himself to pastures new. In his letter dedicating Dom Duardos to King João III he wrote: ‘Since, excellent Prince and most powerful King, the comedies, farces and moralities which I wrote for (en servicio de) the Queen your Aunt were low figures[270] in which there was no fitting rhetoric to satisfy the delicate spirit of your Highness, I realized that I must crowd more sail on to my poor bark.’ For us the words have a tinge of irony, and however much some readers may admire the hushed rapture of these idyllic scenes we miss the merry author of the farsas, and gladly turn to the Romagem de Aggravados (1533) in which Vicente proves that his hand had lost none of its cunning. ‘This tragicomedy is a satire’ says the rubric, and it introduces us to the inimitable Frei Paço, the mincing courtier-priest with gloves, gilt sword, and velvet cap (one of Sá de Miranda’s clerigos perfumados), to the discontented peasant who brings his son to be made a priest, the talkative fish-wives, the hypocrite Frei Narciso scheming to be made a bishop, and awkward Giralda, the peasant Aparicianes’ daughter, whom Frei Paço instructs so competently in Court manners. This long play was written for a special occasion, the birth of the Infante Felipe. Gil Vicente for many years, as poet laureate, had celebrated great events at Court. When the Duke of Braganza was about to leave with the expedition against Azamor in 1513 he wrote the eloquent Exhortaçam da Guerra, which is introduced by a necromancer priest and ends with a rousing call to war (soiça):

When King Manuel’s daughter, the princess Beatrice, married the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Vicente wrote the Cortes de Jupiter, in which the Providence of God bids Jupiter, King of the Elements, speed her on her voyage, and the courtiers and inhabitants of Lisbon accompany her ship, swimming, to the mouth of the Tagus. The Fragoa de Amor (1525) was written on the occasion of the betrothal of King João and Queen Catherina (who replaced Queen Lianor as Vicente’s protector and patron). Into the forge, to the sound of singing, goes a negro, and then Justice in the form of a bent old woman who is forced to disgorge all her bribes and reappears upright and fair. A similar play, Nao de Amor (1527), in which courtiers caulk a miniature ship on the stage, was played before their Majesties in Lisbon two years later. The Templo de Apolo (1526) was acted when another daughter of King Manuel left Lisbon to become the wife of the Emperor Charles V. The author introduces the play and excuses its deficiencies on the plea that he has been seriously ill with fever. He then relates the dream of fair women—las hermosas que son muertas—that he had seen in his sickness. Apollo then enters, and after declaring that he would have made the world otherwise mounts the pulpit and preaches a mock sermon. The world, Fame, Victory, come to his temple and bear witness to the greatness of the Emperor Charles V. A Portuguese peasant also comes and has more difficulty in obtaining admittance. The author called the play an obra doliente, and it was propped up by a passage from the earlier Auto da Festa (1525?), edited by the Conde de Sabugosa from the unique copy in his possession. Its figures are Truth, two gipsies, a fool, and seven peasants. Their speech is markedly beirão and the old woman closely resembles the velha of the tragicomedy Triunfo do Inverno, written to celebrate the birth of Princess Isabel in 1529, as the Auto da Lusitania celebrated that of Prince Manuel in 1532 and the Tragicomedia Pastoril da Serra da Estrella that of Princess Maria in 1527. The latter is a whole-hearted play of the Serra with a cossante, a baile de terreiro and chacota, and continual fragments of song: one of the most Portuguese of Vicente’s plays. The Triunfo do Inverno contains some most effective scenes and a bewildering wealth of lyrics: before one is finished another has begun, and the whole long play goes forward at a gallop. The first triumph of Winter is on the hills, the Serra da Estrella (serra nevada); the second, on the sea, affords a telling satire against the pilots on India-bound ships. The pilot here begins by stating that the storm will be nothing, then he says that he is not to blame for Winter’s conduct, finally he falls to imploring the Virgin and St. George and St. Nicholas; and but for his incompetence the ship might have been lying safe at Cochin. The second part of the tragicomedy is the Triumph of Spring in the Serra de Sintra. Spring enters in a lyrical profusion singing

breaks off into Afuera, afuera nublados, and resumes his song:

