Note 248 — BOOK III.
William Julius Mickle translation
By night our fathers' shades confess their fear, Their shrieks of terror from the tombs we hear.—
Camoëns says, "A mortos faz espanto;" to give this elegance in English required a paraphrase. There is something wildly great, and agreeable to the superstition of that age, to suppose that the dead were troubled in their graves on the approach of so terrible an army. The French translator, contrary to the original, ascribes this terror to the ghost of only one prince, by which this stroke of Camoëns, in the spirit of Shakespeare, is reduced to a piece of unmeaning frippery.