Enough has perhaps been said to suggest the variety of these plays, the glow of colour that pervades them, and to show how far their author, although his genius was never fully realized in his autos, had travelled from the first glimmerings of the drama in Portugal and from his first model, Enzina. Rudiments of dramatic art existed in the Middle Ages in the ceremonies provided by an essentially dramatic Church and in the mummeries and mimicking jograes that delighted the people. Bonamis and his companion furnished some kind of extremely primitive play (arremedillum) for King Sancho I, and they were probably only the most successful of hundreds of wandering mimics and players. Mimicry and scenic display[271] were the principal ingredients of the momos in which Rui de Sousa excelled[272] and the entremeses for which Portugal was famous: they scarcely belonged to literature, although they might include a song and prose breve such as the Conde do Vimioso’s, printed in the Cancioneiro Geral. Religious processions and Christmas, Epiphany, Passion, or Easter scenes[273] gave further scope for dramatic display, as also popular ceremonies such as that in which ‘Emperors’ and ‘Kings’—figures similar, no doubt, to those still to be seen in Spanish processions (e. g. at Valencia)—were carried in triumph to the churches, accompanied by jograes who invaded the pulpit and preached profane sermons containing ‘many iniquities and abominations’, even while mass was in progress. The popular tendencies darkly suggested in the Constituições are manifest in Vicente’s plays—the Christmas representações, the preaching of burlesque sermons, parodies of the mass, profane litanies, parodies and paraphrases of the Lord’s Prayer. Like the Clercs de la Bazoche in France, he represents the drama breaking its ecclesiastical fetters. It was, however, from Spain that the idea of his autos first came to him, as the direct imitations of Juan del Enzina (1469?-1529?) in Vicente’s early pieces and the explicit statement of Garcia de Resende in his Miscellania prove: he speaks of the representações of very eloquent style and new devices invented in Portugal by Gil Vicente, and adds the qualifying clause that credit for the invention of the pastoril belongs to Enzina. But the wine of Vicente’s genius soon burst the old bottles, and when his plays ceased to be confined to the pastoril he naturally turned elsewhere for suggestion. He himself towards the end of his life called his religious plays moralidades, and the real name of the play popularly known as the Farsa da Mofina Mendes was Os Mysterios da Virgem.[274] The introduction of Lucifer as Maioral do Inferno and Belial as his meirinho[275] may have been derived from French mystères; the conception of his Barcas certainly owed more to the Danse macabre (probably through the Spanish fifteenth-century Danza de la Muerte) than to Dante. The burlesque testamento of Maria Parda[276] is one of a long list of such wills (of which an example is the mule’s testament in the Cancioneiro Geral),[277] but in some of its expressions appears to be copied from the Testament de Pathelin. His knowledge of French was perhaps more fluent than accurate, like his Latin which, albeit copious, did not claim to be ‘pure Tully’. But there are many references to France in his plays, as there are in the Cancioneiro Geral, and, although the enselada from France with which the Auto da Fé ends (i. 75) and the French song (i. 92) Ay de la noble ville de Paris[278] were no doubt some fashionable courtier’s latest acquisition, Vicente in literary matters probably shared the curiosity of the Court as to what was going on beyond the frontiers of Portugal. The great majority of his songs are, however, plainly indigenous. His knowledge of Italian certainly enabled him to read Italian plays and poems. We know that he was a great reader—he mentions ‘the written works that I have seen, in verse and prose, rich in style and matter’. In Spanish he did not confine himself to Enzina. He read romances of chivalry, imitated the romances with supreme success, mentions Diego de San Pedro’s La Carcel de Amor, had read the autos of Lucas Fernandez, the comedias of Bartolomé de Torres Naharro probably, and without doubt the Archpriest of Hita’s Libro de Buen Amor, possessed by King Duarte, and the Celestina. Indeed, for some time past barriers between the two literatures had scarcely existed and Vicente enriched both. Celestina would have spoken many proverbs had she foreseen that he would allow two men (judeos casamenteiros) to take the bread out of her mouth, but he copies her in his Brigida Vaz, Branca Gil, the formidable Anna Diaz, and the beata alcoviteira of the Comedia de Rubena, although he may also have had in mind the moller mui vil of King Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (No. 64), with the spirit of which—their fondness for popular types and satire—Vicente had more in common than with the Cancioneiro Geral, compiled by his friend Resende. With this collection he was naturally familiar, and must have heard many of its songs before it was published in 1516. A line here and there in Vicente seems to be an echo of the Cancioneiro,[279] although the fact that it mentions some of his types (as in the Arrenegos[280] of Gregorio Afonso) merely means that he drew from the life around him. His satire of doctors and priests, although essentially popular and mediaeval—both are present in the Cantigas de Santa Maria—was also due to his personal observation: that is to say, he gave realistic expression to a satire of which the motive was literary (since satire directed against priests had long been one of the chief resources of comic writers in France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal).[281] The type of the poor fidalgo or famishing escudeiro on which Vicente dwells so fondly—we have the latter as Aires Rosado in Quem tem farelos? and anonymous in the Farsa de Inés Pereira and O Juiz da Beira[282]—is another instance of literary tradition combined with observation at first hand. Of the priest-satire Vicente was the last free exponent in Portugal. That of the poor gentleman was even older and survived him. It dates from Roman times. The amethystinatus of Spanish Martial[283] reappears in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana, in the Archpriest of Hita’s Don Furon, in the lindos fidalgos que viven lazerados of Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino, in the Cancioneiro Geral, and just before Vicente’s death is wittily described, as the raphanophagus purpuratus, by Clenardus,[284] and less urbanely in Lazarillo de Tormes. With no Inquisition to crush him he continued to starve in literature—for instance, in the anonymous later sixteenth-century play Auto do Escudeiro Surdo he and his moço come on the scene in thoroughly Vicentian guise: a vossa fome de pam ... meio tostão gasto quinze dias ha[285]—as he starves in the real life of the Peninsula to-day.[286] In a sense Gil Vicente no doubt borrowed widely; he was no sorcerer to make bricks without straw, and straw, like poets, is not manufactured: it has to be gathered in. But the homens de bom saber who, as we know from the rubric to the Farsa de Inés Pereira, doubted his originality must have been very superficial as well as envious critics, for the bricks were essentially his own. Indeed, every page of his autos is hall-marked as his, ca non alheo, and he could say with King Alfonso X:

Besides the Auto da Festa we have 42 plays[287]: 12 farsas, 16 obras de devaçam, 4 comedias, 10 tragicomedias. Some of them were staged with much pomp and grande aparato de musica in the spacious times of King Manuel, but they lose little in being merely read. They contain a few scenes of dramatic insight and power, a few touches of real comedy, but above all we value them for their types and characters, the insight they afford us into man and that particular period of man’s history, and for the lyrics and lyrical passages, fragments of heaven-born poetry thrown out tantalizingly at random as the dramatist passes rapidly, carelessly on. We do not possess all Vicente’s plays. A farce which in a poem to the Conde de Vimioso (?1525) he says that he had in hand, A Caça dos Segredos, was perhaps never finished, or perhaps it was produced seven years later as the Auto da Lusitania (1532). Others were probably lost as folhas volantes before the edition of 1562 could collect them. Three at least, the Auto da Aderencia do Paço, Auto da Vida do Paço, and Jubileu de Amor or Amores, were suppressed.[288] The latter, in Spanish and Portuguese, was probably the cause of the loss of the two other plays, for, having ventured far away from the natural piety of Portugal, it was acted in Brussels on December 21, 1531, in the house of the Portuguese Ambassador, D. Pedro de Mascarenhas, and in the mind of the Nuncio, Cardinal Aleandro, who was among those invited, this ‘manifest satire against Rome’ caused such commotion that, as he wrote, he ‘seemed to be in mid-Saxony listening to Luther[289] or in the horrors of the sack of Rome’.[290] Yet in 1533 impenitent, the incorrigible Vicente is pillorying the Court priest, Frei Paço. The fact is that in Portugal no one could suspect the sheep-dog, who had for so long and so mordantly kept watch over the Court flock, of turning wolf and encouraging the seitas and cismas against which Alvaro de Brito had already inveighed. He was himself deeply, mystically religious and perhaps cared the less for creeds and dogmas. His mystic philosophy appears as early as 1502. Yet they do him a poor service who represent him as a profound theologian, a great philosopher, an authoritative philologist. His plays show us a man lovable and human, tolerant of opinions, intolerant of abuses,[291] a man of many gifts, with a passionate devotion to his country. We have only to turn to the ringing Exhortaçam da Guerra or the Auto da Fama. The whole of the latter is written in a glow of pride and patriotism at Portugal’s vast, increasing empire and the victories of Albuquerque:

Clearly the words to him are a sweet music.[292] From one point of view Gil Vicente’s position exactly tallied with Herculano’s description of the bobo. He was a Court jester, expected to render the idle courtiers muy ledos. To this purpose he was compelled to saddle his plays with passages which for us have lost their savour and significance but almost every line of which must have elicited a smile or a shout of laughter at the serões. We may instance O Clerigo da Beira, which ends with the signs and planets under which various courtiers were born, the Tragicomedia da divisa da cidade de Coimbra, with the origins of various noble families, the malicious catalogue raisonné of courtiers in the Cortes de Jupiter, Branca Gil’s comical litany in O Velho da Horta, the sixty-four puzzle verses of the Auto das Fadas. But Vicente frequently had a deeper purpose than to enliven a fashionable gathering. The abuse of indulgences, the corruption of the clergy,[293] the subjection of married women, the danger of appointing ignorant men to the responsible position of pilot, the mingling of the classes—it was not so, he remarks, in Germany or Flanders, France or Venice—the increasing tendency to shun honest labour in order to occupy a position however humble at Court,[294] the ignorance and presumption of the peasants, the false display and false ambitions, the thousand new lies and deceits, the decay of piety, the growth of luxury and corresponding diminution in gaiety—these were matters which he sought not only to portray but to correct, with much earnestness in his iocis levibus. But to the end of his life he was never able to learn that religion and virtue must be melancholy. In the introduction to the Triunfo do Inverno (1529) he complains of the loss of the joyous dances and songs of Portugal and the disappearance in the last twenty years of the gaiteiro and his cheerful piping. He himself drew his inspiration from the people, from Nature, and from the Scriptures, with which he had no superficial acquaintance. In his love of Nature and his wide curiosity he studied children and birds, plants and flowers, astronomy and witchcraft—those myriad forms of sorcery in Portugal, some of which have fortunately survived in the prohibitory decrees of the Church. He included in his plays or alluded to many of the traditions, the songs and dances of old Portugal—the ancient cossantes, the bailes de terreiro, bailos vilãos,[295] bailes da Beira, chacotas, folias, alvoradas, janeiras, lampas de S. João.[296] For he stood at the parting of the ways. Desirous and capable of playing many parts, tinged unawares by the new spirit of the Renaissance, but at the same time keenly national, he linked the Middle Ages with the new learning and the old traditions of Portugal with her ever-widening dominions, for which he showed the wise enthusiasm of a true imperialist. But behind the new glitter and luxury of Lisbon he constantly saw the growing misery of the people of Portugal for which all the splendour of King Manuel’s reign had been but a terrible storm[297]; and his latter sadness was perhaps less personal than patriotic. He had done what he could, far more than had been required of him. He had been expected to delight a Court audience, and had mingled warning and instruction with amusement; and when, having lived and laughed and loved, he went his way, he was not only spared by a crowning grace from the wrath that was to come but left to his countrymen an heirloom more enduring than brass, more precious than all the gold of India, with a breath of that true Portugal in its simplicity, its mirth and jollity, the disappearance of which he had deplored. Portuguese literature was never so national again. A period of splendid achievement followed, but alike in subject and language it was too often a honeyed sweetness containing in itself the seeds of decay, and if for the time it swept away all memory of Gil Vicente, for us it only emphasizes his qualities by the contrast. In his directness, his close contact with the people,[298] his humanity, his quick observation, keen satire, love of laughter and malicious humour, in his unsurpassed lyrical gift and his natural delight in words, to be used not at haphazard but weighed and set cunningly as precious stones in the hands of an ourives, this great lyrical poet and charmingly incorrect playwright clearly foreshadowed dramatists so different as Calderón, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, and Molière. Yet we look in vain for a Vicentian school of great dramatists in Portugal. His fame had reached Brussels and thence Rome, and Erasmus is credited with having wished to learn Portuguese in order to read Vicente’s plays. Shakespeare, who was twenty-two when the second edition of Vicente’s plays appeared and who almost certainly read Spanish, may also have been tempted. It would have been strange if Erasmus had not heard of Vicente through his friend André de Resende, who in his Latin poem Genethliacon declared that had not the comic poet Gil Vicente, actor and author, written in the vulgar tongue he would have rivalled Menander and excelled Plautus and Terence. In Portugal the number of plays written in the sixteenth century was large,[299] but none can be placed on a level with those of Vicente. One cannot say that he influenced Camões or Ferreira de Vasconcellos deeply, although they had evidently read him. In Spain Cervantes, who read everything, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles, had read his plays (the Farsa dos Fisicos, O Juiz da Beira, the Comedia de Rubena among others), Lope de Vega likewise, Calderón possibly. Lope de Rueda probably derived the idea of his paso Las Aceitunas from the Auto da Mofina Mendes. Yet it is almost with amazement, if we forget the crowded history of Portugal and Portuguese literature in the sixteenth century, the introduction of the Inquisition, and the great changes in the language, that we find a Portuguese, Sousa de Macedo, a century after Vicente’s death, speaking of him as one ‘whose style was celebrated of old’,[300] and a Spaniard, Nicolás Antonio, declaring that his works were written in prose and knowing nothing of a collected edition.[301] It was with reasonable misgivings that Vicente just before his death wrote: Livro meu, que esperas tu?; ‘my book, what is in store for you?’ We know that it remained in manuscript for a quarter of a century, that a second edition in 1586 was so handled by the Censorship that it contains but thirty-five mutilated plays, and that for two and a half centuries no new edition was printed.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 2 Lyric and Bucolic Poetry

The romantic story of Macias had not been given literary form, but it exercised a wide influence over the Portuguese poets of the sixteenth century. Together perhaps with Diego de San Pedro’s Carcel de Amor, the Spanish version of Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, and especially Rodriguez de la Cámara’s El siervo libre de Amor (containing the Estoria de los dos amadores Ardanlier e Liesa), it must have been in the mind of Bernardim Ribeiro (1482-1552) when he wrote that ‘gentle tale of love and languishment’ the book of Saudades, which is always known (like the first farce of Gil Vicente) from its first three words as Menina e moça. Yet it is not really an imitative work, being, indeed, remarkable for its unaffected sincerity, as the expression of a personal experience. Its passionate truth continues to delight many readers.[302] Almost all our information about Ribeiro’s life is derived from his writings, which are in part evidently autobiographical, and it shrinks or expands according to the degree of the critic’s wariness or ingenuity. His birthplace is declared to have been the quaint Alentejan village of Torrão. A passage in the eclogue Jano e Franco says that Jano fled thence at the time of the great famine. The unhappy frequency of famines makes the date doubtful, but if the year of Ribeiro’s birth be correctly stated in an official document of May 6, 1642, as 1482, we may suppose—since Jano was twenty-one—that he left his native Alentejo for Lisbon in 1503. It is possible that he studied law and took his degree at the University (at Lisbon) a few years later (1507-11?),[303] and became secretary to King João III in 1524. As a cavalleiro fidalgo he had his place at Court, as poet he contributed to the Cancioneiro Geral (1516). A hopeless passion drove him from the Court, drove him perhaps to Italy, and finally deprived him of his reason, so that his last years were spent in the Lisbon Hospital de Todos os Santos.[304] Successive generations have busied themselves over the object of his passion. The romantic tradition that it was the Princess Beatriz, twenty-two years his junior, the daughter of King Manuel for whose marriage to the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Gil Vicente wrote the Cortes de Jupiter, is now definitely discarded. That it was Queen Juana la Loca of Castille no one except Varnhagen has ever imagined. But literary critics continue to be tempted by the transparent anagrams of Ribeiro’s novel (adopted evidently in order to make the story unintelligible to all except the inner circle of the Court). Dr. Theophilo Braga has an ingeniously fabricated theory that Aonia was Ribeiro’s cousin, Joana Tavares Zagalo. Lamentor at least can scarcely have been King Manuel, since he sends his daughter to the king’s Court. The scenery appears to be a combination of that of the Serra de Sintra near Lisbon with that of Alentejo. The story opens with an introductory chapter in which a young girl (menina e moça), who has taken refuge in the serra far from all human society, announces her intention of writing down what she had seen and heard in a small book (livrinho), not for the happy to read but for the sad, or rather for none at all, seeing that of him for whom alone it is intended she has had no news since his and her misfortune bore him away to far-distant lands. Thus we have the thirteenth-century amiga mourning for her lover. Ai Deus! e u é? Presently, as she shelters from the noonday calma beneath trees that overhang a gently flowing stream, a nightingale pours forth its song, and then dying with its song falls with a shower of leaves and is borne away songless by the silent stream.[305] She is still bewailing its fate when another, older but equally sad, lady (dona) appears, and the menina becomes an almost silent listener to the end of the book while the dona unfolds the tale which is its true subject, the history of two friends Narbindel and Bastião. But it begins with the love adventure of Lamentor and Belisa. It is only in the ninth chapter that the knight Narbindel arrives and falls in love with Belisa’s sister Aonia, adopting a shepherd’s life in order to be near her palace. It is in fact a romance of chivalry in pastoral garb. But Ribeiro might have introduced the pastoral romance without changing the fantastic features. It is in his singular combination of passion and realism that his true originality consists. His power of giving vivid expression to tranquil scenes—the whole of the first part has something of the quiet intensity of a background by Correggio, as well as his ‘softer outline’, and although there is no explicit indication of colour it is clearly felt by the reader—and his gentle love of Nature, or rather his love of Nature in its gentler aspects, cast over the book a strange charm. The softly flowing streams, the trees and birds and delicious shade, beautiful dawns, the birds seeking their nests at evening, the flowers que a seu prazer se estendem, the mateiros going out to cut brushwood, the shepherds asleep round their fire at night, are described with great naturalness and truth, often with familiar words and colloquial phrases. The reason of the extreme intricacy of the plot was not the wish to conceal the author’s love story in a labyrinthine maze[306] in order to exercise the ingenuity of nineteenth-century professors, but to be true to life. In life events are not rounded and distinct but merge into and react on one another in an endless ravelled skein: Das tristezas não se pode contar nada ordenadamente porque desordenadamente acontecem ellas (cap. 1). Ribeiro thus anticipates by four centuries the theory enunciated in Spain by Azorín that a novel, like life, should have no plot,[307] and his book has a certain modernity. We may refuse him the name of novelist, but many a novelist might envy his lifelike portrayal of scenes and sentiments. It has been doubted whether he wrote the second part of the story. It consists of fifty-eight short chapters, and opens with a new episode, the love of Avalor for Arima, daughter of Lamentor (cap. 1-24), and it is even more bewildering in its confusion than is Part I. The scenes are less idyllic, the tone more that of a conventional romance of chivalry, yet the realism is maintained. It is on no hippogriff that Avalor goes to the rescue of the distressed maiden: in fact, he had set out on his adventure in a rowing-boat and his hands blistered. If later there are mortal combats with wicked knights, with a bear, with giants, there are also scenes, as in chapters 9, 12, 23—of an impassioned saudade,[308] of dove and nightingale—which could only have been written by the author of Part I.[309] His own story, still related by the dona, is only resumed in chapter 26, or rather 32, since the intervening chapters deal with events prior to those with which Part I begins. Bimnarder, now again Narbindel—the name Bernardim was also spelt Bernaldim—after Aonia’s marriage lives with an old hermit and his nephew, Godivo, and passes his time in tears and contemplation, as in Part I. But he is discovered by his faithful squire, and meets Aonia, and the lovers are killed by the jealous husband (cap. 48). The last chapters are concerned with the happier love story of Romabisa and Tasbião.

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

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

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

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

probably refers to some previous effort of his own rather than to the work of Vicente, and Miranda was in Italy when Gil Vicente was taunted by certain homems de bom saber and turned the tables on them in the Farsa de Inés Pereira. The Fabula do Mondego is a cold, stilted production of 600 lines in Petrarcan stanzas, the subject of which was partly derived from Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano). In 1532 the King gave Miranda a commenda (benefice) of the Order of Christ on the banks of the Neiva in Minho, and having acquired the neighbouring estate of Tapada (quinta da Tapada) he left the Court and retired to it not many months later. Miranda’s love of Nature was very deep, from his boyhood at Coimbra he had preferred the country to life in cities, and probably no other incentive was required, although it is thought that he may have been too zealous in support of Bernardim Ribeiro and that a passage in Alexo (1532?) offended the powerful favourite, the Conde da Castanheira. Whatever the cause of his withdrawal, literature must call it blessed, for his new life in the country suited his temperament; the independence of character shown in his fine letter (one of the most famous poems in the Portuguese language) addressed to King João III developed, and close contact with the country and the peasants gave his poetry that indigenous flavour and peculiar charm which have fascinated all readers of the eclogue Basto, that individual stamp in which the Court poetry was infallibly lacking. He had already written his best work—for this eclogue and the letters show the real Miranda, pointed, original, racy of the soil—and written it in quintilhas, when in 1536 he married Briolanja, the sister of his old friend, now his neighbour at Crasto, Manuel Machado de Azevedo. Some miles away, at the straggling little village of Cabeceiras de Basto, he had other intimate friends, the Pereiras, and the gift, by one of these two brothers, Antonio Nunalvarez Pereira, of a manuscript of Garci Lasso de la Vega’s poems shortly before Miranda’s marriage revived his enthusiasm for the alien metres. He turned again to the hendecasyllable and wrote the eclogues Andrés (1535), Celia, and Nemoroso (1537), the latter in memory of the tragic death of Garci Lasso in the preceding year. He returned to the quintilha later, employing it with flowing ease in A Egipciaca Santa Maria (or Santa Maria Egipciaca), which was probably written between 1544 and 1554, when he was educating his two sons with amor encoberto e moderado (A Egipciaca, p. 3), and nearer the former than the latter date. Its vigour and the promise of more[323] after 721 quintilhas preclude the date (1556-8) assigned to it by its first editor, even without the statement of the 1614 biographer that Miranda wrote scarcely anything after his wife’s death in 1555; but it may have been written even earlier, before 1544. And still through all these various poems, despite their undeniable value and incidental beauties, it is the man, his life and character, that interest us. The wild yet green and peaceful scenery of Minho accorded well with his alma soberana, at once active and contemplative, disciplined and independent. At first hunting the wolf and boar occupied his leisure—we see him out with his dogs Hunter, Swallowfoot, &c., in crimson dawn and breathless noonday—and gave him a hundred opportunities for quiet observation of Nature, the streams, especially the birds, and the peasants. The poems written soon after his arrival still retain the freshness of these impressions. His evenings were spent with his friends at Cabeceiras—true noctes cenaeque deum—or in the more formal society at Crasto or with music—he played the viola—or his favourite authors, Homer in Greek, or Horace, the Bible, the Italians, or Garci Lasso and Boscán. Later gardening[324] and the education of his sons and entertainment of visitors took the place of his favourite wolf-hunting. As his fame and influence spread, Diogo Bernardez (whose recollections of Miranda were recorded in the 1614 life) was not the only disciple who came to see him in his retreat, and he corresponded in verse with most of the poets of the time, Andrade Caminha, Montemôr, Ferreira, D. Manuel de Portugal, Bernardez. Cardinal Henrique was a steadfast admirer of his work, and the young Prince João asked for a copy: lhas mandou pedir. This wide recognition after the first coldness[325] was some measure of comfort for the many sorrows of his last years, the death of his eldest son Gonçalo, killed in his teens in Africa (1553), of his wife (1555), of that promising precocious Prince João (1537-54) to whom he had thrice sent a collection of his poems, the departure of his brother, Mem, to become one of the most notable Governors of Brazil (1557). In the latter year King João died, leaving an infant heir to a distracted kingdom, and Miranda’s death followed a few months later. In a sense this philosopher was the most un-Portuguese of poets, for he had no facility in verse. He went on hammering his lines, altering, erasing, compressing in a divine discontent. He had a lofty conception of the poet’s art—to express the noblest sentiment in the best and fewest words—five versions of Alexo, twelve of Basto, attest his untiring zeal and his ‘art to blot’. The elliptical abruptness of his native quintilhas, by which they have something in common with those of Ribeiro, are not their least charm, and gives an effective emphasis to his sententious philosophy. In introducing the new measures[326] he used the Castilian language as being the most natural and suitable until, but only until, they should be thoroughly acclimatized. He wrote Castilian not fluently—that was not his gift—but correctly, with only occasional lusitanismos. His best work, however, was written in Portuguese: in the new poetry with which his name is for ever associated he is only the forerunner of the work of Diogo Bernardez and Camões,[327] the founder of a school to which Portuguese literature owes some of its chief glories. In Portuguese he wrote his comedies and, about half a century before Samuel Daniel’s Cleopatra (1592), a tragedy Cleopatra, of which we only possess a few lines.[328] The poem on the life and conversion of St. Mary of Egypt[329] (a favourite theme a few centuries earlier, as in the Spanish Vida de Santa Maria Egipciaqua (13th c.?), the fourteenth-century Vida de Maria Egipcia, and the French Vie de Sainte Marie l’Égyptienne) is stamped with the author’s sententious wisdom and love of discipline. It contains quaint plays on words (Ide ao mar que por amar, p. 169), tours de force such as the three quintilhas of esdruxulos (pp. 179-80), and rises to wonderful lyric beauty in the saint’s farewell to Earth (Vou para um jardim de flores, pp. 166-9). He intended the poem to be ‘rare, unique and excellent’ and to some extent he achieved his aim. In much of his work the diction is rough and halting, but the greatness of the man nevertheless extends to his poetry. Perhaps the best example of this is the melancholy grandeur of the sonnet, technically so imperfect, O sol é grande. Force of character made him not only a laborious but a successful craftsman. When he died, honoured and admired by all the best intellects in the country, the position of the new school was assured and he had been able to hail with joy the support of younger writers: Venid buenos zagales! Foremost in time among these poets of el verso largo was D. Manuel de Portugal[330] (1520?-1606), son of the first Conde de Vimioso and of D. Joana de Vilhena, cousin of King Manuel. He outlived all his fellow-poets, welcomed the appearance of Os Lusiadas, and in 1580 took the side of the Prior D. Antonio. His Obras (1605) consist of seventeen books of poems, mostly of a religious character and written in Spanish—books 9 and 15 contain some Portuguese poems, and among them the fine mystic sonnet Apetece minha alma (Bk. ix, f. 199 v.).

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

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

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

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

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

The Portuguese poems of André Falcão de Resende (1527?-98), born at Evora, nephew of the antiquarian André and of the poet Garcia de Resende, were first published at Coimbra in an incomplete volume Poesias [1865], and consist of the Microcosmographia and some spirited anti-Drake ballads and good sonnets (e.g. Ó fragil bem, Ó breve gosto humano) and satires. Balthasar de Estaço (born in 1570), Canon of Viseu, and his brother the antiquarian Gaspar de Estaço, Canon of Guimarães and author of Varias Antiguidades de Portugal (1625), were both born at Evora. The former’s Sonetos, Eglogas e ovtras rimas (1604), published, according to the preface, in the author’s mature age but written in the green, contain some religious sonnets of high merit.

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

Little certain is known of the life of Fernam Alvarez do Oriente (c. 1540-c. 1595?). Born at Goa, he served in the East, and may have fought in the battle of Alcacer Kebir. His resemblance to Moraes in temperament and adventures perhaps gave rise to the assertion that he wrote the fifth and sixth parts of Palmeirim de Inglaterra. The scene of his Lvsitania Transformada (1617) is partly in Portugal (the banks of the river Nabão and the seven hills of Thomar) and partly in India (no nosso Oriente). Like Montemôr’s Diana, it is divided into prosas and poems, and it is modelled on the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazzaro (1458-1530)—the mountains of Arcadia transformed into Lusitania[347]—which, however, each of its three books equals in length. The prose setting, although devoid of thought, is mellifluous and clear, and the poems, which contain reminiscences of Camões, rival in the harmony and transparent flow of the verse that ‘prince of the poets of our time’, as Alvarez calls him. Some critics have even ventured to attribute the work to Camões, as though his genius were so poor that he must needs fall to quoting himself in whole lines, as is here the case. But Alvarez had certainly caught some measure of Camões’ skill and of il soave stilo e ’l dolce canto of Sannazzaro and Petrarca. He is, moreover, less vague[348] than many writers of eclogues, and in singing his own love story describes what his eyes have seen. It was, however, an aberration to favour the verso esdruxulo (Ariosto’s sdruccioli) (cf. Sannazzaro’s Arcadia, Ecl. 1, 6, 8, 9, 12), a truly Manueline adornment which other Portuguese poets unfortunately copied as a new artifice.[349]

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

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

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

Had Rodriguez Lobo written not better but less, his pastoral romances would probably be far more widely read. But his finest work is of a different kind, a long dialogue, Corte na Aldea e Noites de Inverno (1619), between a fidalgo, D. Julio, and four friends in the long winter evenings near Lisbon. Suggested by Baldassare Castiglione’s famous Il Cortigiano, which had been popularized in Spain by Boscán’s excellent translation (1534), this work, for which Gracián prophesied immortality, is full of the most varied interest. The prose, excellent as is all that of this champion of the Portuguese language, jardineiro da lingua portuguesa (which his countrymen, he complained, patch and patch like a beggar’s cloak), is here more vigorous and compact in its construction without losing its harmonious rhythm, attractive as the conversations which it records. Besides the beautiful verses lavishly scattered through his prose works, Rodriguez Lobo wrote a long epic on Nun’ Alvarez in twenty cantos of oitavas: O Condestabre de Portugal D. Nuno Alvarez Pereira (1610),[350] a volume of Eglogas (1605), in which he is a recognized master, a volume of Romances (1596) written, with two exceptions, in Spanish,[351] and, perhaps, a Christmas play entitled Auto del Nascimiento de Christo y Edicto del Emperador Avgvsto Cesar, published in 1676. It is written in redondilhas in Spanish and Portuguese.[352] This auto is followed by an Entremes do Poeta in Portuguese. A poet, an obdurate Gongorist (Do Gongora tive sempre opinadas preferencias), recites a sonnet to a lady: Celicola substancia procreada, which she does not understand, and a ratinho, also at a loss (he para mim cousa grega), advises him to give over his jargon for a more natural language: