PORTUGUESE LITERATURE

Oxford University Press

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the University

BY
AUBREY F. G. BELL

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1922

TO THE TRUE PORTUGAL OF THE FUTURE

La letteratura, dalla quale sola potrebbe aver sodo principio
la rigenerazione della nostra patria.

Giacomo Leopardi.

AUBREY F. G. BELL.

S. João do Estoril,
Portugal.
July 1921

Portuguese literature may be said to belong largely to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Europe can boast of no fresher and more charming early lyrics than those which slept forgotten[1] in the Vatican Library until the late Professor Ernesto Monaci published Il Canzoniere Portoghese in 1875. And, to take a few more instances out of many, the poems of King Alfonso X, of extraordinary interest alike to historian and literary critic, first appeared in 1889; the plays of Gil Vicente were almost unknown before the Hamburg (1834) edition, based on the Göttingen copy of that of 1562; Sá de Miranda only received a definitive edition in 1885; the Cancioneiro Geral became accessible in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the three volumes of the Stuttgart edition were published; the exquisite verses[1] of Sá de Meneses, which haunted Portuguese poetry for a century,[2] then sank into oblivion till they were discovered by Dr. Sousa Viterbo in the Torre do Tombo.[3] The abundant literature of popular quadras, fados, romances, contos has only begun to be collected in the last fifty years.

In prose, the most important Leal Conselheiro[4] of King Duarte[Pg 14] was rediscovered in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale and first printed in 1842, and Zurara’s Cronica da Guiné, lost even in the days of Damião de Goes,[5] similarly in 1841; Corrêa’s Lendas da India remained in manuscript till 1858; so notable a book as King João I’s Livro da Montaria appears only in the twentieth century, in an edition by Dr. Esteves Pereira, and the first trustworthy text of a part of Fernam Lopez was published by Snr. Braamcamp Freire in 1915; D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, who at the end of his second Epanaphora wrote ‘Se por ventura tambem despois de meus dias acontece que algum vindouro honre ao meu nome quanto eu procuro eternizar e engrandecer o dos passados’, had to wait two and a half centuries before this debt was paid by Mr. Edgar Prestage.[6] Even now no really complete history of Portuguese literature exists, but the first systematic work on the subject was written by Friedrich Bouterwek in 1804. Other histories have since appeared, and during the last half-century the ceaseless, ingenious, and enthusiastic studies of Dr. Theophilo Braga have sifted Portuguese literature, chiefly the poetry, in all directions, and a flood of light has been thrown on it by the works of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Perhaps, therefore, one may be forgiven for having been tempted to render some account of this ‘new’ literature which continues to be so strangely neglected in England and other countries.[7] Yet a quarter of a century hence would perhaps offer better conditions, and a summary written at the present time cannot hope to be complete or definitive. Every year new studies and editions appear, new researches and alluring theories and discoveries are made. The Lisbon Academy of Sciences during its long and honourable[Pg 15] history[8] has rarely if ever rendered greater services—‘essential services’ as Southey called them in 1803—to Portuguese literature. A short history of that literature must, apart from unavoidable errors and omissions, do less than justice to many writers. In appropriating the words of Damião de Goes, ‘Haud ignari plurima esse a nobis omissa quibus Hispania ornatur et celebrari possit,’ one may hope that Mr. Edgar Prestage, who has studied Portuguese literature for a quarter of a century,[9] and whose ever-ready help and advice are here gratefully acknowledged, will eventually write a mellower history in several volumes and give their full due both to the classics and to contemporary authors and critics.

No one can study Portuguese literature without becoming deeply indebted to D. Carolina Wilhelma Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Her concise history, contributed to Groeber’s Grundriss (1894), necessarily forms the basis of subsequent studies, but indeed her work is as vast as it is scholarly and accurate, and the student finds himself constantly relying on her guidance. Even if he occasionally disagrees, he cannot fail to give her point of view the deepest attention and respect. Born in 1851, the daughter of Professor Gustav Michaëlis, she has lived in Portugal during the last forty years and is the wife of the celebrated art critic, Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos (born in 1849). Her edition of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (1904) is a masterpiece of historical reconstruction and literary criticism, and her influence on Portuguese literature generally is as wide as her encouragement and assistance of younger scholars are generous.[10] Femina, as was said of the Princess Maria, undequaque spectatissima et doctissima.

Most of the works of Dr. Theophilo Braga are of too provisional a nature to be of permanent value, but a summary, Edade Medieval (1909), Renascença (1914), Os Seiscentistas (1916), Os[Pg 16] Arcades (1918), gives his latest views. The best detailed criticism of the literature of the nineteenth century is that of Dr. Fidelino de Figueiredo, Member of the Academy of Sciences and Editor of the Revista de Historia: Historia da Litteratura Romantica Portuguesa (1913) and Historia da Litteratura Realista (1914).

The only completely methodical history of Portuguese literature in existence is the brief manual by the learned ex-Rector of Coimbra University, Dr. Joaquim Mendes dos Remedios: História da Literatura Portuguêsa (5th ed., Coimbra, 1921), since it contains that rarity in Portuguese literature: an index.[11] Dr. Figueiredo published a short essay in its general bibliography in 1914 (Bibliographia portuguesa de critica litteraria), largely increased in a new (1920) edition, but otherwise little has been done in this respect (apart from a few special authors). The bibliography attached to the present book[12] follows—longo intervallo—the lines of Professor James Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s Bibliographie de l’Histoire de la Littérature Espagnole (Paris, 1913). After its proved excellence it would, indeed, have been folly to adopt any other method.

It has been thought advisable to add a list of works on popular poetry, folk-lore, &c. (since in no country are the popular and the written literatures more intimately connected), and of those concerning the Portuguese language. Unless energetic and persistent measures are taken to protect this language it will be hopeless to look for a great Portuguese literature in the future. Yet with the gradually developing prosperity of Portugal and her colonies such expectations are not unfounded. A new poet may arise indigenous as Gil Vicente and technically proficient as Camões. And in prose, if it is not allowed to sink into a mere verbiage of gallicisms, great writers may place Portuguese on a level with and indeed above the other Romance languages. The possibilities are so vast, the quarry ready to their hand so rich—the works of Manuel Bernardes, Antonio Vieira, Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos, Luis de Sousa, João de Lucena, Heitor Pinto, Arraez; an immense mass of sermons (milhões de sermonarios),[Pg 17] most of them in excellent Portuguese, as those of Ceita, Veiga, Feo, Luz, in which, as in a large number of political tracts, notably those of Macedo, intense conviction has given a glow and concision to the language; old constituições, ordenações, and foros[13]; technical treatises,[14] folk-lore, popular phrases,[15] proverbs. But unless a scholarly use of Portuguese be more generally imposed no masterpieces will be produced. The same holds good of Brazilian literature, which, although, or perhaps because, it has provided material for a history in two portly volumes (Sylvio Romero, Historia da Litteratura Brazileira, 2nd ed., 1902-3), is here, with few exceptions, omitted.

A supplementary chapter on modern Galician literature has been added, for although the language from which Portuguese parted only after the fourteenth century is now quite independent,[16] modern Galician is not more different from modern Portuguese than is the language of the Cancioneiros with which Portuguese literature opens. The Portuguese have always shown a strong aptitude for acquiring foreign languages, and the individual’s gain has been the literature’s loss. Jorge de Montemôr, who

was not by any means the only Portuguese who wrote exclusively in Spanish, and others chose Latin. The reason usually given in either case was that Portuguese was less widely read.[17] It was[Pg 18] a short-sighted view, for the more works of importance that were written in Portuguese the larger would naturally become the number of those who read them. While Portuguese literature may be taken to be the literature written in the Portuguese language, in a sense it must also include the Latin and Spanish works of Portuguese authors. Of the former, one collection alone, the Corpus Illustrium Poetarum Lusitanorum qui latine scripserunt (Lisbonae, 1745), consists of eight volumes, and Domingo Garcia Peres’ Catálogo Razonado (Madrid, 1890) contains over 600 names of Portuguese authors who wrote in Spanish.

Portuguese names present a difficulty, for often they are as lengthy as that which was the pride of Dona Iria in Ennes’ O Saltimbanco. The course here adopted is to relegate the full name to the index and to print in the text only the form by which the writer is generally known.[18]

The Portuguese, a proud and passionate people with a certain love of magnificence and adventure, an Athenian receptivity,[19] an[Pg 19] extensive sea-board and vague land-frontiers, naturally came under foreign influences. Many and various causes made their country cosmopolitan from the beginning. It is customary to divide Portuguese literature into the Provençal (13th c.), Spanish (14th and 15th c.), Italian (16th c.), Spanish and Italian (17th c.), French and English (18th c.), French and German (19th c.) Schools. The question may therefore be asked, especially by those who confuse influence with imitation, as though it precluded originality: What has Portuguese literature of its own? In the first place, the Celtic satire and mystic lyrism of the Galicians is developed and always present in Portuguese literature. Secondly, the genius for story-telling, displayed by Fernam Lopez, grew by reason of the great Portuguese discoveries in Africa and Asia to an epic grandeur both in verse and prose. Thirdly, the absence of great cities, the pleasant climate, and fertile soil produced a peculiarly realistic and natural bucolic poetry. And in prose, besides masterpieces of history and travel—a rich and fascinating literature of the East and of the sea—a fervent religious faith, as in Spain, with a more constant mysticism than in Spain, led to very high achievement. Had one to choose between the loss of the works of Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, and that of the whole of Portuguese literature, the whole of Portuguese literature must go, but that is not to say that the loss would not be very grievous. Indeed, those who despise Portuguese literature despise it in ignorance,[20] affecting to believe, with Edgar Quinet, that it has but one poet and a single book; those who are acquainted with it—with the early lyrics, with the quaintly alluring eclogues of Ribeiro and Sá de Miranda, with the works of Fernam Lopez, described by Robert Southey as ‘the best chronicler of any age or nation’, naïf, exact, touchant et philosophe[21]; of Gil Vicente, almost as far above his contemporary Juan del Enzina as Shakespeare is above Vicente; of Bernardim Ribeiro, whose Menina e moça is the earliest and best of those pastoral romances which led Don Quixote to contemplate a quieter[Pg 20] sequel to his first adventures; of Camões, ‘not only the greatest lyric poet of his country, but one of the greatest lyric poets of all time’[22]; with Fernam Mendez Pinto’s travels, ‘as diverting a book of the kind as ever I read’[23]; or Corrêa’s Lendas, Frei Thomé de Jesus’ Trabalhos, or the incomparable prose of Manuel Bernardes—know that, extraordinary as were Portugal’s achievements in discovery and conquest, her literature is not unworthy of those achievements. Unhappily the Portuguese, with a notorious carelessness,[24] have in the past set the example of neglecting their literature, and even to-day scarcely seem to realize their great possessions and still greater possibilities in the realm of prose.[25] The excessive number of writers, the excessive production of each individual writer, and the desleixo by which innumerable books and manuscripts of exceptional interest have perished, are all traceable to the same source: the lack of criticism. A nation of poets, essentially lyrical,[26] with no dramatic genius but capable of writing charmingly and naturally without apparent effort, needed and needs a severely classical education and stern critics, to remind them that an epic is not rhymed history nor blank verse mangled prose, that in bucolic poetry the half is greater than the whole, and to bid them abandon abstractions for the[Pg 21] concrete and particular and crystallize the vague flow of their talent. But in Portugal, outside the circle of writers themselves, a reading public has hitherto hardly existed, and in the close atmosphere resulting the sense of proportion was inevitably lost, even as a stone and a feather will fall with equal speed in a vacuum. The criticism has been mainly personal,[27] contesting the originality or truthfulness of a writer, without considering the literary merits of his work. To deprecate such criticism became a commonplace of the preface, while numerous passages in writers of the sixteenth century show that they feared their countrymen’s scepticism, expressed in the proverb De longas vias mui longas mentiras, which occurs as early as the thirteenth century.[28] The fear of slovenly or prolix composition was not present in the same degree. But these are defects that may be remedied partly by individual critics, partly by the increasing number of readers. Meanwhile this little book may perhaps serve to corroborate the poet Falcão de Resende’s words:

Under the Moorish dominion we know that poetry was widely cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula, by high and low. At Silves in Algarve ‘almost every peasant could improvise’.[30] But the early Galician-Portuguese poetry has no relation with that of the Moors, despite certain characteristics which may seem to point to an Oriental origin. The indigenous poems of Galicia and Portugal, of which thirteenth-century examples have survived, are so remarkable, so unlike those of any other country, that they deserve to be studied apart from the Provençal imitations by the side of which they developed. Half buried in the Cancioneiros, themselves only recently discovered, these exquisite and in some ways astonishingly modern lyrics are even now not very widely known and escape the attention of many who go far afield in search of true poetry. The earliest poem dated (1189) by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, in which Pay Soarez de Taveiroos, a nobleman of Galicia or North Portugal, addresses Maria Paez Ribeira, the lovely mistress of King Sancho I, mia sennor branca e vermelha, does not belong to these lyrics[31]; but the second earliest (1199), attributed to King Sancho I (1185-1211) himself, is one of them (C.C.B.348). This unique form of lyric requires a distinctive name, and if we adopt that used by the Marqués de Santillana’s father, Diego Furtado de Mendoza (†1404), we shall have a word well suited to convey an idea of their striking character.[32] His Spanish poem written in parallel[Pg 23] distichs, A aquel arbol, is called a cossante.[33] In an age when all that seemed most Spanish, the Poema del Cid, for instance, or the Libro de Buen Amor, has been proved to derive in part from French sources, it is peculiarly pleasant to find a whole series of early poems which have their roots firmly planted in the soil of the Peninsula. The indigenous character of the cossantes is now well established, thanks chiefly to the skilful and untiring researches of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.[34] They are wild but deliciously scented single flowers which now reappear in all their freshness as though they had not lain pressed and dead for centuries in the library of the Vatican. One of the earliest is quoted by Airas Nunez (C. V. 454) and completed in Grundriss, p. 150:

What first strikes one in this is its Oriental immobility. The second distich adds nothing to the sense of the first, merely intensifying it by repetition. Neither the poetry of the trouvères of the North of France nor that of the Provençal troubadours presents any parallel. The scanty Basque literature contains[Pg 24] nothing in this kind. But it is unnecessary to go for a parallel to China.[36] None more remarkable will be found than those contained in the books of that religion which came from the East and imposed its forms if not its spirit on the pagans of the Peninsula. Verses 8, 9 of Psalm 118 are very nearly a cossante but have no refrain. The resemblance in Psalm 136, verses 17, 18, is still more marked:

The relations between Church and people were very close if not always very friendly. The peasants maintained their ancient customs, and their pagan jollity kept overflowing into the churches to the scandal of the authorities. Innumerable ordinances later sought to check their delight in witchcraft and mummeries, feasts and funerals (the delight in the latter is still evident in Galicia as in Ireland and Wales). Men slept, ate, drank, danced, sang profane songs, and acted plays and parodies in the churches and pilgrimage shrines. The Church strove to turn their midsummer and May-day celebrations into Christian festivals, but the change was rather nominal than real. But if the priests and bishops remained spiritually, like modern politicians, shepherds without sheep, the religious services, the hymns,[37] the processions evidently affected the people. Especially was this the case in Galicia, since the great saint Santiago, who farther south (as later in India) rode into battle on a snow-white[Pg 25] steed before the Christians, gave a more peaceful prosperity to the North-west. Pilgrims from all countries in the Middle Ages came to worship at his shrine at Santiago de Compostela. They came a motley company singing on the road,[38] criminals taking this opportunity to escape from justice, tradesmen and players, jugglers and poets making a livelihood out of the gathering throngs, as well as devout pilgrims who had ‘left alle gamys’ for their soul’s good, des pélerins qui vont chantant et des jongleurs. Thus the eyes of the whole province of Galicia as the eyes of Europe were directed towards the Church of Santiago in Jakobsland. The inhabitants of Galicia would naturally view their heaven-sent celebrity with pride and rejoice in the material gain. They would watch with eager interest the pilgrims passing along the camino francés or from the coast to Santiago, and would themselves flock to see and swell the crowds at the religious services. When we remember the frequent parodies of religious services in the Middle Ages and that the Galicians did not lag behind others in the art of mimicry,[39] we can well imagine that the Latin hymns sung in church or procession might easily form the germ of the profane cossante. A further characteristic of the cossante is that the i-sound of the first distich is followed by an a-sound in the second (ricercando ora il grave, ora l’acuto) and this too maybe traced to a religious source, two answering choirs of singers, treble and bass.[40] It is clear at least that these alternating[Pg 26] sounds are echoes of music: one almost hears the clash of the adufe in the louçana (answering to garrida) or ramo (pinho). The words of these poems were, indeed, always accompanied by the son (= music). But if born in the Church, the cossante suffered a transformation when it went out into the world. The rhythm of many of the songs in the Cancioneiros is so obtrusive that they seem to dance out of the printed page. One would like to think that in the ears of the peasants the sound of the wheel mingled with the echo of a hymn and its refrain as they met at what was, even then, no doubt, a favourite gathering-place—the mill[41]—and thus a lyric poem became a dance-song. The cossante Solo ramo would thus proceed, sung by ‘the dancers dancing in tune’:

the first line of the third distich repeating the second line of the first (and in the same way the first line of the fifth the second line of the third), in leixa-pren (laisser prendre) corresponding evidently to the movements of the dance.[42] The love-lorn maidens danced together, the men forming a circle to look on. St. Augustine considered the dance to be a circle of which the Devil was the centre; in real life the Devil was often replaced by a tree (or by a mayo). The refrain was a notable feature of the cossante in all its phases as it went, a bailada (dance-song) from the terreiro, to become a serranilha on the hills, or at pilgrimage shrines a cantiga de romaria,[43] or a barcarola (boat-song) or alvorada (dawn-song).[Pg 27] A marked and thoroughly popular characteristic of the cossante is its wistful sadness,[44] the soidade which is already mentioned more than once in the Cancioneiros,[45] and, born in Galicia, continued in Portugal, combined with a more garish tone under the hotter sun of the South. Thus we have the melancholy Celtic temperament, absorbed in Nature, acting on the forms suggested by an alien religion till they become vague cries to the sea, to the deer of the hills, the flower of the pine. The themes are as simple and monotonous—the monotony of snowdrops or daffodils—as the form in which they are sung. A girl in the gloom of the pine-trees mourning for her lover, the birds in the cool of the morning singing of love, the deer troubling the water of a mountain-stream, the boats at anchor, or bearing away meus amores, or gliding up the river a sabor. The amiga lingers at the fountain, she goes to wash clothes or to bathe her hair in the stream, she meets her lover and dances at the pilgrim shrine, she waits for him under the hazel-trees, she implores the waves for news of him, she watches for the boats pelo mar viir. The language is native to the soil, far more so, at least, than in the cantigas de amor and cantigas de amigo written under foreign influence. Their French or Provençal words and learned forms[46] are replaced in the cossante by forms Galician or Spanish. Despite its striking appearance to us now among sirventes senes sal in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, it must be confessed that the early cossante of King Sancho has a somewhat meagre, vinegar aspect, and the genre could hardly have developed so successfully in the next half-century had it not been fixed in the country-side, ever ready to the hand of the poet in search of fresh inspiration. It is possible to exaggerate the effect of war on the life of the peasant. Portugal in the twelfth century was only gradually and by constant conflict winning its territory and independence. It had no fixed capital and Court at which the Provençal poets[Pg 28] might gather. But while king and nobles and the members of the religious and military orders were engaged with the Moors to the exclusion of the Muses, so that they had no opportunity to introduce the new measures, the peasants in Galicia and Minho no doubt went on tilling the soil and singing their primitive songs. In the thirteenth century Provençal poetry flourished in Portugal, but so monotonously that it failed to kill the older lyrics, and they reacted on the imported poetry. In the trite conventions with which the latter became clothed the cossante had a new opportunity of life. Trobadores wearied by their own monotony, jograes wishing to please a patron with a novidade, had recourse to the cossante. The jogral wandering from house to house and town to town necessarily came into close touch with the peasants. Talented men among them, prompted by patrons of good taste, no doubt exercised the third requisite of a good jogral (doair’ e uoz e aprenderdes ben, C. C. B. 388)—a good memory—not only in learning his patron’s verses to recite at other houses but in remembering the songs that he caught in passing from the lips of the peasants, songs of village mirth and dance, of workers in the fields and shepherds on the hills. These, developed and adorned according to his talent, he would introduce to the Court among his motz recreamens e prazers. When Joan de Guilhade in the middle of the thirteenth century complained that os trobadores ja van para mal (C. V. 370), he might almost be referring to the fact that the stereotyped poems of the Portuguese trobadores could no longer compete with the fresh charm of the cossante. Alfonso X reproached Pero da Ponte for not singing like a Provençal but, rather, like Bernaldo de Bonaval (first half 13th c.). King Dinis in the second half of the century viewed the cossante with such favour that he wrote or collected some of the most curious and delightful that we possess. But although King Dinis set his name to a handful of the finest cossantes, most of the cossante-writers belonged to an earlier period and were men of humble birth. Of Nuno Fernandez Torneol[47] (first half 13th c.), poet and soldier, besides conventional cantigas de amor we have eight simple cossantes of which the alvorada (C. V. 242), the barcarola (C. V. 246), and C. V. 245 with its dance rhythm are[Pg 29] especially beautiful. Pedr’ Anez Solaz[48] (early 13th c.) wrote a cossante (C. V. 415) celebrated for its refrain, lelia doura, leli leli par deus leli, in which some have seen a vestige of Basque (il = dead). Of Meendinho (first half 13th c.) we have only one poem, a cantiga de romaria (C. V. 438), but its beauty has brought him fame;[49] and another jogral, Fernand’ Esguio[50] (second half 13th c.), is remembered in the same way chiefly for C. V. 902: Vayamos, irmana. Bernaldo de Bonaval, one of the earliest Galician poets, and the jograes Pero de Veer, Joan Servando, Airas Carpancho,[51] Martin de Ginzo,[52] Lopo and Lourenço, composed some charming pilgrimage songs in the second third of the thirteenth century. This was a popular theme, but the two poets who seem to have felt most keenly the attraction of the popular poetry and to have cultivated it most successfully are Joan Zorro (fl. 1250) and Pero Meogo (fl. 1250). The cossantes of Zorro, one of the most talented of all these singers, tell of Lisbon and the king’s ships and the sea. In this series of barcarolas (C. V. 751-60) and in his delightful bailada (C. V. 761)[53] he evidently sought his inspiration in popular sources, as with equal felicity a little later did Pero Meogo,[54] whose cossantes (C. V. 789-97), each with its biblical reference to the deer of the hills (cervos do monte), are as singular as they are beautiful. Martin Codax at about the same time was singing graceful songs of the ondas do mar of Vigo (C. V. 884-90). But the real poet of the sea was the Admiral of Castille, Pay Gomez Chariño[55] (†1295). He belonged to an ancient family of Galicia, was[Pg 30] prominent at the Courts of Alfonso X (between whose character and the sea he draws an elaborate parallel in C. A. 256) and of his son Sancho IV, played an important part in the troubled history of the time, and fought by land and sea in Andalucía, at Jaen in 1246 and Seville in 1247. On the lips of his amiga he places a touching cantiga de amigo (C. V. 424: she expresses her relief that her amigo has ceased to be almirante do mar; no longer will she listen in sadness to the wind, now her heart may sleep and not tremble at the coming of a messenger) and the two sea cossantes C. V. 401, with its plaining refrain:

—one can imagine it sung as a chanty[56]—and C. V. 429, in which she prays Santiago to bring him safely home: ‘Now in this hour Over the sea He is coming to me, Love is in flower.’ Beauty of expression and a loyal sincerity are conspicuous in his poems, as well as a certain individuality and vigour. He escaped the perils of the sea, the mui gran coita do mar (C. A. 251), but to fall by the hand of an assassin on shore. His sea lyrics are only excelled by the enchanting melody of the poem (C. V. 488) of his contemporary and fellow-countryman Roy Fernandez (second half 13th c.), who was apparently a professor at Salamanca University, Canon of Santiago, and Chaplain to Alfonso the Learned. Of the later poets Estevam Coelho, perhaps father of one of the assassins of Inés (†1355), wrote a cossante of haunting beauty (C. V. 321):

and D. Afonso Sanchez (c. 1285-1329) in C. V. 368 (Dizia la fremosinha—Ay Deus val) proved that he had inherited part of his father King Dinis’ genius and instinct for popular poetry. King Dinis, having thrown wide his palace doors to these thyme-scented lyrics, would turn again to the now musty chamber of Provençal song (C. V. 123):

[Pg 31]

The cossantes had become so familiar that Airas Nunez, of Santiago, could string them together, as it were, by the head, without troubling himself to give more than the first lines, precisely as Gil Vicente treated romances three centuries later. The reader or listener would easily complete them. His pastorela (C. V. 454) would be an ordinary imitation of a pastourelle of the trouvères[57] were it not for the five cossante fragments inserted. Riding along a stream he hears a solitary shepherdess singing and stays to listen. First she sang Solo ramo verde frolido,[58] then—as if to prove that she is a shepherdess of Arcady, not of real life—

an impassioned cry of the heart only comparable with

or that wonderful line of a wonderful poem:

Next she sang the first lines of a cossante by Nuno Fernandez Torneol (C. V. 245) with its dance refrain E pousarei solo avelanal. The refrain is identical in C. V. 245 and C. V. 454, but the distich has variations which seem to imply that Airas Nunez was not quoting Fernandez, rather that both drew from a popular source. The fourth cossante we also have complete, a lovely barcarola by Joan Zorro (C. V. 757):

[Pg 32]

Lastly she (or he), as he rides on his way, sings:

i.e. este cantar which is familiar in the villancico (Por una gentil floresta) by the Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458):

Very few, if any, of the cossantes were anonymous, which only means that modern folk-lore was unknown; it was not the fashion to collect songs from the lips of the people without ulterior purpose. A variety known as cantiga de vilãos existed, but it was deliberately composed by the trobadores and jograes.[61] A specimen is given in C. V. 1043:

No drawing-room lyric, evidently: more likely to be sung in taverns; composed perhaps by a knight like him of C. V. 965, whose songs were not fremosos e rimados. Like the Provençal poet Guilherme Figueira who mout se fetz grazir ... als ostes et als taverniers, this knight’s songs pleased ‘tailors, furriers and millers’; they had not the good taste of the tailor’s wife in Gil Vicente who sings the beautiful cantiga

The cantiga de vilãos was no such simple popular lyric, but rather a drinkers’ song, picaresquely allusive, sung by a jogral who non fo hom que saubes caber entre ‘ls baros ni entre la bona gen but sang vilmen et en gens bassas, entre gens bassas per pauc d’aver (Riquier), cantares de que la gente baja e de servil condicion se alegra (Santillana). The cossante, on the contrary, came straight from field and hill into palace and song-book. Probably[Pg 33] many of them were composed, as they were sung, and sung dancing, by the women. The women of Galicia have always been noted for their poetical and musical talent. We read of the choreas psallentium mulierum, like Miriam, the sister of Moses, at Santiago in 1116,[63] and there is a cloud of similar witnesses. But whether any of the cossantes that we have in the Cancioneiros is strictly of the people or not, their traditional indigenous character is no longer doubtful. It would surely be a most astounding fact had the Galician-Portuguese Court poets, who in their cantigas de amor reduced Provençal poetry to a colourless insipidity, succeeded so much better with the cossantes that, while the originals from which they copied have vanished, the imitations stand out in the Portuguese Cancioneiros like crimson poppies among corn. It is remarkable, too, that of the three kinds of poem in the old Cancioneiros, satire, love song, and cossante, the first two remain in the Cancioneiro de Resende (1516), but the third has totally disappeared. The explanation is that as Court and people drew apart and the literary influence of Castille grew, the poems based on songs of the people were no longer in favour. But they continued, like the Guadiana, underground, and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has traced their occasional reappearances in poets of popular leanings, like Gil Vicente and Cristobal de Castillejo, from the thirteenth century to the present day,[64] while Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos has discovered whole cossantes sung by peasants at their work in the fields in the nineteenth century.[65] Dance or action always accompanies the cossante as it does in the danza prima of Asturias (to the words Ay un galan d’esta villa, ay un galan d’esta casa).[66] If it[Pg 34] be objected that the songs printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos are rude specimens by the side of a poem like Ay flores, ay flores do verde pinho, it should be remembered that the quadra (or perhaps one should say distich without refrain) has now replaced the cossante on the lips of the people, and that among these quatrains something of the old cossante’s charm and melancholy is still found. D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos and others have remarked that these quadras pass from mouth to mouth and are perfected in the process, smoothed and polished like a stone by the sea, and this may well have been true of the earlier cossantes.[67] The jogral who hastened to his patron with a lovely new poem was but reaping the inspiration of a succession of anonymous singers, an inspiration quickened by competition in antiphonies of song at many a pilgrimage. One singer would give a distich of a cossante, as to-day a quadra, another would take it up and return it with variations. The cossante did not always preserve its simple form, or, rather, the more complicated poems renewed themselves in its popularity. We find it as a bailada (C. V. 761), balleta (cf. C. A. 123: Se vos eu amo mais que outra ren), as cantiga de amor (C. A. 360 or 361, C. V. 657-60), cantiga de maldizer (C. V. 1026-7), or satirical alba (C. V. 1049). But these hybrid forms are not the true cossante, which is always marked by dignity, restraint, simple grace, close communion with Nature, delicacy of thought, and a haunting felicity of expression. The cossante written by King Sancho seems to indicate a natural development of the indigenous poetry. In its form it owed nothing to the poetry of Provence or North France, but its progress was perhaps quickened, and at least its perfection preserved, by the systematic cultivation of poetry introduced from abroad at a time when no middle class separated Court and peasant. The tantalizing fragments that survive in Gil Vicente’s plays show all too plainly what marvels of popular song might flower and die unknown. In spirit the original grave religious character of the cossante may in some measure have affected the new poetry. To this[Pg 35] in part may be ascribed the monotony, the absence of particular descriptions in the cantigas de amor. In religious hymns obviously reverence would not permit the Virgin to be described in greater detail than, for example, Gil Vicente’s vague branca e colorada, and the reverence might be transferred unconsciously to poems addressed to an earthly dona. (Only in the extravagant devotional mannerisms (gongorismo ao divino) of the seventeenth century could Soror Violante do Ceo describe Christ as a galan de ojos verdes.) Dona genser qu’ieu no sai dir or la genser que sia says Arnaut de Marueil at the end of the thirteenth century. The Portuguese poet would make an end there: his lady is fairest among women, fairer than he can say. He would never go on to describe her grey eyes and snowy brow: huelhs vairs and fron pus blanc que lis. But introduced into alien and artificial forms, like mountain gentians in a garden, the monotony can no longer please. In the cantigas de amor the iteration becomes a tedious sluggishness of thought, whereas in the cossantes it is part of the music of the poem.

[Pg 36]

If, besides the Cancioneiros da Vaticana, Colocci-Brancuti, and da Ajuda, we include King Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. M.) we have over 2,000 poems, by some 200 poets. Of these the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (C. A.) contains 310. Preserved in the Lisbon Collegio dos Nobres and later in the Royal Library of Ajuda at Lisbon, it was first published in an edition of twenty-five copies by Charles Stuart (afterwards Lord Stuart of Rothesay), British Minister at Lisbon (C. A. S.). Another edition, by Varnhagen, appeared in 1849 (C. A. V.), and the splendid definitive edition by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in 1904 (C. A. M. V.). C. A. M. V. contains 467 poems, in part reproduced from C. V. M. and C. C. B. The third volume, of notes, is still unpublished.

Of the Cancioneiro preserved as Codex Vaticanus 4803, and now commonly known as Cancioneiro da Vaticana (C. V.), fragments were published soon after its rediscovery: viz. that portion attributed to King Dinis, edited by Moura in 1847 (C. D. M.). This part received a critical edition at the hands of Professor H. R. Lang in 1892; 2nd ed., with introduction, Halle, 1894 (C. D. L.). A few more crumbs were given to the world by Varnhagen in 1870, 2nd ed. 1872 (C. T. A.), and in 1873 (C. A. P.) and 1875 (C. L.) by Ernesto Monaci, who printed his diplomatic edition of the complete text (1,205 poems) in the latter year (C. V. M.), and with it an index of a still larger Cancioneiro (it has 1,675 entries) compiled by Angelo Colocci in the sixteenth century and discovered by Monaci in the Vatican Library (codex 3217). Dr. Theophilo Braga’s critical edition appeared in 1878 (C. V. B.).

In this very year a large Cancioneiro (355 ff.), corresponding nearly but not precisely to the Colocci index, was discovered in the library of the Conte Paolo Antonio Brancuti (C. C. B.[Pg 38] For convenience’ sake C. C. B. also = the fragment published by Enrico Gasi Molteni), and the 442 of its poems, lacking in C. V. (but nearly half of which are in C. A.), were published in diplomatic edition by Enrico Molteni in 1880 (C. C. B.). All these (C. A., C. V., and C. C. B.) were in all probability derived from the Cancioneiro compiled by the Conde de Barcellos. When his father, King Dinis, died, silence fell upon the poets. The new king, Afonso IV, showed no sign of continuing to collect the smaller Cancioneiros kept by nobles and men of humbler position, a custom inaugurated by his grandfather, Afonso III (if the Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Afonso in King Duarte’s library was his), continued by King Dinis (Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Dinis), and perhaps revived by King Duarte a century later (Livro de Trovas del Rei). It was thus a time suitable for a ‘definitive edition’, and Count Pedro, who was the last of the Cancioneiro poets and who was more collector than poet, probably took the existing Cancioneiros (of Afonso III and Dinis) and added a third part consisting of later poems. Besides the chronological order there was a division by subject into cantigas de amor, cantigas de amigo, and cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer (Santillana’s cantigas, serranas e dezires, or cantigas serranas, the Archpriest of Hita’s cantares serranos e dezires). C. V. is divided into these three kinds; in the older and incomplete C. A. 304 of the 310 poems are cantigas de amor. Eleven years after the death of King Duarte the Marqués de Santillana wrote (1449) to the Constable of Portugal, D. Pedro, describing the Galician-Portuguese Cancioneiro—un grant volume—which he had seen in his boyhood in the possession of D. Mencia de Cisneros. (This may have been the actual manuscript compiled by D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos and bequeathed by him in 1350 to Alfonso XI of Castille and Leon—a few days after Alfonso XI’s death. Or it may have been a copy of the Cancioneiro of D. Pedro or the Cancioneiro of Afonso III or of Dinis.) It is significant that in this very important letter it is a foreigner informing a Portuguese. Under the predominating influence first of Spain then of the Renaissance, the old Portuguese poems, even if they were known to exist, excited no interest in Portugal. They were[Pg 39] musas rusticas, musas in illo tempore rudes et incultas.[68] With this disdain the Cancioneiro became a real will-o’-the-wisp. Even as late as the nineteenth century one disappeared mysteriously from a sale, another emerged momentarily (see C. T. A.) from the shelves of a Spanish grandee only to fall back into the unknown. In the sixteenth century the evidence as to its being known is contradictory. Duarte Nunez de Leam in 1585 says of King Dinis that extant hodie eius carmina. Antonio de Vasconcellos in 1621 declares that time has carried them away: obliviosa praeripuit vetustas.

A few vague allusions (as that of Sá de Miranda concerning the echoes of Provençal song) were all that was vouchsafed in Portugal to the Cancioneiro, although prominent Portuguese men of letters—as Sá de Miranda, André de Resende, Damião de Goes—travelled in Italy and met there Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who had probably owned the Cancioneiros (copies by an Italian hand of a Portuguese original) acquired by Angelo Colocci; yet at this very time Colocci (†1549) was eagerly indexing and annotating the Cancioneiros in Rome. It is this Portuguese neglect and indifference to the things of Portugal which explains the survival of the cossantes only in Rome while the more solemn and less indigenous poems of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda remained in the land of their birth. A fuller account of the Portuguese Cancioneiros, with the fascinating and complicated question of their descent and interrelations, will be found in the Grundriss (pp. 199-202) and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos’ edition of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (vol. ii, pp. 180-288).[69]

When the poetry of the troubadours flourished in Provence Portugal was scarcely a nation. The first Provençal poet, Guilhaume, Comte de Poitou (1087-1127), precedes by nearly a century Sancho I (1154-1211), second King of Portugal, who wrote poems and married the Princess Dulce of Aragon; and the Gascon Marcabrun, the first foreign poet to refer to Portugal, in his poems Al prim comens del ivernaill and Emperaire per mi[Pg 40] mezeis, in the middle of the twelfth century, spoke not of her poetry but of her warrior deeds: la valor de Portegal. Gavaudan similarly refers at the end of the twelfth century to the Galicians and Portuguese among other (Castille, &c.) barriers against the ‘black dogs’ (the Moors). It was in Spain that the Portuguese had opportunity of meeting Provençal poets. The Peninsula in the thirteenth century was, like Greece of old, divided into little States and Courts, each harbouring exiles and refugees from neighbouring States. Civil strife or the death of a king in Portugal would scatter abroad a certain number of noblemen on the losing side, who would thus come into contact with the troubadours as Provençal poetry spread to the Courts of Catalonia and Aragon, Navarre, Castille and Leon. The first King of Portugal, although a prince of the House of Burgundy, held his kingdom in fief to Leon, and all the early kings were in close touch with Leon and Castille. Fernando III, King of Castille and Leon (St. Ferdinand), was a devoted lover of poetry, and his son Alfonso X gathered at his cort sen erguelh e sen vilania a galaxy of talented troubadours, Provençal and Galician. Portugal came into more direct touch with France in other ways, but the influence might have been almost exclusively that of the trouvères of the North had not the more generous enthusiasm of Provence penetrated across the frontier into Spain. Trade was fairly active in the thirteenth century between Portugal and England, North France and Flanders. Many of the members of the religious orders—as the Cluny Benedictines—who occupied the territory of the Moors in Portugal were Frenchmen. With foreign colonists the new towns were systematically peopled. The number of French pilgrims was such that the road to Santiago became known as the ‘French Road’. The Crusades also brought men of many languages to Portugal.[70] The Court by descent and dynastic intermarriage was cosmopolitan; but indeed the life of the whole Peninsula was cosmopolitan to an extent which tallies ill with the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of isolation and darkness. The Portuguese had already begun to show their[Pg 41] fondness for novedades. Yet it was they who imposed their, the Galician, language. As the Marqués de Santillana observed and the Cancioneiros prove, lyric poets throughout the Peninsula used Galician.[71] Probably the oldest surviving instance of this language in verse by a foreigner is to be found (ten lines) in a descort (descordo) written by Raimbaud de Vaqueiras (1158-1217) at the Court of Bonifazio II of Montferrat towards the end of the twelfth century. We cannot doubt that the character and conditions of the north-west of the Peninsula had permitted a thread of lyric poetry to continue there ever since Silius Italicus had heard the youth of Galicia wailing (ululantem) their native songs, and that both language and literature had the opportunity to develop earlier there than in the rest of Spain. The tide of Moorish victory only gradually ebbed southward, and the warriors in the sterner country of Castille, with its fiery sun and battles and epics, would look back to the green country of Galicia as the idyllic land of song, a refuge where sons of kings and nobles could spend their minority in comparative peace. When from the ninth century Galicia became a second Holy Land its attractions and central character were immeasurably increased. Pilgrims thither from every country would return to their native land with some words of the language, and those acquainted with Provençal might note the similarity and the musical softness of Galician.[72] It is not certain that the eldest of the ten children of San Fernando, Alfonso X (1221?-84), el Sabio, King of Castille and Leon, Lord of Galicia, and brother-in-law of our Edward I, passed his boyhood in Galicia. But when he was compiling a volume of poems referring to many parts of the world besides Spain, to Canterbury and Rome, Paris and Alexandria, Lisbon, Cologne, Cesarea, Constantinople, he would naturally choose Galician not only, or indeed chiefly, because it was the more graceful and pliant medium for lyric verse but because it was the most widely known, and, like French, plus commune à toutes[Pg 42] gens.[73] He had no delicate ear for its music and made such poor use of its pliancy that it often becomes as hard as the hardest Castilian in his hands. His songs of miracles offer a striking contrast to contemporary Portuguese lyrics in the same language. Their jingles are only possible as a descort in the Portuguese Cancioneiros. At the same time he would be influenced in his choice of language by his knowledge of Galicia as the traditional home of the lyric, of the encouraging patronage extended to Galician poets by his son-in-law Afonso III, of the Santiago school of poets, and of the promising future before the Galician language in the hands of the conquering Portuguese. Multas et perpulchras composuit cantilenas, says Gil de Zamora, and likens him to David. But when we remember the prodigious services rendered by Alfonso X to Castilian prose, the first question that arises is whether he was indeed the author of the 450 poems in Galician[74] that we possess under his name. Of these poems 426, or, cancelling repetitions, 420, are of a religious character, written, with one or two exceptions, in honour of the Virgin: Cantigas de Santa Maria. Many of these poems themselves provide an answer to the question: they record his illnesses and enterprises and his trobar in such a way that they could only have been written by himself: he is the entendedor of Santa Maria (C. M. 130), he exhorts other trobadores to sing her praises (C. M. 260), he himself is resolved to sing of no other dona (C. M. 10: dou ao demo os otros amores); and his attractive and ingenuous pride in these poems accords ill with an alien authorship. When he lay sick at Vitoria and was like to die it was only when the Livro das Cantigas was placed on his body that he recovered (C. M. 209), and he directed that they should be preserved in the church in which he was buried. There is little reason to doubt that he was the author, in a strictly limited sense, of the majority of the poems, although not of all.[Pg 43] Various phrases seem to imply a double method. C. M. 219 says: ‘I will have that miracle placed among the others’; C. M. 295: ‘I ordered it to be written.’ On the other hand, C. M. 47 is ‘a fair miracle of which I made my song’; C. M. 84 ‘a great miracle of which I made a song’; of 106 ‘I know well that I will make a goodly song’; of 64 ‘I made verses and tune’; for 188 ‘I made a good tune and verses because it caught my fancy’; for 307 ‘according to the words I made the tune’; of 347 ‘I made a new song with a tune that was my own and not another’s’. The inference seems to be that, the personal poems and the loas apart, if a miracle especially attracted the king he took it in hand; otherwise he might leave it to one of the joglares, and he would perhaps revise it and be its author to the extent that the Portuguese jograes were authors of the early cossantes. We know that he had at his Court a veritable factory of verse. The vignettes[75] to these Cantigas show him surrounded by scribes, pen and parchment in hand, by joglares and joglaresas. Poets thronged to his Court and he was in communication with others in foreign lands. Some of the miracles might come to him in verse, the work of a friendly poet or of a sacred jogral such as Pierres de Siglar, whom C. M. 8 shows reciting his poems from church to church: en todalas eigreias da Uirgen que non a par un seu lais senpre dizia,[76] and this would account for the variety of metre and treatment. Of raw material for his art there was never a scarcity, nor was the idea of turning it into verse original. In France Gautier de Coincy (1177-1236) had already written his Miracles de la Sainte Vierge in verse, and the Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo (1180-1247) had composed the Milagros de Nuestra Sennora. But there was no need for direct imitation. If the starry sky were parchment and the ocean ink, the miracles[Pg 44] could not all be written down, says King Alfonso (C. M. 110). Churches and rival shrines preserved an unfailing store for collectors. Gautier de Coincy spoke of tant miracles, a grant livre of them, and King Alfonso chooses one from among 300 in a book (C. M. 33), finds one written in an ancient book (265) written among many others (258), in a book among many others (284), and refers to a book full of them at Soissons. The miracles were recorded more systematically in France, and the books of Soissons and Rocamadour (Liber Miraculorum S. Mariae de Rupe Amatoris) provided the king with many subjects, as did also Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale, of which he possessed a copy. But the sources in the Peninsula were very copious, as, for instance, the Book of the Miracles of Santiago, of which a copy, in Latin, exists in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale. Of other miracles the king had had personal experience, or they were recent and came to him by word of mouth. Thus he often does not profess to invent his subject: he merely translates it into verse and sometimes appraises it as he does so. It is ‘a marvellous great miracle’ (C. M. 257), ‘very beautiful’ (82), ‘one in which I have great belief’ (241), ‘one almost incredible’, mui cruu de creer (242), or ‘famous’ (195), ‘known throughout Spain’ (191). Many of these miracles occurred to the peasants and unlettered: then as now the humbler the subject the greater the miracle. Accordingly we find the king in his poems dealing not with the conventional shepherdesses of the pastorelas but with lowly folk of real life, peasants, gleaners, sailors, fishermen, beggars, pilgrims, nuns; and it is one of the king’s titles to be considered a true poet that he takes an evident pleasure in these themes and retains their graphic, artless presentment. The collection abounds in charming glimpses of the life of the people. Indeed, in many of the poems there is more of the people than of King Alfonso,[77] and he sings diligently of the misdeeds of clerics and usurers, of the incompetence of doctors, and of massacres of Jews. He seems to have followed the originals very closely, and evident traces[Pg 45] of their language remain, French, English, and perhaps Provençal. The poems are often of considerable length, sometimes twenty or thirty verses, and as a rule the last line of each verse must rhyme with the refrain. The attention thus necessarily bestowed upon the rhymes sometimes mars the pathos of the subject, and the reader is reminded that he has to do with a skilful, eager, and industrious craftsman but not with a great original poet. In the remarkable Ben vennas Mayo and in many of his other poems materialism and poetical ecstasy go hand in hand. Yet in several of the more beautiful legends the poet proves himself equal to his theme. Some of these legends are still famous, that of the Virgin taking the place of the nun (C. M. 55 and 94), of the knight and the pitcher (155), of the stone miraculously warded from the statue of the Virgin and Child (136 and 294), of the monk’s mystic ecstasy at the lais of the bird in the convent garden (103). Others had probably an equal celebrity in the Middle Ages, as that of the captive miraculously brought from Africa and awaking free in Spain at dawn (325),[78] of the painter with whom the Devil was wroth for always painting him so ugly (74), or of the peasant whose vineyard alone was saved from the hail (161). Every tenth poem (the collection was intended originally to consist of one hundred) interrupts the narratives of miracles by a purely lyrical cantiga de loor, and some of these, written with the fervour with which the king always sang as graças muy granadas of the Madre de Deus Manuel, are of great simplicity and beauty. The king had not always written thus, and of his profane poems we possess thirty[79] (since no one who has read the lively essay by Cesare de Lollis will doubt that C. V. 61-79 and C. C. B. 359-72 (= 467-78) were written by Alfonso X). The most important of these are historical, and invoke curses on[Pg 46] false or recalcitrant knights, non ven al mayo! C. V. 74 is a battle-scene description so swift and impetuous that we must go to the Poema del Cid for a parallel. And indeed some of the old spirit peeps out from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, as when he prays to be delivered from false friends or praises the Virgin for giving his enemies ‘what they deserved’.

From the return and enthronement of Afonso III imitation of French and Provençal poetry was in full swing in Portugal. The long sojourn of the prince in France, accompanied by several noblemen who figure in the Cancioneiros (as Rui Gomez de Briteiros and D. Joan de Aboim), had an important bearing on the development of Portuguese poetry. He came back determined to act the part of an enlightened patron of letters; he encouraged the immigration of men of learning from France and maintained three jograes permanently in his palace.[80] Princes and nobles as trobadores for their own pastime, the segreis,[81] knights who went from Court to Court and received payment for the recital of their own verses, the jograes, belonging to a lower station, who recited the poems of their patrons the trobadores, all vied in imitation of the love songs of Provence. In general, i. e. in the structure of their poems, the resemblance is close and clear enough. The decasyllabic love song in three or four stanzas with an envoi, the satirical sirventes, the tenson (jocs-partits) in which two poets contended in dialogue, the descort in which the discordant sounds expressed the poet’s distress and grief, the balada of Provence, the ballette and pastourelle of North France, were all faithfully reproduced.

If, on the other hand, we look for imitations in detail it is perhaps natural that we should find them less frequently.[Pg 47][82] The conventional character of the Portuguese poems would sufficiently account for this, and moreover their models were probably more often heard than read, so that reproduction of the actual thought or words would be difficult. When Airas Nunez in a poem of striking beauty, which is almost a sonnet (C. V. 456), wrote the lines:

he need not have read Peire de Bussinac’s lines:

in order to know that birds sing and trees grow green in spring. And generally it is not easy to say whether an apparent echo is a direct imitation or merely a stereotyped phrase. The Portuguese trobadores introduced little of the true spirit of the Provençal troubadours—that had passed to Palestine and to the Lady of Tripoli. In their cantigas de amor is no sign of action—unless it be to die of love; no thought of Nature. Jaufre Rudel (1140-70), that prince of lovers, had ‘gone to school to the meadows’ and might sing in his maint bons vers of la flor aiglentina or of flors d’albespis, but in the Portuguese cantigas nothing relieves the conventional dullness and excessive monotony (which likewise marked the Provençal school of poets in Sicily). Composed for the most part in iambic decasyllables they describe continually the poet’s coita d’amor, grave d’endurar, his grief at parting, his loss of sleep, his pleasure in dying for his fremosa sennor. She is described merely as beautiful, or, at most, as

Vocabulary and thought are spectre-thin. Indeed, it was part of the convention to sing vaguely. Eu ben falarei de sa fremosura, says one poet[83] (C. C. B. 337)—he will sing of her[Pg 48] beauty, but not in such a way that the curious who non o poden adevinhar should guess his secret. As to allusions to Nature, perhaps the climate, with less marked divisions than in Provence, furnished less incentive to sing of spring and the earth’s renewal or to imitate Guiraut de Bornelh in going to school all the winter (l’ivern estava a escola a aprender) and singing only with the return of spring. King Dinis, perhaps in reference to that troubadour, declares that his love is independent of the seasons and more sincere than that of the singers of Provence:

and even as he wrote the words he was unconsciously imitating the thought of the Provençal poet Gace Brulé, who had spoken of les faus amoureus d’esté. The exceeding similarity of the cantigas de amor did raise doubts as to the sincerity of all this dying of love (cf. C. V. 353 and C. V. 988) and as to whether a poem was a cantar novo or an article at second hand (C. V. 819). Yet the poets evidently had talent and poetic feeling; indeed, their skill in versification contrasts remarkably with their entire absence of thought or individuality. They appear to revel in monotony of ideas and pride themselves on the icy smoothness of their verse. All their originality consisted in the introduction of technical devices, such as the repetition at intervals of certain words (dobre), or of different tenses of the same verb (mordobre, as C. V. 681), to carry on the poem without stop from beginning to end by means of ‘for’, ‘but’, &c., at the beginning of each verse (cantigas de atafiinda,[84] as C. V. 130,[Pg 49] C. A. 205), to begin and end each verse with the same line (canção redonda, as C. V. 685), to repeat the last line of one verse as the first line of the next (leixapren), to use the same word at the end of each line (as vi in C. A. 7). The poet who addressed cantigas de amor to his lady also provided her with poems for her to sing, cantigas de amigo in complicated form, or as the simpler cossante, which the cantigas de amigo include. These are poems with more life and action, often in dialogue. Perhaps the dona herself, wearied by the monotonous cantigas de amor, had pointed to the songs of the peasant women, and the form of these cantigas de amigo was a compromise between the Provençal cantiga de meestria and the popular cantiga de refran. The peasant woman composed her own songs, and the poet places his song on the lips of his love: thus we find her describing herself as beautiful, eu velida; eu fremosa; trist’ e fremosa; fremosa e de mui bon prez; o meu bon semelhar. Poetical shepherdesses sing these cantigas de amigo; the fair dona sings them as she sits spinning (C. V. 321). The old Poetica (II. 2-12) distinguishes between the cantigas de amor, in which the amigo speaks first, and the cantigas de amigo, in which the first to speak is the amiga. Both were artificial forms, but the latter are clearly more popular in theme (the amiga waiting and wailing for her lover), and in treatment sometimes convey a real intensity of feeling.[85] The favourite subject of the cantiga de amigo is that the cruel mother prevents the lovers from meeting. The daughter is kept in the house: a manda muito guardar (C. V. 535). She reproaches and entreats her mother, who answers her as choir to choir; she bewails her lot to her friends, or to her sister. She is dying of love and begs her mother to tell her lover. Her mother and lover are reconciled. Her lover is false and fails to meet her at the trysted hour. She waits for him in vain, and her mother comforts her in her[Pg 50] distress. She pines and dies of love while her amigo is away serving the king in battle or en cas’ del rei.

The third section of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana does not sin by monotony. We may divide Pope’s line, since if the cantigas de amor are ‘correctly cold’ many of the satiric poems are ‘regularly low’. In these verses, containing violent invective and abuse (cantigas de maldizer) or more covert sarcasm and ridicule (cantigas d’escarnho), the themes are often scandalous, the language ribald and unseemly. They were written with great zest, although without the fiery indignation of the Provençal and Catalan sirventeses. They are concerned with persons: the haughty trobador may take a jogral to task for writing verses that do not rhyme or scan, but even then it is a personal matter and he rebukes his insolence for daring to raise his thoughts to altas donas in song. Some of these poems should never have been written or printed, but many of them give a lively idea of the society of that time. They laugh merrily or venomously at the poverty-stricken knight with nothing to eat; at the knight who set his dogs on those who called near dinner-time; the jogral who knows as much of poetry as an ass of reading; the poet who pretended to have gone as a pilgrim to the Holy Land but never went beyond Montpellier; the physician (Mestre Nicolas) whose books were more for show than for use (E sab’ os cadernos ben cantar quen[86] non sabe por elles leer, C. V. 1116); the Galician unjustifiably proud of his poetical talent (non o sabia ben, C. V. 914); the jogral who gave up poetry—shaved off his beard and cut his hair short about his ears—in order to take holy orders, in hope of a fat living, but was disappointed; the jogral who played badly and sang worse; the poet who was the cause of good poetry in others; the gentleman who spent most of his income on clothes and wore gilt shoes winter and summer. We read of the excellent capon, kid, and pork provided by the king for dinner; of the fair malmaridada, married or rather sold by her parents; of the impoverished lady, one of those for whom later Nun’ Alvarez provided; of the poet pining in exile not of love but hunger; of the lame lawyer, the unjust[Pg 51] judge; the parvenu villão, the knighted tailor, the seers and diviners (veedeiros, agoreiros, divinhos). These cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer were a powerful instrument of satire from which there was no escape. A hapless infançon, slovenly in his ways, drew down upon himself the wit of D. Lopo Diaz, who in a series of eleven songs (C. V. 945-55) ridiculed him and his creaking saddle till at Christmas he was fain to call a truce. But the implacable D. Lopo forthwith indited a new song: ‘I won’t deny that I agreed to a truce about the saddle, but—it didn’t include the mare’,[87] and so no doubt continued till pascoa florida or la trinité. But the majority of these verses are not so innocently merry. Many of the poets of the Cancioneiros wrote in all three kinds: cantigas de amor, de amigo, and de maldizer. Of Joan de Guilhade[88] (fl. 1250) we have over fifty poems.[89] He imitated both French and Provençal models, and, having learnt lightness of touch from them, would appear to have contented himself with writing cantigas de amigo (besides cantigas de amor and escarnho) without having recourse to the cossante. There is life and poetical feeling as well as facility of technique in his poems.

Pero Garcia de Burgos (fl. 1250) is, with Joan de Guilhade, one of the more voluminous writers of the Cancioneiros. He shows himself capable of deep feeling in his love songs, but speaks with two voices, descending to sad depths in his poems of invective. His contemporary, the segrel Pero da Ponte, is also an accomplished poet of love, in the even flow of his verse far more accomplished than Pero Garcia, and in his satirical poems wittier and, as a rule, more moderate. He placed his poetical gift at the service of kings to sing their praises for hire, and celebrated San Fernando’s conquest of Seville in 1248; Seville, of which, he says, ‘none can adequately tell the praises’. To satire almost exclusively the powerful courtier of King Dinis’ reign, Stevam Guarda, devoted his not inconsiderable talent, and the segrel Pedr’ Amigo de Sevilha (fl. 1250) shone in the same kind with a great variety of metre as well as in[Pg 52] numerous cantigas de amigo. Martin Soarez (first half 13th c.), born at Riba de Lima, and considered the best trobador of his time (by those who could not appreciate the charm of the indigenous poetry), wrote no cossante nor cantiga de amigo, and in his satirical poems displayed a contemptuous insolence—towards those whom he regarded as his inferiors in lineage or talent—which places him in no attractive light. A notable poet at the Courts of Spain and Portugal was Joan Airas of Santiago de Compostela (fl. 1250), of whom we have over twenty cantigas de amor and fifty cantigas de amigo. Contemporary criticism apparently viewed their quantity with disfavour,[90] for he complains that Dizen que meus cantares non valen ren porque tan muitos son (C. V. 533). But if his poems lack the variety of those of King Dinis, which they almost rival in number, they are nevertheless marked not only by harmony but by many a touch of real life. Of most of the other singers we have far fewer poems. Like Meendinho and Estevam Coelho, Pero Vyvyães (first half 13th c.) is known chiefly for a single song: his bailada (C. V. 336). By D. Joan Soarez Coelho (c. 1210-80) there are two cossantes (C. V. 291, 292) and numerous other poems. He was prominent at the Court of Afonso III (1248-79) and in the conquest of Algarve, as was also D. Joan de Aboim (c. 1215-87), whose poems are less numerous but include a dozen cantigas de amigo and a pastorela (C. V. 278: Cavalgava noutro dia per hun caminho frances), and Fernan Garcia Esgaravunha,[91] whose cantigas de amor show characteristic life and vigour, and a good command of metre. There is an engaging grace and spirit in the cantigas de amigo written in dancing rhythm by Fernan Rodriguez de Calheiros (fl. in or before 1250), who preceded those soldier poets; deep feeling and melancholy in the cantigas de amor of D. Joan Lopez de Ulhoa, their contemporary. Neither of these, however, possessed the poetical genius and versatility of the priest of Santiago, Airas Nunez (second half[Pg 53] 13th c.)—the name appears in a marginal note to one of King Alfonso’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. M. 223 in the manuscript j. b. 2)—whose poems show a perfect mastery of rhythm and a true instinct for beauty. He wrote a pastorela in the manner of the trouvères, and combined it with some of the most exquisite specimens of the indigenous poetry.[92] The fact that one of these was by Joan Zorro makes it probable that Nunez’ celebrated bailada (C. V. 462) is but a development of Zorro’s (C. V. 761), unless both drew from a common popular source. Another of his poems (C. V. 468) reads like an anticipatory slice out of Juan Ruiz’ Libro de Buen Amor. Great importance has been attached to another (C. V. 466) as a remnant of a cantar de gesta, but D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has shown that it was written to commemorate a contemporary event, probably in 1289.[93] More than any other poet of the Cancioneiros, with the exception, perhaps, of King Dinis, Nunez anticipated that doce estylo, the introduction of which cost Sá de Miranda so many perplexities.

The Cancioneiros contain poems by high and low, prince and, one would fain say, peasant, noble trobador and humble jogral, soldiers and civilians, priests and laymen, singers of Galicia, Portugal, and Spain, but more especially of Galicia and North Portugal. As in the case of C. V. 466, the interest of many of the poems is historical: C. V. 1088, for instance, written by a partisan of the dethroned King Sancho II; or C. V. 1080, a gesta de maldizer of fifty-six lines in three rhymes, with the exclamation Eoy! at the change of the rhyme, which was written by D. Afonso Lopez de Bayan (c. 1220-80), clearly in imitation of the Chanson de Roland.[94] Almost equally prominent, though not from any historical associations, is the curiously modern C. A. 429 (= C. C. B. 314) among the cantigas de amor. It tells of a girl forced against her will to enter a convent, and who says to her lover: ‘My dress may be religious, but God shall not have my heart.’ (For the metre, cf. C. V. 342.) Its author was the fidalgo[Pg 54] D. Rodrig’ Eanez de Vasconcellos, one of the pre-Dionysian poets. But indeed no further proofs are needed to show that, even had King Dinis never existed, the contents of the early Portuguese Cancioneiros would have been remarkable for their variety and beauty. When Alfonso X died his grandson Dinis (1261-1325)[95] had sat for five years on the throne of Portugal. Plentifully educated by a Frenchman, Ayméric d’Ébrard, afterwards Bishop of Coimbra, married to a foreign princess, Isabel of Aragon (the Queen-Saint of Portugal), profoundly impressed, no doubt, by the world-fame of Alfonso X, to whom he was sent on a diplomatic mission when not yet in his teens, he became nevertheless one of the most national of kings. If he imitated Alfonso X in his love of literature, he showed himself a far abler and firmer sovereign, being more like a rock than like the sea, to which the poet compared Alfonso. Far-sighted in the conception of his plans and vigorous in their execution, the Rei Lavrador, whom Dante mentions, though not by name: quel di Portogallo (Paradiso xix), fostered agriculture, increased his navy, planted pine-forests, fortified his towns, built castles and convents and churches, and legislated for the safety of the roads and for the general welfare and security of his people. Among his great and abiding services to his country was the foundation of the first Portuguese University in the year 1290, and in the same spirit he ordered the translation of many notable books from the Spanish, Latin, and Arabic into Portuguese prose, including the celebrated works of the Learned King, so that it is truer of prose than of poetry to say that he inaugurated a golden age.[96] Had he written no line of verse his name must have been for ever honoured in Portugal as the real founder of that imperishable glory which was fulfilled two centuries later. But he also excelled as a poet, d’amor trobador. It had no doubt been part of his education to write conventionally in the Provençal manner, but his skill in versification, remarkable even in an age in which Portuguese poetry had attained exceptional proficiency in technique, would have[Pg 55] availed him, or at least us, little had he not also possessed an instinct for popular themes, perhaps directly encouraged by Alfonso X. The Declaratio placed by Guiraut Riquier of Narbonne on the lips of that king in 1275 marked the coming asphyxia of Provençal poetry, for it showed the tendency to take the jogral[97] away from tavern and open air and to cut off his poetry from the life of the people. It was owing to the personal encouragement of Dinis that the waning star of both Provençal and indigenous poetry continued to shine in Portugal for another half-century. The grandson of Alfonso X was the last hope of the trobadores and jograes of the Peninsula. From Leon and Castille and Aragon they came to reap an aftermath of song and panos at his Court, and after his death remained silent or unpaid (C. V. 708). The poems of King Dinis are not only more numerous but far more various than those of any other trobador, with the exception of Alfonso X, and it may perhaps be doubted whether they are all the work of his own hand. In poetry’s old age he might well wish to collect specimens of various kinds for his Livro de Trovas. But many of the 138 poems[98] that we possess under his name are undoubtedly his, and display a characteristic force and sincerity as well as true poetic delicacy and power. Among them are some colourless cantigas de amor and others more individual in tone, pastorelas (C. V. 102, 137, 150), cantigas de amigo (more Provençal than Portuguese in their spirit of vigorous reproach are C. V. 186: Amigo fals’ e desleal, and C. V, 198: Ai fals’ amigo e sen lealdade), a jingle worthy of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. V. 136), a poem in 8.8.4.8 metre (C. V. 131), atafiindas (e. g. C. V. 130), a mordobre in querer (C. V. 113, Quix ben, amigos, e quer’ e querrei Ũa molher que me quis e quer mal E querrá), and cossantes of an unmistakably popular flavour: Ay flores, ay flores do verde pino (C. V. 171), two albas (C. V. 170, 172), C. V. 168, 169, with their refrains louçana and ai madre, moiro d’amor, C. V. 173 with its[Pg 56] quaint charm: Vede-la frol do pinho—Valha Deus, and the bailada-cossante (C. V. 195: Mia madre velida, Voum’ a la bailia Do amor). If the king wrote these cossantes he must be reckoned not only as a musical and skilful versifier but as a great poet. And certainly, at least, his graciosas e dulces palavras well earned him the reputation of being not only the best king but the best poet of his time in the Peninsula.

It would seem that, unlike his grandfather, who had begun with profane and ended with religious verse, King Dinis, no doubt at his grandfather’s bidding, who would be delighted to find a disciple (Dized’, ai trobadores, A Sennor das Sennores Por que a non loades?), began writing songs in honour of the Virgin and sent them to the Castilian king. His book of Louvores da Virgem Nossa Senhora is said to have been seen in the Escorial Library and in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo, and it is impossible altogether to set aside the statements of Duarte Nunez de Leam[99] and Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, who says that he read religious poems by King Dinis at the Escorial.[100] On the other hand, it must be remembered that it was the common opinion that King Dinis had been the first to write Portuguese poetry, and the temptation to attribute ancient poems to him would be strong. The possibility of confusion with the Livro de Cantigas of Alfonso X (to which his grandson may well have contributed poems)[101] is also obvious. But the statement of Sousa de Macedo, who was no passing traveller in a hurry, and who had wide experience of books and libraries,[102] is very precise. No trace or

[Pg 57]

memory of the existence of this manuscript exists, however, at the Escorial Library, nor is to be found in the Catálogo de los Manuscritos existentes antes del incendio de 1671. The subjects of King Dinis’ ten[103] satirical poems are trivial, but he had too much force of character to descend to such vilenesses as were common among profaçadores. (His concise definition of a bore: falou muit’ e mal (C. C. B. 411) is worthy of Afonso de Albuquerque.) Of his illegitimate sons, besides D. Afonso Sanchez, D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos, long had a reputation as a poet almost equal to that of his father, owing to the association of his name with the Cancioneiro; but of his ten poems six (C. V. 1037-42) are satirical, and the four cantigas de amor (C. V. 210-13) are perhaps the heaviest and most prosaic in the collection. It was as a prose-writer and editor of the Livro de Linhagens that he worthily carried on the literary tradition of King Dinis.

With prose a new period opens, since, although there are Portuguese documents of the late twelfth century[104] and the Latin chrysalis was in an advanced stage of development even earlier, prose as a literary instrument does not begin before the fourteenth century or the end of the thirteenth at the earliest. The fragments of an early Poetica[105] clearly show how slow and awkward were still the movements of prose at a time when poetry had attained an exceedingly graceful expression. The next two centuries redressed the balance in the favour of prose. The victory of Aljubarrota (1385) made it possible to carry on the national work begun by King Dinis—the preparation of Portugal’s resources for a high destiny. In this constructive process literature was not forgotten, and indeed its deliberate encouragement, as though it were an industry or a pine-forest, may account for the fact that it consisted mainly of prose—chronicles, numerous translations from Latin, Spanish, and other languages, works of religious or practical import. The first kings of the dynasty of Avis, who rendered noble service to Portuguese literature, were not poets, and in the second half of the fifteenth century Spanish influence, checked at Aljubarrota, succeeded by peaceful penetration in recovering all and more than all that it had lost, till it became common to hear lyrics of Boscan sung in the streets of Lisbon,[106] and uncommon for a Portuguese poet to versify in his mother tongue.[107] Prose[Pg 59] was more national. King Dinis had encouraged translation into Portuguese, and among other works his grandfather King Alfonso the Learned’s Cronica General was translated by his order. The only edition that we have, Historia Geral de Hespanha (1863), is cut short in the reign of King Ramiro (cap. ccii, p. 192). The first ‘O’ of the preface in the manuscript contains the king in purple robe and crown of gold, pen in hand, with a book before him. The style is primitive, often a succession of short sentences beginning with ‘And’.[108] In the convents brief lives of saints, portions of the Bible, prayers and regulations were written in Portuguese. Thus we have thirteenth-or fourteenth-century fragments of the rules of S. Bento, Fragmentos de uma versão antiga da regra de S. Bento, with its traces of a Latin original (e. g. os desprezintes Deos = contemnentes Deum); the Actos dos Apostolos, written in the middle of the fifteenth century by Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça and Frei Nicolao Vieira, that is, copied by them from an older manuscript; the eloquent prayers (Libro de Horas) translated by another Alcobaça monk, Frei João Claro (†1520?); the Historias abreviadas do Testamento Velho, printed from a manuscript of the fourteenth century, or of the thirteenth retouched in the fourteenth. The translation is close; the style foreshadows that of the Leal Conselheiro. The importance of these and other fragmentary versions of the Bible, in which there can rarely be a doubt as to the meaning of the words, is obvious. Extracts from the Vida de Eufrosina and the Vida de Maria Egipcia, published in 1882 by Jules Cornu from the manuscripts formerly in the Monastery of Alcobaça, now in the Torre do Tombo, show that they were written in vigorous if primitive prose (14th c.). A Lenda dos Santos Barlaam e Josaphat is perhaps a little later (end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century). The Visão de Tundalo, of which the Latin original, Visio Tundali, was written by Frei Marcos not long after the date of the vision (1140),[Pg 60] exists in two Portuguese versions, probably both of the fifteenth century (Monastery of Alcobaça). The Vida de Santo Aleixo also exists in two codices belonging to the middle and beginning of the fifteenth century, and Dr. Esteves Pereira, who published the latter, considers that the variants point to an earlier manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth or end of the thirteenth century. To about the same period (14th-15th c.) belong the Lenda de Santo Eloy, the Vida de Santo Amaro, the Vida de Santa Pelagia, and many similar short devout treatises and legends which concern literature less than the development of the Portuguese language. Both literature and philology are interested in the early fifteenth-century work printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos from the manuscript in the Vienna Hofbibliothek: O Livro de Esopo, which consists not of direct translations[109] from Exopo greguo of Antioch but of estorias ffremosas de animalias, told in the manner of Aesop, half a century before William Caxton and Robert Henryson, with great naturalness, vigour, and brevity.

The earliest entry of the Cronica Breve do Archivo Nacional is dated 1391, and both it and the Cronicas Breves e memorias avulsas de Santa Cruz de Coimbra are laconic annals of the first kings of Portugal, a few lines covering a whole reign. The Livro da Noa de Santa Cruz de Coimbra is an extract from the Livro das Heras of the same convent, and is, as the latter title indicates, a similar simple chronicle of events by years.[110] It begins in Latin, then Latin and Portuguese entries alternate till 1405. From 1406 to the end (1444) they are exclusively Portuguese. The Cronica da Ordem dos Frades Menores (1209-85) is a fifteenth-century Portuguese translation of a fourteenth-century Latin chronicle, and has been carefully edited by Dr. J. J. Nunes from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional; the Vida de D. Tello (15th c.), and the Vida de S. Isabel, the Queen-consort of King Dinis (earlier 15th c.), are ‘historical’ biographies[Pg 61] which contain more legend and less history than the Cronica da Fundaçam do Moesteiro de S. Vicente de Lixboa (Cronica dos Vicentes), a fifteenth-century version from a Latin original, Indiculum, of the eleventh century. There is far more life if equal brevity in the Cronica da Conquista do Algarve (Cronica de como Dom Payo Correa. .. tomou este reino de Algarve aos Moros)—a rapid, vivid sketch which reads almost like a chapter out of Fernam Lopez. Here at last was some one with will and power to make the dry bones live.[111] But meanwhile history of another kind had been written from a very early date. As a first rough catalogue of names the livros de linhagens, books of descent, as they were called by their compilers,[112] go back farther than the chronicles or religious prose, but so far as concerns their claim to literary form they belong like those to the fourteenth century. Of the four that have come down to us the Livro Velho is a jejune family register (11th-14th c.); the second is a mere fragment of the same kind. The manuscript of the third (O Nobiliario do Collegio dos Nobres) was bound up with the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, and together with the fourth, O Nobiliario do Conde D. Pedro, represents the lost original of the Livro de Linhagens of D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos (1289-1354). The Nobiliario do Conde has been shown by Alexandre Herculano, who printed it from the manuscript in the Torre do Tombo, to be the work of various authors extending over more than a century (13th-14th), the Conde de Barcellos being but one of them. It was in fact compiled like a modern peerage,[113] and was not intended to be final, new entries being added as time made them necessary, so that the passage diz O Conde D. Pedro em seu livro is as natural as the mention of Innocencio da Silva in a later volume of his great dictionary. But it was this son of King Dinis who with infinite diligence searched for documents far and wide, had recourse to the writings of King Alfonso X and others, and spared no pains to give the work[Pg 62] an historical as well as a genealogical character. His researches (Ouue de catar, he says, por gram trabalho por muitas terras escripturas que fallauam das linhagens) set an excellent example to Fernam Lopez. Certainly the Livro de Linhagens is a vast catalogue of names, with at most a brief note after the name, as ‘he was a good priest’ or ‘a very good poet’; but it also gives succinct stories of the Kings of the Earth from Adam, including Priam, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and the early kings of Portugal, and it contains rare but charming intervals, green oases of legend and anecdote, such as the tale of King Lear with its happy ending, or the account of King Ramiro going to see his wife, who was a captive of the Moors.[114] Count Pedro, by his humanity and his generous conception of what a genealogy should be, really made the book his own. It was naturally consulted by the early chroniclers, its worth was recognized by the ablest author of the Monarchia Lusitana,[115] and recently, in the skilful hands of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, it has rendered invaluable service in reconstructing the lives of the thirteenth-century poets.[116]

The Livro de Linhagens refers not only to King Lear but to Merlin, King Arthur, Lancelot, and the Isle of Avalon. Many other allusions, both earlier and later, to the Breton cycle, the matière de Bretagne, are to be found in early Portuguese literature: to the lovers Tristan and Iseult, to the cantares de Cornoalha,[117] to the chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table. In the fourteenth century many in Portugal were baptized with the name of Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival; and Nun’ Alvarez (1360-1431) chose Galahad for his model, and came as near realizing his ideal as may be given to mortal man. In Gil Vicente’s time the name Percival had already descended to the sphere of the peasants: as Passival (i. II) in 1502[Pg 63] (Auto Pastoril Castelhano) and Pessival (i. 117) in 1534 (Auto de Mofina Mendes).

The early Portuguese Cancioneiros contain many references to this cycle, and the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti opens with five celebrated songs,[118] imitations of Breton lais, with rubrics explaining their subjects, and mentioning King Arthur and Tristan, Iseult, Cornwall, Maraot of Ireland, and Lancelot. Whether they were incorporated in the Cancioneiro from a Portuguese Tristam earlier than the Spanish version (1343?), or, as is more probable, directly from the Old-French Historia Tristani, their presence here is a sufficient witness to the Portuguese fondness for such themes. It was but natural that a Celtic people living by the sea, delighting in vague legends and in foreign novelties, should have felt drawn towards these misty tales of love and wandering adventure, which carried them west as far as Cornwall and Ireland, and also East, through the search for the Holy Grail. It was natural that they should undergo their influence earlier and more strongly than their more direct and more national neighbours the Castilians, whose clear, definite descriptions in the twelfth-century Poema del Cid would send those legends drifting back to the dim regions of their birth. (Even to-day connexion with and sympathy for Ireland is far commoner in Galicia than in any other part of Spain.) Unhappily, most of the early Portuguese versions of the Breton legends have been lost. King Duarte in his library possessed Merlim, O Livro de Tristam, and O Livro de Galaaz. The probability that these were written in Portuguese, not in Spanish, is increased by the survival of A Historia dos Cavalleiros da Mesa Redonda e da Demanda do Santo Graall, as yet only partially published from the manuscript (2594) in the Vienna Hofbibliothek. It was written probably in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the end of the thirteenth, although the Vienna manuscript is more recent and belongs to the fifteenth century, in which the work was referred to by the poet Rodriguez de la Cámara.[119] It is a Portuguese version of the story of the Holy Grail, and, although not a[Pg 64] continuous translation, was evidently written with the French original (doubtfully ascribed to Robert de Boron,[120] author of a different work on the same subject) constantly in view. Traces of French remain in its prose.[121] This was clearly part of a larger work,[122] perhaps of a whole cycle of works dealing with the search for the Holy Grail. The only others that we have in print are the Estorea de Vespeseano and the Livro de Josep ab Arimatia, the manuscript of which was discovered in the nineteenth century in the Torre do Tombo. This, in the same way as the Demanda do Santo Graall, is a later (16th c.) copy of a thirteenth-fourteenth-century Portuguese translation or adaptation from the French, and retains in its language signs of French origin. The incunable Estorea de Vespeseano (Lixboa, 1496) is a work in twenty-nine short chapters, which only incidentally[123] refers to the Holy Grail, but recounts vividly the event mentioned in the Demanda[124]: the destruction of Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus. It was also known formerly as Destroyçam de Jerusalem.[125] It is an anonymous translation, made in the middle of the fifteenth century, not from the French Destruction de Jérusalem, but from the Spanish Estoria del noble Vespesiano (c. 1485 and 1499). Dr. Esteves Pereira believes that the 1499 Spanish edition is a retranslation from the Portuguese text originally translated from the Spanish.

Tennyson’s revival of the Arthurian legend in England evoked no corresponding interest in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and the primitive and touching story as published in 1887 has left Sir Percival in the very middle of an adventure for over a generation. The descent of the Amadis romances from the noble ideal of chivalry of King Arthur’s Court is obvious, but their exact pedigree, the date and nationality of the first ancestor of the Amadis who is still with us, has been the subject of some little contention.

[Pg 65]

Amadis de Gaula has indeed been doubly fortunate. The successor of Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan as a fearless and loyal knight, he early won his way in the Peninsula; he was spared by the priest and barber in the Don Quixote scrutiny, and now when Vives’ ‘pestiferous books’,[126] those ‘serious follies’, are no longer read widely, he has received a new span of immortality as a corpse of Patroclus between the contending critics. The problem of the date and authorship has become more fascinating than the book. Champions for Spain and Portugal come forward armed for the fight: Braunfels, Gayangos, Baist are met by Theophilo Braga, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, while Dr. Henry Thomas holds the scales. The ground is thick with their arrows. And beneath them all lies the simple ingenuous story as retold by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in or immediately after 1492 and published in 1508, still worth reading for its freshness and for its clear good style, which Braunfels, following up the praise in Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la Lengua (c. 1535), declared could not be a translation.[127] The argument, conclusive in the case of the masterpiece of prose that is Palmeirim[Pg 66] de Inglaterra, loses its force here, since Montalvo himself tells us that he corrected the work from old originals. Naturally we are curious to know what these antiguos originales were, but the question did not arise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: readers did not then concern themselves greatly with the origin and authorship of a book; they were content to enjoy it. Evidently Amadis was enjoyed both in Spain and Portugal. It is mentioned in the middle of the fourteenth century in the Spanish translation, by Johan Garcia de Castrogeriz, of Egidio Colonna’s De regimine principum, at the very time, that is, when the Spanish poet and chronicler, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407), was reading Amadis in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the Cancionero de Baena refers to Amadis as written in three books. This is one of the most definite early references to Amadis, but of course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent Spanish references occur in the Cancionero de Baena, which was compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is, which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry, although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose rubrics of the Portuguese Cancioneiros and the Poetica of the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti are sufficient to dispel this delusion. Whether this Poetica be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which[Pg 67] it theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that Amadis is contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets—Bom Vasco de Lobeira and Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando—written by his father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco de Lobeira wrote Amadis of Gaul. We know that King Dinis encouraged not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth, not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the Demanda do Santo Graall, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the Cancioneiros, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse. The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s Amadis identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier Prince Afonso (c. 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first Peninsular version of Amadis was composed in Portuguese in the middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a novelty by López de Ayala. In the fourteenth century most Spaniards read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse, to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read Amadis in Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which Amadis is so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of Amadis, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first three[Pg 68] books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents, sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130]

But if we admit that Amadis was written c. 1350, who was its author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara, basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority, in a perfectly genuine passage of his Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century, ascribes Amadis to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old knight at[Pg 69] Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros wrote Clarimundo in his youth.

If he lived on through the reigns of Pedro I (1357-67) and Fernando (1376-83), and acquired new distinction in battle in the reign of the latter, this might account for Zurara’s assertion that he wrote Amadis in the reign of Fernando. But the chief obstacle to the authorship of Vasco is the existence in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti (Nos. 230 and 232 A) of a song by Joan de Lobeira, Leonoreta, fin roseta, which reappears with slight variations in Montalvo’s Amadis (Lib. II, cap. xi: este villancico). It would seem then that Joan, not Vasco, wrote Amadis. Joan de Lobeira,[135] or Joan Pirez Lobeira, flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century, and so we have Amadis dating not only from the reign of King Dinis but from the first half of his reign. But does the existence of the poem entail that of a prose romance? The early mention of Tristan, e.g. by Alfonso X, does not necessarily imply the existence of a thirteenth-century Peninsular Tristan in prose. May we not accept the poem, written in the stirring metre, dear to men of action, used by Alfonso X (C. M. 300), as merely a proof of the popularity of the story, fondness for an episode perhaps treated in greater detail in the Anglo-French original than in Montalvo’s version? Certainly it is in the highest degree improbable that a Spaniard, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, should extract a poem from the Portuguese Cancioneiros and insert it in his prose; but the improbability disappears if in the middle of the fourteenth century a Portuguese (Vasco de Lobeira), perhaps drawn to the story by the poem of his ancestor, incorporated it in his romance. The late Antonio Thomaz Pires in 1904 discovered at Elvas the will of a João de Lobeira, mercador, who died[Pg 70] there in 1386, and in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s latest opinion[136] there were three Portuguese versions of Amadis: that of the father, this João de Lobeira, written in the time of King Dinis (a long-lived race these Lobeiras!), that of the son,[137] Vasco, and a third by Pedro de Lobeira in the first half of the fifteenth century. The threefold authorship of this family heirloom is even more cruu de creer than the theory that a single Lobeira—Vasco—wrote it in the middle of the fourteenth century. A certain note of disapproval of Amadis as fabulous, shared by Portuguese and Spanish writers,[138] perhaps indicates a fairly late date: its irresponsible fiction would be less excusable if it was written in an age which was beginning to attach serious importance to nobiliarios and ‘true’ chronicles. Moreover, if the Portuguese adaptation of an Anglo-French legend had been even remotely as developed as the form in which we now have it, the Infante Afonso must have seen at once that the faithfulness of Amadis was absolutely essential to the story. But especially the fact that the Portuguese Cancioneiros, familiar with Tristan and the matière de Bretagne, are silent on the subject of Amadis is significant.

In Gottfried Baist’s argument, based on a rigid division between early lyric poetry (as Portuguese) and early prose (as Spanish), the Leonoreta lyric, far from being a stumbling-block, is actually a sign of the Spanish origin of Amadis: as a fragment (14th c.) of a prose Tristan exists in Spanish, and five Portuguese Tristan lais figure in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, so the Leonoreta poem belongs to a Spanish Amadis in prose. But although the priority and relations of early Portuguese and Spanish prose works are intricate and have not yet been thoroughly studied, it is clear that in many cases versions have been more carefully preserved in conservative Spain, while the Portuguese through neglect, fire, and earthquake have perished, and also that the natural tendency and development of prose, in view of[Pg 71] the growing power of Castille and the greater pliancy of the Portuguese, was from Portuguese to Spanish, not from Spanish to Portuguese. And in one instance at least we have an early Portuguese prose work of the first importance, the Demanda do Santo Graall, which with its gallicisms can by no stretch of imagination be accounted a version from the Spanish. It is plainly legitimate to hold that the story of Amadis was first reduced to book form in the Peninsula in precisely the same way as was the story of Galahad, i.e. as a fourteenth-century Portuguese adaptation with the French text in view. Nicholas d’Herberay des Essarts, we know, claimed to have discovered fragments of Amadis en langage picard, Jorge Cardoso (1606-69) declared that Pero Lobeira translated Amadis from the French,[139] and Bernardo Tasso, whose Amadigi appeared in 1560, believed (non è dubbio) Amadis to be derived da qualche istoria di Bretagna. Nor would the Portuguese, for all their familiarity with the story and topography of the Breton cycle, be likely to compose original works dealing with Vindilisora (Windsor) or Bristoya (Bristol). Unhappily, however deep may be our conviction (a conviction which stands in no need of antedating Hebrew versions of the 1508 Amadis) that the Peninsular Amadis was originally Portuguese, it has now ceased to belong to Portuguese literature; another instance, if we may beg the question, of the gravitation to Spain. The Portuguese text, of which a copy, according to Leite Ferreira, existed in the library of the Duques de Aveiro in the sixteenth century (1598), and, according to the Conde da Ericeira, in the library of the Condes de Vimieiro in the seventeenth (1686), is still missing, as it was in 1726.

Some of the poems of the early Cancioneiros, as we have seen, have an historical character, but they are all written from a personal point of view. Portuguese history, with its heroic achievements such as the conquest of Algarve, seems to have begun just too late to be the subject of great anonymous epics, or rather the temperament of the Portuguese people eschewed them. Of five poems, long believed to be the earliest examples of Portuguese verse but no longer accepted by any sane critic as genuine, only one belongs to epic poetry. This Poema da Cava or da Perda de Espanha was an infant prodigy indeed, since it was supposed to have been written (in oitavas) in the eighth century. With a discretion passing that of Horace it kept itself from the world not for nine but nine hundred years, and was first published in Leitão de Andrada’s Miscellanea (1629)[140]: O rouço da Cava imprio de tal sanha, &c.

Of the four other spurious poems, two[141] were alleged to be love letters of Egas Moniz Coelho, a cousin of the celebrated Egas Moniz Coelho of the twelfth century; another, published by Bernardo de Brito,[142] Tinherabos nam tinherabos, has a real charm as gibberish. Fascination, of a different kind, attaches also to the fifth:

for if this poem is not genuine, and the fact that it was first published by Brito[143] at once lays it open to grave suspicion, it is nevertheless undoubtedly based on popular tradition of a yearly[Pg 73] tribute of maidens to the Moors such as the Greeks paid to the Minotaur, and must be the echo of some Algarvian song. Its simple repetitions have a haunting rhythm, but they are perhaps a little too emphatic. The impression is that its author had been struck by the repetitions in songs heard on the lips of the people, perhaps crooned to him in his infancy (cf. Miscellanea, p. 25: sendo eu muito menino), and worked them up in this poem. One early epic poem Portugal undoubtedly possessed, the Poema da Batalha do Salado, by Afonso Giraldez, who himself probably took part in the battle (1340). The subject of the poem is the same as that of the Spanish Poema de Alfonso Onceno, but whether its treatment was similar we cannot say, as only forty lines of the Galician-Portuguese poem survive. Since the authorship of the Spanish poem is doubtful and its rhymes run more naturally in Galician than in Spanish, the theory has arisen, among others, that Rodrigo Yannez, whose name perhaps denotes a connexion with Galicia, merely translated the poem of Afonso Giraldez. But against this it is argued that Yannez or Eanez was a Galician or wrote Galician lyrics (there are several poets of that name in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana), and when called upon to compose an epic—for Spain a late epic—chose Castilian, the traditional language of such poetry, and in executing his design found that his enthusiasm had outrun his knowledge of Castilian.[144] It is not strange if so brilliant a victory inspired two poets independently with its theme. It is perhaps more extraordinary that both should have chosen a metre (8 + 8) which has called for remark as showing the romance through the cantar de gesta.[145] Frei Antonio Brandão, indeed, called the Portuguese poem a romance, a type of poem which did not exist in the fourteenth century. Since the battle was fought in Spain it would be considered in Brandão’s day a proper subject for a romance, but would be noticeable as being written in Galician. Castilian was throughout the Peninsula regarded as the fitting medium for the romance, as for its father the epic, just as, a century earlier, Galician was the universal[Pg 74] language of the lyric.[146] Portuguese poets, if they wrote a romance, would usually do so in Spanish. The best-known instance is Gil Vicente’s fine poem (muy sentido y galan as the 1720 editor says) of D. Duardos e Flerida, which only belongs to Portuguese literature through the excellent ‘translation of the Cavalheiro de Oliveira’, among whose papers Garrett professed to have found it. Portugal possessed no epic cantares de gesta of her own, had not therefore the stuff out of which the romances were formed, and the birth of the romance coincided with the predominance of Spanish influence in Spain. It is therefore surprising to find in Portugal a large number of romances unconnected with Spain, the explanation being that, having accepted with characteristic enthusiasm the new thing imported from abroad, the Portuguese turned to congenial themes, of love, religion, and adventure. Had the romances been elaborated in the same way as in Spain, we might have expected a large number of anonymous Portuguese romances dealing with the Breton cycle, and indeed with early Portuguese history, so rich in heroic incidents. The fact that this is not the case and the number of romances collected in Tras-os-Montes alike point to their Spanish origin, while their frequency in the Azores denotes how popular they became later in Portugal. In the sixteenth century their Spanish character was recognized. The poor escudeiro in Eufrosina is bidden go to Spain to gloss romances, and in the seventeenth century, as a passage in Mello’s Fidalgo Aprendiz well shows, they were better liked if written in Spanish. The partiality for Spanish applied to poetry of other kinds, and Manuel de Galhegos says (1635) that it is a bold venture to publish poetry in Portuguese.[147] But it did not as a rule extend to popular poetry. It is therefore noteworthy that the nurse in Gil Vicente sings romances in Spanish.[148] Dr. Theophilo Braga, who considers Spanish influence on the romances in[Pg 75] Portugal to have been ‘late and insignificant’,[149] is obliged, in order to support his argument, to quote not Portuguese but Spanish romances.[150] Nor is it a happy contention that Portuguese romances were not printed owing to desleixo, since the publication of Spanish romances at Lisbon cannot be attributed merely to a craze for things foreign. More persuasive is the theory, developed by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos,[151] that many romances in Spanish were the work of Portuguese poets, especially those related to the Breton cycle, such as Ferido está Don Tristan, those concerned with the sea, and those of a soft lyrical character, as Fonte Frida and La Bella Malmaridada. However that may be, the fact that romances appear on the lips of the people in Gil Vicente, that is, before the publication of the romanceros, indicates how rapidly their popularity spread,[152] and accounts for their numerous progeny in Portugal, collected in the nineteenth century. True historical romances the Portuguese did not possess, unless we are to consider that certain lines which occur in Vicente’s parody of Yo me estaba allá en Coimbra, in Garcia de Resende’s Trovas, and elsewhere, are echoes of a Portuguese romance on the death of Inés de Castro.[153] But that is not to say that they did not possess romances, and many of these might be almost as old as their Spanish models, although not derived directly from cantares de gesta. These Portuguese romances or xacaras (in the Azores estorias and aravias) often differ from the Spanish in a certain vagueness of outline and sentimental tone. They are frequently of considerable length. Many of them are undoubtedly of popular origin and have a large number of variants in different parts of the country. If[Pg 76] there are none to compare with Fonte Frida or Conde Arnaldos (which belong to Castilian literature, whatever the nationality of their authors), they nevertheless, with a total lack of concentration, present many natural scenes and incidents of affecting pathos and an attractive simplicity. One of the best and most characteristically Portuguese is A Nau Catharineta, and others almost equally famous are Santa Iria, Conde Nillo, and Brancaflor e Flores. The second edition of Dr. Theophilo Braga’s Romanceiro runs to nearly two thousand pages. The first two volumes contain over 150 romances (together with numerous variants). Of these 5 belong to the Carolingian, 8 to the Arthurian cycle, 63 are romances sacros or ao divino, 11 treat of the cruel husband or unfaithful wife. In the third volume are reprinted romances composed by well-known Portuguese authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It must be admitted that Spain generously repaid to Portugal the loan of the Galician language for lyrical composition—although in each case it was the lender’s literature that profited (especially if some of the most beautiful Spanish romances were the work of Galician or Portuguese poets). But even after the birth of the romance Spain continued to cultivate the Galician lyric, until the second half of the fifteenth century. The last instance is supposed to be a Galician poem by Gomez Manrique (1412-91), uncle of the author of Recuerde el alma dormida, No. 65 in the Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano. This collection, published by Professor Lang at the suggestion of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, contains the meagre crop of Portuguese verse of the transition period from 1350 to 1450, meagre in quality and quantity. One name dominates the period. The love and tragic fate of Macias (second half 14th c.), o Namorado, idolo de los amantes, gave him a renown similar to but far exceeding that of D. Joan Soarez de Paiva in the preceding century. As the ideal lover he is met with at every turn in the Portuguese poetry of the fifteenth century,[154] and later became the subject of Lope de Vega’s Porfiar hasta morir (1638). Of his story we know definitely nothing, but some lines in one of his poems, En meu[Pg 77] cor tenno ta lança and Aquesta lança. .. me ferio, would appear to have inspired the famous legend which dates from the end of the fifteenth century. Imprisoned at Arjonilla in Andalucía for paying court to his sennora, he continued to address her in song and was killed by the lance that her infuriated husband hurled through the prison window. In an older version, that of the Constable D. Pedro in his Satira de felice e infelice vida, he saved the lady of his heart from drowning, and afterwards, as he lingered where she had stood, was struck down by the jealous husband. According to Argote de Molina,[155] both he and the husband served in the household of D. Enrique de Villena (1385-1434), who was perhaps only six when Macias died. Most of the twenty poems ascribed to Macias that survive are written in Galician, and of many, as Loado sejas amor,[156] the authorship is doubtful. Clearly his fame would act as a strong magnet to poems of uncertain origin. The matter is of the less importance in that these poems, however love-sick, have but little literary merit. If the Galician Juan Rodriguez de la Cámara, a native, like Macias, of Padron, was the real author of the romance of Conde Arnaldos (which is improbable), he was a far greater poet than his friend. Both the lyrics and the prose of his El Sieruo libre de Amor are in Castilian. Of the other two fourteenth-century Galician poets mentioned by Santillana, Fernam Casquicio and Vasco Perez de Camões (†1386?),[157] no poems have survived. The latter, a knight well known at the Court of King Ferdinand and an ancestor of Luis de Camões, played a leading part in the troubles preceding the battle of Aljubarrota, He had come to Portugal from Galicia, and his name appears frequently in the pages of Fernam Lopez (where it is written Caamoões) till the year 1386. In the middle of the sixteenth century he is mentioned by Sá de Miranda’s brother-in-law as a Court poet corresponding to Juan de Mena in Spain. But there were other poets whose verse was probably not inferior[Pg 78] to that of Perez de Camões and Casquicio. Besides Macias the Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano contains the names of sixteen writers whose poems may not attain high distinction but prove that the Galician lyric continued to be cultivated by poets in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century in Castille and Leon, Aragon and Catalonia. The Archdeacon of Toro, Gonçalo Rodriguez (fl. 1385),[158] was one of a group of such poets; a man with a keen zest of living and capable of vigorous verse, in which he took a characteristic delight (a minna boa arte de lindo cantar). In his farewell poem A Deus Amor, a Deus el Rei, which Cervantes perhaps remembered, he bids good bye to the trobadores con quen trobei, and in a quaint humorous testament he mentions a number of friends and relatives, two of whom, at least, his cousin Pedro de Valcacer or Valcarcel and Lope de Porto Carreiro, also wrote verse. In the last of the sixteen stanzas (abbacca) of this testamento the Archdeacon appoints his namesake Gonçalo Rodriguez de Sousa and Fernan Rodriguez to be his executors. He may have been alive in 1402, for a Doctor Gonçalo Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Almazan, is mentioned as one of the witnesses to the oath taken by the city of Burgos to the Infante María in that year.[159] In that case he must have been transferred to Almazan, some 150 miles farther up the Duero. More chequered was the career of Garci Ferrandez de Gerena (c. 1340-c. 1400). Having married one of King Juan I’s dancing girls (una juglara) in the belief that she was rich, he repented when he found que non tenia nada. He next became a hermit near Gerena, and, this not proving more congenial than married poverty, he embarked ostensibly for the Holy Land, but in fact landed at Malaga with his wife and children. At Granada he turned Moor, satirized the Christian faith, and deserted his wife for her sister. After such proven inconstancy we may perhaps doubt the sincerity of his repentance when he returned to Christianity and Castille at the end[Pg 79] of the fourteenth century. But for all his weakness and folly he seems not to have sunk utterly out of the reach of finer feelings; he sang various episodes of his life, e.g. when he went to his hermitage (puso se beato), in lyrics of some charm, and addressed the nightingale in a dialogue, as did his contemporary, Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino (c. 1345-c. 1428). This Castilian Court poet, born at Villasandino near Burgos and possessed of property at Illescas, was of a sleeker and more subservient mind than Garci Ferrandez and prospered accordingly, en onra e en ben e en alto estado. He wrote to order and was considered the ‘crown and king of all the poetas e trovadores who had ever existed in the whole of Spain’. This extravagant claim of his admirers need not prevent us from recognizing that there is often real feeling and music in his poems, of which the Cancionero de Baena has preserved over twenty. He writes in varying metres with unfailing ease and harmony, rarely sinks into mere verbal dexterity, and well deserves to be considered the best of these later Galician poets. Side by side with the lyric the cantiga d’escarnho continued to flourish. Alfonso Alvarez (C. G. C. 48) upbraids Garci Ferrandez for renouncing the Christian faith and leaguing himself with the Devil (gannaste privança do demo mayor); Pero Velez de Guevara (†1420), uncle of the Marqués de Santillana, addresses a satiric poem to an old maid, and an anonymous poet in a vigorous sirventes attacks degenerate Castille, cativa, mezela Castela, perhaps, as Professor Lang thinks, immediately after the Portuguese victories of Trancoso, Aljubarrota, and Valverde in 1385. Five fragmentary poems belong to the Infante D. Pedro (1429-66), Constable of Portugal. There are, besides his three short Portuguese poems in the Cancioneiro de Resende, only forty-one lines in all, for while Galician, already separated from her twin sister of Portugal, went to sleep—a sleep of nearly four centuries—in these last accents of her muse preserved in the Cancionero de Baena, the Infante Pedro turned definitely to the new forms of lyric appearing in Castille. As a transition poet he may be mentioned here before his father D. Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, since his prose works, which would naturally place him with his father and with D. Duarte, his uncle, belong,[Pg 80] together with most of his poetry (prosas and metros) to Spanish literature. By stress of circumstance rather than any set purpose he inaugurated the fashion of writing in Castilian, a fashion so eagerly taken up by his fellow-countrymen during the next two centuries. After the tragic death of his father at Alfarrobeira (1449) he escaped from Portugal, of which his sister Isabel was queen,[160] spent the next seven years as an exile in Castille, and after returning to his native land died an exile, but now as King of Aragon (1464-6). His life of thirty-seven years was thus as full of wandering adventure as that of any troubadour of old. To him Santillana addressed his celebrated letter on the development of poetry, and his own influence on Portuguese literature was important, for he introduced not only a new style of poetry, including oitavas de arte maior, but the habit of classical allusion and allegory. His first work, Satira de felice e infelice vida, was written in Portuguese before he was twenty, but re-written by himself in Castilian, the only form in which it has survived. This firstfruit of his studies was dedicated to his sister, Queen Isabel, whose death (1455) he mourned in his Tragedia de la Insigne Reyna Doña Isabel (1457), a work of deep feeling and some literary merit, first published by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos 444 years after Queen Isabel’s death. His longest and most important poem, in 125 octaves, Coplas del menosprecio e contempto de las cosas fermosas del mundo (1455), reflects the misfortunes of his life and the high philosophy they had brought him. Under a false attribution to his father, the Duke of Coimbra[161] (his Portuguese poems were also wrongly ascribed to King Peter I of Portugal, through confusion with the later King Peter, of Aragon), it was incorporated in the Cancioneiro de Resende, which appeared half a century after the Constable’s death.

The father of Portuguese history, Fernam Lopez (c. 1380-c. 1460), had grown up with the generation that succeeded Aljubarrota, and from his earliest years imbibed the national enthusiasm of the time. He had himself seen Nun’ Alvarez as a young man and the heroes who had fought in a hundred fights to free their country from a foreign yoke, and he had listened to many a tale of Lisbon’s sufferings during the great siege.[162] Since 1418, at latest, he was employed in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo (the State Archives), for in that year he was appointed keeper of the documents (escrituras) there. Sixteen years later, King Duarte, who as prince encouraged him to collect materials for the work,[163] entrusted him with the task of writing the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal (poer em caronycas as estorias dos reys), and at the same time (March 19, 1434[164]) assigned him a salary of 14,000 réis. His work at the Torre do Tombo covered a period of over thirty years. He won and kept the confidence of three kings, was secretary to João I (escrivam dos livros) and to the Infante Fernando (escrivam da puridade), whose will exists in Lopez’ handwriting.[165] His son Martinho accompanied the Infante to Africa as doctor, and died (1443) in prison soon after the prince. The last document signed by Lopez as official is dated 1451; in July 1452 he seems to have resigned his position at least temporarily, and on June 6, 1454, he was definitely superseded by Zurara as being ‘so old and[Pg 82] weak that he cannot well fulfil the duties of his post’. That he lived for at least five years more we know from the existence of a document (July 3, 1459) referring to the pretensions of an illegitimate son of Martinho which Fernam Lopez rejected.[166] Of the chronicles of the first ten Kings of Portugal written by Lopez[167] only three survive: the Cronica del Rei Dom Joam de boa memoria, Cronica del Rei Dom Fernando, and Cronica del Rei Dom Pedro. The latter is but a brief sketch, and lacks the unity which the subject-matter gives to the other two. His chronicles of the seven earlier kings disappeared in the revised versions of subsequent historians. Although they no doubt incorporated large slices of his work with little alteration, the freshness and the style are gone, the good oak hidden beneath coats of paint. It was a proceeding the more deplorable in that Lopez had been at great pains to discover and record the truth, ‘the naked truth’.[168] His successor, Zurara, represents him as ‘a notable person’, ‘a man of some learning and great authority’;[169] he travelled through the whole of Portugal to collect information and spent much time in visiting churches and convents in search of papers and inscriptions, while King Duarte had documents brought from Spain for his use. Whatever sources he utilized, Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, he stamped his work with his own individuality. He himself frequently refers to previous historians, and often expresses his disapproval of their methods.[170] He seems to have drawn largely from a Latin work of a certain Dr. Cristoforus. Keenly alive to the dignity and responsibilities[Pg 83] of history, he was anxious that his work should be well ordered and philosophical.[171] He has been called the Portuguese Froissart, but he combines with Froissart’s picturesqueness moral philosophy, enthusiasm, and high principles, is in fact a Froissart with something of Montaigne added, and easily excels Giovanni Villani or Pero López de Ayala. The latter must descend from the pedestal given him by Menéndez y Pelayo,[172] since he only occasionally rises to the height of Fernam Lopez, as in the account of the murder of the Infante Fradique, which Lopez copies very closely (although abbreviating it as really foreign to his history), evidently appreciating such dramatic touches as the sentence which describes how, as the murdered man advanced through the palace, ever fewer went in his company. By the side of the laborious prose and precocious wisdom of King Duarte this child of genius seems to give free rein to his pen, but it is his greatness and his title to rank above all contemporary chroniclers, not only of Portugal but of Europe, that he could combine this spontaneity with the scruples of an accurate historian, and be at once careful and impetuous, or, as Goes calls him, copious and discreet. He assigns speeches of considerable length to the principal actors, but they contain not mere rhetoric[173] but arguments such as might well have been used; and the frequent shorter sayings of humbler persons, often anonymous and as illuminating as graffiti, have the stamp of truth and bring the scenes most clearly before us. Indeed, every sentence is living; his unfailing qualities are rapidity and directness. Sometimes the sound of galloping horses or the loud murmur of a throng of men is in his pages. He ever and anon rivets the reader’s—the listener’s—attention by some captivating phrase, by his quaintly expressed wisdom, by his personal keenness and delight in the ‘marvellous deeds of God’ (maravilhas que Deos faz) or in the actions of his heroes (Oo que fremosa cousa era de veer!). His chronicles are not only a succession of imperishably[Pg 84] vivid scenes—King Pedro dancing through his capital by night, the escape of Diogo Lopez, the punishment of D. Inés’ murderers, the siege of Lisbon, the murder of D. Maria Tellez—but describe fully and with skilful care the character of the actors, pleasure-loving King Ferdinand, cunning, audacious, and accomplished Queen Lianor Tellez, wise and noble Queen Philippa, even morose Juan I, and principally the popular Mestre d’Avis and his great Constable, Nun’ Alvarez Pereira. And the Portuguese people is delineated both collectively and as individuals, in its generous enthusiasm, unreasoning impetuosity, and atrocious anger. That Lopez paid attention to his style is proved by his modest disclaimer bidding the reader expect no fremosura e afeitamento das pallavras, but merely the facts breve e sãamente contados, em bom e claro estilo. His style is always clear and natural, the serviceable handmaid of his subject, admirably assuming the colour and sound of the events described, and his longest sentences are never obscure. He wrote his history on a generous scale, for in the rapidity of his descriptions this inimitable story-teller preserved his leisure. His last chronicle ended with the expedition to Ceuta (1415). The kernel of that chronicle had been the illustrious deeds and character of Nun’ Alvarez, also described in the hitherto anonymous Coronica do condestabre de purtugal, of which the earliest edition is dated 1526. Large tracts of this chronicle are included, with alterations, in Lopez’ Chronicles of King Fernando and King João I. Dr. Esteves Pereira and Snr. Braamcamp Freire have now independently come to the conclusion that it is the work of Lopez, clearly an earlier work[174] written shortly after the death of Nun’ Alvarez (1431), i. e. before he concluded the Cronica de D. Fernando[175] and wrote the Cronica de D. Joam, at which he was working in 1443.[176] We are forced to accept this view, although of course it is no argument to say that the conscientious and scrupulous Fernam Lopez could not be a plagiarist since it was the duty of the official chronicler of the day to incorporate the best work of other historians. Lopez’[Pg 85] authorship is borne out by two passages which at a first glance seem to refute it. In chapter 55 of the Cronica de D. Joam (1915 ed., p. 120) he introduces the version given in the Cronica do Condestabre (cap. 22) with the words ‘now here some say’ (ora aqui dizem algũs), and then cites huũ outro estoriador, cujo fallamento nos pareçe mais rrazoado, i. e. he now rejects the version (of algũs) which he had adopted in his earlier work. In chapter 152 (1915 ed., p. 281) he similarly quotes what dizem aqui algũs and then the version of huũ outro compillador destes feitos, de cujos garfos per mais largo estillo exertamos nesta obra segundo que compre, rrecomta isto per esta maneira, a manner which is not that of the Cronica do Condestabre. But indeed the style of the two works is conclusive. A single age does not produce two Fernam Lopez any more than it produces two Montaignes or two Malorys. Those who read the continuation of the Cronica de D. Joam (i. e. the Cronica da Tomada de Ceuta, completed in 1450) by Gomez Eanez de Zurara (c. 1410-74) find themselves in a very different atmosphere. We are told[177] that this soldier, turned historian, acquired his learning late in life, and he parades it like a new toy. Aristotle, Avicenna, and all the Scriptures are in his preface; Job, Ovid, Hercules, and Xenophon, a motley company, mourn the death of Queen Philippa (cap. 44). Sermons extend over whole chapters, although, as he is careful to state, the exact words of the preachers could not be given.[178] Philosophy had been graciously woven into Lopez’ narrative, but here it stands in solid icebergs interrupting the story. And if he wishes to say that memory often fails in old age he must quote St. Jerome; a date occupies half a page, being calculated in nine or ten eras;[Pg 86][179] and the style is sometimes similarly inflated, so that ‘next morning’ becomes ‘When Night was bringing the end of its obscurity and the Sun began to strike the Oriental horizon’ (cap. 92). He also delights in elaborate metaphors.[180] But it must not be thought that Zurara is all froth and morals: in between his purple patches and erudite allusions he tells his story directly and vividly, and, what is more, he has his enthusiasm and his hero. Nun’ Alvarez has faded into the background, but in his place appears the intense and fervent spirit of Prince Henry the Navigator. His partiality for Prince Henry appears in the Cronica de D. Joam, and in his Cronica do Descobrimento e Conquista da Guiné it is still more evident.[181] In this chronicle, written at the request of King Afonso V and finished in the king’s library in February 1453, he made use of a lost Historia das Conquistas dos Portugueses by Afonso Cerveira, and profited by much that he had heard from the Infantes Pedro and Henrique and other makers of history. For Zurara was a sincere and painstaking historian,[182] and when the king bade him record the deeds of the Meneses in Africa (the Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses was completed in 1463, and the Cronica dos Feitos de D. Duarte de Meneses about five years later) he was not content with the ‘recollections of courtiers’, but set out for Africa (August 1467) and spent a whole year there gathering material at first hand. An affectionate letter[Pg 87][183] from King Afonso to the historian in his voluntary exile shows the pleasant relations existing between the liberal king and his grateful librarian. He praises him as well learned in the arte oratoria,[184] and for undertaking of his own free will a journey which was imposed on others as a punishment, and promises to look after the interests of his sister while he is away. Zurara was a Knight of the Order of Christ, with a comenda near Santarem, owned other property, and suffered himself to be adopted by a wealthy furrier’s widow, an unusual proceeding for a person in his station. But if, as this indicates, he had a love of riches (satisfied by the king’s generosity and this fortunate adoption), this in no way interfered with his work of collecting and verifying evidence nor affects the truth of his chronicles. He had proposed to write that of Afonso V, but the king, wisely considering that his reign was not yet over, refused his consent,[185] and this chronicle was reserved for the pen of Ruy de Pina (c. 1440-1523?).[186] Herculano’s ‘crow in peacock’s feathers’ has been somewhat harshly treated by modern critics. Not he but the taste and fashion of his time was to blame if he laid desecrating hands on the invaluable chronicles of Fernam Lopez, and thus became the ‘author’ of the chronicles of the six kings, Sancho I to Afonso IV. The mischief is irreparable, but it is well at least that these chronicles should have been dealt[Pg 88] with by Ruy de Pina, and not, for instance, by the uncritical Duarte Galvão (c. 1445-1517); the friend of Afonso de Albuquerque, who died in the Arabian Sea when on his way as Ambassador to Ethiopia, and who as Cronista Môr revised the Cronica de D. Afonso Henriquez (1727). Ruy de Pina has further been attacked because the people no longer figures, and the king figures too prominently, in the chronicles for which he was more directly responsible: Cronica de D. Duarte, Cronica de D. Afonso V, and Cronica de D. João II. That is to censure him for faithfully recording the changed times and not writing as if he were his own grandfather. Pina was no flatterer, but the chronicle of João II inevitably centred round the king, and, in spite of its excellence and of the moving incident of Prince Afonso’s death, is less attractive than those which are a record of freer, jollier times. Born at Guarda, of a family originally Aragonese, Pina served as secretary on an embassy to Castille in 1482 and on two subsequent occasions, and in the same capacity in a special mission to the Vatican in 1484. He became secretary (escrivão da nossa camara) to King João II, and succeeded Lucena as Cronista Môr in 1497. Both King João II and King Manuel showed their appreciation of his services, and Barros lent authority to a foolish story that Afonso de Albuquerque sent him rubies and diamonds from India as a reminder, in Corrêa’s phrase, to glorificar as cousas de Afonso de Albuquerque. Ruy de Pina in his chronicles of King Duarte and Afonso V used material collected by Fernam Lopez and Zurara, and he in turn left material for the reign of King Manuel of which Damião de Goes availed himself, while his Cronica de D. João II was laid under contribution by Garcia de Resende. It may be doubted whether the Cronica de D. Afonso V contains much that is not Ruy de Pina’s own. It was poetical justice that the interest of the story should be transferred from the Infante Henrique to the Infante Pedro.[187] His death and that of the Conde de Abranches at Alfarrobeira are told with the most impressive simplicity, which produces a far greater effect than[Pg 89] the long exclamação that follows. Lacking Lopez’ genius, but possessed of an excellent plain style, which only becomes flowery on occasion, and on his guard against what he calls the vicio e avorrecimento da proluxidade, Pina relates his story straightforwardly, almost in the form of annals. He does not attempt to eke out his matter with rhetoric and has chapters of under fifty words. The Cronica de D. Afonso V effectively contrasts the characters of the weak and chivalrous Afonso, who is praised as man but not as king, and the vigorous practical João II, and has an inimitable scene of the meeting of the former and Louis XI at Tours in 1476. The glow of Fernam Lopez is absent, but Pina none the less deserves to be accounted an able and impartial historian.

To the fifteenth century belongs the Cronica do Infante Santo. It is impossible to read unmoved the clear and unaffected story of the sufferings and death (1437-43), as a captive of Fez, of this the most saintly of the sons of King João I and Queen Philippa. It was written at the bidding of his brother, Prince Henry the Navigator, with the skill born of a fervent devotion, by Frei João Alvarez, an eyewitness[188] of D. Fernando’s misfortunes and one of the few of his companions to survive (till 1470 or later). A curious indication of the writer’s accuracy in detail is the correct spelling of a Basque name,[189] of the meaning of which he was probably ignorant.

The founder of the dynasty of Avis, King João I (1365-1433), found time in his busy reign of forty-eight years to encourage literature, ardently assisted no doubt by English Queen Philippa, and was himself an author. His keen practical spirit turned to Portuguese prose, and while as a poet he confined himself to a few prayers and psalms, in prose he caused to be translated the Hours of the Virgin and the greater part of the New Testament, as well as foreign works such as John Gower’s[Pg 90] Confessio Amantis (c. 1383), and himself wrote a long treatise on the chase. This Livro da Montaria, which has little but the title in common with Alfonso XI’s Libro de Montería, lay unpublished for four centuries, but is now available in a scholarly edition by Dr. Esteves Pereira from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional. Valuable and interesting in itself, this book is of great significance in Portuguese literature by reason of the impulse thus given to Portuguese prose. It is impossible as yet to estimate the full value of the prose works that followed: many are lost, others remain in manuscript, as the Orto do Sposo by Frei Hermenegildo de Tancos, or the Livro das Aves. But with King João’s son and successor Portuguese prose came into its kingdom.

Punctilious and affectionate, gifted with many virtues and graces, the half-English King Duarte (1391-1438), o Eloquente, shared the high ideals of all the sons of João I. Liable to fits of melancholy, and of less active disposition than his brothers Henrique and Pedro, he proved himself not less gallant in action than they at the taking of Ceuta in 1415, and had even earlier been entrusted by his father with affairs of State. His scruples as philosopher-or rather student-king during his unhappy reign of five years may have hampered his decisions, but his love of truth made the saying palavra de rei proverbial. The corroding cares of State prevented him from giving all the time he would have wished to literary studies, but he was a methodical collector of books[190] and papers written by himself and others, and his great work, Leal Conselheiro (c. 1430), consisted of such a collection on moral philosophy and practical conduct, addressed to his wife, Queen Lianor. It contains 102 chapters, often stray papers, sometimes translated from other authors.[191] Besides a detailed consideration of virtues and vices which are treated with an Aristotelian precision, and always with preference for the[Pg 91] Portuguese as opposed to the latinized word, it has chapters on the art of translation, food, chapel services, and other subjects.[192] The book reveals a character of rare charm, combining humility with a clear instinct for what was right, humanity with common sense. His literary genius was akin to that of his father; he scarcely possessed poetical talent, although he translated in verse the Latin hymn Juste Judex, and possessed in his library a Livro das Trovas del Rei, in all probability a collection of the poems of others. Wit and originality he also lacked. But as a prose-writer he ranks among the greatest Portuguese authors, and in style was indeed something of an innovator, using words with an exactness and scrupulous nicety hitherto unknown in Portugal. He gave the matter long and serious consideration, and the directness of his style corresponds to his sincerity of thought. His clear, concise sentences and careful choice of words show a true artist of unerring instinct in prose.[193] King Duarte wished to be read as Sainte-Beuve recommended that one should read the Caractères of La Bruyère: peu et souvent (pouco ... tornando algũas vezes). The first part of the precept has been followed, but unhappily for Portuguese prose the second has been neglected. In his youth the king was noted for his horsemanship, and his Livro da Ensinança de bem cavalgar toda sella is a practical treatise based on his personal experience (nom screvo do que ouvi, as he says) begun when he was prince, laid aside after his accession, and left unfinished at his death. It is remarkable, like the Leal Conselheiro, for the excellence of its style and the manly, thoughtful character of its author. But for his premature death, King Duarte might have done for Portuguese prose what Alfonso X and Don Juan Manuel had done for Castilian. An excellent translator himself, he encouraged translations into Portuguese, in Portugal and Spain; the Bishop of Burgos, Don Alonso de Cartagena, translated Cicero for him,[Pg 92] and the Dean of Santiago Aristotle. More active than King Duarte, more literary than his younger brother Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), D. Pedro (1392-1449), created Duke of Coimbra after the capture of Ceuta in 1415, became almost a legendary figure owing to his extensive travels (1424-8)—andou as sete partes do mundo—and his equally exaggerated reputation as a poet, through confusion with his son the Constable. Regent from 1438 to 1448, he resigned when the young king, his nephew and son-in-law, Afonso V, came of age. His enemies succeeded in effecting his banishment from Court. Civil strife followed, and D. Pedro fell in a preliminary skirmish at Alfarrobeira in May 1449. Had he been granted a peaceful old age he would probably occupy a more important place in Portuguese literature. Apart from the historical value of his letters, his chief claim to be remembered literarily consists in the translations from the Latin, principally from Cicero, undertaken under his supervision or by himself personally, as the De Officiis, which was dedicated to King Duarte and is still unpublished. The Trauctado da Uirtuosa Benfeyturia was originally a translation by the prince of Seneca’s De Beneficiis. Except the dedication to King Duarte (between 1430 and 1433), the work as it stands in six books is properly not D. Pedro’s, since he had not leisure for the corrections and additions which he wished to make, and accordingly handed over his translation and the original to his confessor, Frei João Verba, who made the necessary alterations,[194] and expanded the book from a literal translation to a paraphrase of the De Beneficiis. The reader who does not bear this in mind might be startled to find references in a work of Seneca’s to St. Thomas, Nun’ Alvarez, the noble knight Abraham, or the virtuous knight Cid Ruy Diaz. The work lacks King Duarte’s gift of style which set the Leal Conselheiro high above contemporary prose.

Lopo de Almeida, created first Count of Abrantes in 1472,[Pg 93][195] accompanied D. Lianor, daughter of King Duarte, on her marriage to the Emperor Frederick III in 1451. In four letters written to King Afonso V from Italy (February to May 1452) he displays a keen eye for colour and much directness in description, so that the Emperor bargaining miserly over the price of damask or the two wealthy Italian dukes so sorrily horsed (em sima de senhos rocins magros) remain in the memory, and the letters are more original than most of the Portuguese prose of the century.

One of the most important early prose works is the Boosco Delleytoso (1515). It consists of 153 short chapters,[196] and is dedicated (on the verso of the frontispiece portraying the ‘delightful wood’) to Queen Lianor, widow of King João II. It is a homily in praise of the hermit’s life of solitude and against worldly joys and traffics, and is marked by a pleasant quaintness, an intense and excellent style, a fervent humanity and love of Nature. The hermit’s independent and healthy life[197] is contrasted with that of the merchant in cities.[198] In chapter I the repentant sinner is introduced in ‘a very thick wood of very fair trees in which many birds sang very sweetly’ near ‘a very fair field full of many herbs and scented flowers’—frolles de boo odor. He prays to be delivered from this darkness of death, and a very fair youth appears ‘clothed in clothes of gleaming fire and his face shone as the sun when it rises in the season of great heat’. His ‘glorious guide’, grorioso guyador, leads him to a dona sabedor and to dom francisco solitario, who in a fremoso fallamento praises the solitary life and condemns those who are puffed up with the conceit of learning, in itself ‘a very fair[Pg 94] thing’. He tells of the lives of saintly hermits; St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dom Seneca, Dom Cicero, a mui comfortosa donzella, and others exhort the sinner to leave the world, and he ends by relating his frequent raptures until his soul is carried to the terra perduravil. In its main subject, praise of the solitary life, the book recalls the title of the treatise ascribed to D. Philippa de Lencastre: Tratado da Vida Solitaria, a translation or adaptation from the Latin of Laurentius Justinianus.[199] The latter’s De Vita Solitaria is, however, quite different from the Boosco deleytoso, which was probably composed before the birth of D. Philippa (1437).

Another remarkable early work is the anonymous Corte Imperial (14th or early 15th c.), the language of which often bears traces of a Latin original.[200] Many of its sentences are veritable dobres and mordobres in prose,[201] and to a superficial reader will have little meaning; but in fact this mystic treatise is closely reasoned. It may have some connexion with similar works by Juda Levi, Ramon Lull, and Don Juan Manuel. In a corte or parliament the Church Militant, in the person of a ‘glorious Catholic Queen’ argues with Gentile, Moor, and Jew on the nature of God and the Trinity. The Gentiles and Moors gradually accept her doctrines, but the Jewish rabbis prove more contumacious. Saints and angels and all the company of heaven discourse sweet music in the intervals of the discussion. One of the best known of the many other important translations of this time was the Flos Sanctorum (1513),[202] which begins[203] with extracts from the Gospels and has a savour of the Bible about its prose. There were many later versions of the Gospel story, as A Paxã de Jesu Christo Nosso Deos e Senhor, &c. (1551);[Pg 95] Tratado en que se comprende breue e deuotamente a Vida, Paixão e Resurreição, &c. (1553); Traatado em q̃ se contẽ a paixam de x̃po, &c. (1589?). But the earliest and most splendid, an incunable of which Portugal has reason to be proud on account of its beautiful print, is the Vita Christi (Lixboa, 1495), translated em lingoa materna e portugues linguagem from the original of Ludolph von Sachsen by the Cistercian monk Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça (†1478?), at the bidding of Queen Isabel, sister of the Constable D. Pedro, in the middle of the fifteenth century (1445).

Another notable translation for the same queen is the Espelho de Christina (1518),[204] from the French of Christine de Pisan: Livre des trois vertus pour l’enseignement des princesses (1497). The Portuguese manuscript, translated from the French manuscript nearly half a century before the latter appeared in print,[205] was published at the bidding of Queen Lianor (wife of João II), who so keenly encouraged Portuguese art, language, and literature. Her squire Valentim Fernandez’ version of Marco Polo, Marco Paulo, was published at Lisbon in 1502. The Espelho de Prefeyçam (1533) was translated from the Latin by the Canons of Santa Cruz, Coimbra, and edited by Bras de Barros (c. 1500-59), Bishop of Leiria and cousin of the historian João de Barros. A Portuguese version of a scriptural work entitled Sacramental, originally written in Spanish by Clemente Sanchez de Vercial, was published apparently in 1488 (it would thus be one of the earliest books printed in Portugal), and was reprinted at Lisbon in 1502.

The silence that falls on Portuguese poetry after the early Cancioneiros lasts for over a century, scarcely interrupted by the twilight murmurings of the later Galician poets, and is only broken for us by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral five years before the death of King Manuel. The native trovas had no doubt continued to be written by many poets in a country where poetry is scarcely rarer than prose, far commoner than good prose. But no one had cared to preserve them in a collection corresponding to the Cancionero de Baena in Spain. When Portuguese poetry again emerges into the clear light of day Spanish influence is in full swing and behind it looms that of Italian poetry, the natural continuation of one side of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana. No Spanish poet now writes in Portuguese, many Portuguese in Spanish. Popular poetry and royal troubadours have alike disappeared, leaving a narrow circle of Court rhymesters. It is to one of these that we owe the collection which embraces the poetry of the day, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the actual year of publication, 1516. Stout, good-natured Garcia de Resende (c. 1470-1536), a favourite alike with king and courtiers, often the butt of the Court poets’ wit—he is a tunny, a barrel, a wineskin, a melon in August—belonged to an old family which in the sixteenth century distinguished itself in literature. Born at Evora and brought up in the palace as page and then as secretary of King João II, he had every opportunity of observing the events which he so graphically describes in his Vida de Dom João II (1545).[206] Talented and many-sided, Resende continued in high favour during the succeeding reigns: in 1498 as secretary he accompanied King Manuel to Castille and Aragon, and in 1514 was chosen for the much coveted post[Pg 97] of secretary to Tristão da Cunha’s mission to Rome with wonderful presents for Pope Leo X. Resende not only drew and wrote verses but was a musician and an accomplished singer: de tudo intende laughed his friend Gil Vicente. Perhaps it only required the stress of adversity to inspire to greatness this blunted, prosperous courtier—fidalgo da casa del Rei. He was not a great poet, although he excelled the Court poets of the fifteenth century. As historian he has been unjustly condemned. If in his Chronicle of João II he made use of Ruy de Pina’s manuscript chronicle, first published in 1792, it must be remembered that it was customary for the official historians to regard their predecessors as existing mainly for purposes of plagiarism. Herculano called Resende’s chronicle a poor bundle of anecdotes,[207] and no doubt Resende was not a Herculano nor a Fernam Lopez but a more limited Court chronicler. He is none the less delightful because he deals not in tendencies and abstractions but in concrete details and persons, Court persons. With an artist’s eye for the picturesque he makes his readers see the event described, and his chronicle is throughout singularly vivid and dramatic. He is certainly an attractive writer, and perhaps he is also instructive. The incident, for instance, of the Duke of Braganza being kept waiting while a scaffold of the latest Paris pattern is being erected for his execution (1483), which a grander historian might have omitted, is possibly not without its significance and shows francesismo in action four centuries before Eça de Queiroz. Besides various minor works in prose Resende composed, not without misgiving,[208] a long survey of the events of his day in some 300 decimas: Miscellania e Variedade de Historias, which throws curious and valuable light on the times. His literary work was prompted by a real desire to serve his country. His delicate appreciation of the past appears in his remarkable and charming verses on the death of Inés de Castro; and wishing in so far as lay in his power to remedy the Portuguese neglect which had allowed so many poems and records and gentilezas to perish, he collected what he could of past and present poets and published[Pg 98] them in one great volume which he dedicated to the Infante João: Cancioneiro Geral (1516), often known as the Cancioneiro de Resende to distinguish it from the Spanish Cancionero General (1511). Resende wrote to the poets of his acquaintance requesting them in verse to send him their poems, and they sent him answers, also in verse, accompanying their poems.[209] The receipt of these he would acknowledge as editor, promising, still in verse, to have them printed. Politeness no doubt induced him to include more than his judgement warranted, for his own poems are superior to those of most of his contemporaries. A large number of the Cancioneiro’s poems—some 1,000 poems by between 100 and 200 poets—should scarcely have been included, for, however well they might answer their purpose as occasional verse, they were not intended as a possession for ever, and massed together produce an effect of dull and endless triviality. These love poems can indeed be as monotonous, the satiric poems as coarse, licentious, and irreverent, as those of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana. One of the poets, D. João Manuel, like King Alfonso X of old, does beseech his colleagues to cease singing of Cupid and Macias and turn to religious subjects. But it was not Garcia de Resende’s purpose to include religious verse. Poems recording great deeds and occasions he would gladly have printed in larger number, but, as he (among others) complained in his preface, it was characteristic of the Portuguese not to record their deeds in literary form. Satiric verses he included in plenty, satire being one of the recognized functions of the poet’s art: per trouas sam castigados.[210] But if we turn to the poems of his collection we are amazed by the pettiness of the subjects, and our amazement grows when we remember that this was the period in the world’s whole history most calculated to awe and inspire men’s minds with the thought of vast new horizons. While Columbus was discovering America, Bartholomeu Diaz rounding the Cape of Good Hope,[Pg 99] Vasco da Gama sailing to India, or Afonso de Albuquerque making desperate appeals for men and money to enable him to maintain his brilliant conquests, the Court poets were versifying on an incorrectly addressed letter, a lock of hair, a dingy head-dress, a very lean and aged mule, the sad fate of a lady marrying away from the Court in Beira, a quarrel between a tenor and soprano, a courtier’s velvet cap or hat of blue silk, a button more or less on a coat, the length of spurs, fashions in sleeves: themes, as José Agostinho de Macedo might say, ‘prodigiously frivolous’. When news reached Lisbon of the tragic death of D. Francisco de Almeida and of the defeat of Afonso de Albuquerque[211] and the Marshal D. Fernando de Coutinho before Calicut, with the death of the latter, Bras da Costa wrote to Garcia de Resende that at this rate he would prefer to have no pepper, and Resende answered that for his part he certainly had no intention of embarking. But, as a rule, such events received not even so trivial a comment, and no doubt the poets felt that the verse which served to pass the time at the serões was inadequate to any great occasion. But the trovador segundo as trovas de aquelle tempo[212] had little idea of what subjects were suitable or unsuitable to poetry. A typical instance of the themes in which they delighted is an event which seems to have produced a greater impression than the discovery of new worlds: the return from Castille of a gentleman of the Portuguese Court wearing a large velvet cap. For over 300 lines of verse this cap is bandied to and fro by the witty poets. It must weigh four hundredweight, says one. Another advises him to lock it up em arcaaz until he can turn it into a doublet; another bids him sell it in the Jews’ quarter. Small wonder, chimes in a fourth, that no galleys come now with velvet from Venice.[213] ‘I would not wear it at a serão, not for a million,’ says another. ‘A Samson could not wear it all one summer,’ is the comment of a sixth. Another remarks that he would rather read Lucan (or Lucian)[Pg 100] (antes leria por luçam) in the heat of the day than wear it. ‘He will need a cart to bring it to the serão,’ says yet another. The wit, it will be seen, is not brilliant, although it may have effectively nipped this budding Castilian fashion and enlivened an evening. But there were duller contests. For score on score of pages the rival merits of sighing and of loving in silence are discussed by poet after poet (O Cuidar e Sospirar). Such a subject once started tended to accumulate verses like a snowball. But the Cancioneiro also contains poems on serious topics, although they are rarer, as well as delicate, airy nothings (sutiles nadas) like Vimioso’s vilancetes.[214] There are two poems on the death of King João II, there is Luis Anriquez’ lamentation on the death of the Infante Afonso (1491), that of Luis de Azevedo on the death of the Infante Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, at Alfarrobeira, and a few poets, like Resende himself, stand out from the rest. Besides the elaborate Spanish poem by that noble prince the Constable D. Pedro we have several long poems dealing with high matters of the soul or the State. The sixty-one interesting stanzas by the querulous, satirical, intolerant Alvaro de Brito Pestana treat of the condition of the city of Lisbon and the decay of morals. The correspondent of Gomez Manrique and contemporary of his nephew Jorge, in the metre of whose famous Coplas he wrote, he was present at the battle of Alfarrobeira. His trovas on the death of Prince Afonso, with the recurrent choremos perda tamanha, are wooden and artificial and his sixteen alliterative verses scarcely belong to literature, but at least he chose themes which were not concerned with passing Court fashions. The few simple lines written as he lay dying show him at his best.[215] His friend and distant relative Fernam da Silveira, o Coudel Môr, is concerned with more mundane matters. A man of noble birth and high character, he was held in great honour by Afonso V and João II. The latter, a keen judge of men, had implicit confidence in the justice of this upright magistrate, who[Pg 101] was also a soldier, a poet, and a finished courtier. He deals with affairs of State, writes an account in trovas of six syllables of the Cortes held by the king at Montemôr in 1477 and a short poem, on the appointment of various bishops in 1485. Or he sends a poem to his nephew Garcia de Mello with detailed instructions as to how he should dress and behave at Court. His trovas are thoroughly Portuguese, vigorous, concise, and picturesque. He is less at home in the trovas de poesia (i. e. de arte mayor) written on a journey from Évora to Thomar, but he could skilfully turn a short love poem, and for a wager of capons for Easter (with Álvaro de Brito) wrote a stanza containing as many rhymes as it has words. In fine he belonged to his age, but his poetry bears the impress of his strong character and his love of Portuguese ways. On the other hand, the younger brother of the Conde de Cantanhede, D. João de Meneses (†1514), wrote indifferently in Portuguese or Spanish. He fought for many years in Africa, although his slight love poems, fluent and harmonious, give no sign of a life of action, and died in the expedition against Azamor.[216] Another soldier, courtier, and poet marked out by birth and ability was D. João Manuel (c. 1460-99), son of the Bishop of Guarda. Legitimized in 1475 and brought up at Court with the prince Manuel, he continued to be a favourite after the latter’s accession, became Lord High Chamberlain, and was sent to the Court of Castille in 1499 to arrange the marriage of the king with the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. In Spanish octaves he had written a lament on the death of Prince Afonso, which both in feeling and technique excels the verses of Álvaro de Brito on the same subject. Towards the end of his poem he introduces the saying of St. Augustine that ‘our soul exists not where it lives but where it loves’, which in the following century was quoted by two writers so different as Ferreira de Vasconcellos and Frei Heitor Pinto and soon became a commonplace. In other works he shows a high seriousness, sometimes a sententious strain, combined with a very real poetical talent. His death during his mission to Castille was a loss for the Court and for Portuguese poetry. By another writer, Fernam da Silveira (†1489), we have[Pg 102] but a few poems, the principal of which is a lament for his own death, in the metre of Manrique, which he places on the lips of various ladies of the Court. His death was tragic, for, having succeeded his father as secretary to King João II, he took part in the ill-fated conspiracy of the Duke of Viseu. After lying hidden in the house of a friend he fled in disguise to Castille and thence to France, but, although he thus succeeded in prolonging his life for five years, the king’s justice relentlessly pursued and he was stabbed to death at Avignon. A favourite of João II, especially before his accession, was Nuno Pereira (fl. 1485), homem galante, cortesão e bom trovador, who married the daughter of the Coudel Môr and valiantly sustained the part of Cuidar against his relative Jorge da Silveira’s Sospirar in the great literary tournament of the courtiers. Later, after serving as Governor (Alcaide) of the town of Portel, he retired to live in the country, and presents a happy picture of himself in the midst of harvesters and pruners. He finds, he says, more pleasure in his vines, in the chase, in digging and watering his garden, than in being a favourite at Court. He had not always thought thus, for when the lady he was courting married a rival he could devise no worse fate for her than to bid her go and die among the chestnut groves of Beira. He had, indeed, made a name for himself by his courtly satire, which he turned to good use in ridiculing those who came back from Castille with a supercilious disdain for everything Portuguese. It is pleasant to find him bidding them not speak their ‘insipid Castilian’ in his presence. Diogo Brandam (†1530) of Oporto wrote an elaborate poem in octaves on the death of King João II. He also used the octosyllabic metre with breaks of single lines (quebrados) of four syllables, so familiar in Gil Vicente’s plays, and in his Fingimento de Amores (27 verses of 8 octosyllabic lines), under Spanish-Italian influence, he touches a richer, more generous vein of poetry: the poet-lover descends into the region of Proserpine, the dominion of Pluto, and sees the torments of Love’s followers. His vilancete to the Virgin is in the same metre with the difference that the verses have seven lines only (abbaacc). The spirit of Jorge de Manrique is absent from the stanzas written in the metre of his Coplas by Luis Anriquez on the fatal accident which ended[Pg 103] the life of Prince Afonso in his teens. His lamentation on the death of King João II is written in octaves, as that of Diogo Brandam, which they resemble. Both poets invoke Death: Ó morte que matas quem é prosperado (Brandam); Ó morte que matas sem tempo e sazam (Anriquez). Other historical poems by Anriquez in the same metre are the verses written on the occasion of the transference of the remains of João II and thirty-five stanzas addressed to James, Duke of Braganza, when he left Lisbon with his fleet to attack Azamor in 1513. If we turn from these somewhat heavy pieces to Anriquez’ other poems we find a hymn in praise of the Virgin, written more in the manner of Alfonso X, and various love cantigas. The nephew of D. João de Meneses, Joam rroiz de saa, that is, Joam Rodriguez de Sá e Meneses (1465?-1576), studied in Italy as a disciple of Angelo Poliziano (†1594) and died a centenarian. He wrote a poem in decimas describing the arms of the noble families of Portugal, and translated into trovas three long letters from the Latin which by their spirit of saudade appealed to Portuguese taste: Penelope to Ulysses, Laodamia to Protesilaus, and Dido to Aeneas. He was also versed in the Greek language, and for his noble character and courtly ways as well as for his learning and poetical talent was venerated by the younger generation into which he lived: Antonio Ferreira salutes him as the ‘ancient sire of the muses of this land’. The ‘most discreet’ D. Francisco de Portugal, first Conde de Vimioso (†1549), although he did not live to be a centenarian, also survived most of the poets of João II’s reign and died towards the end of that of João III. Son of the Bishop of Evora and great-grandson of the first Duke of Braganza, he was created a count by King Manuel in 1515, and was equally renowned as soldier, statesman, courtier, and poet, ‘wise and prudent in peace and war’. His Sentenças (1605), over one hundred of which are rhymed quatrains, were published by his grandson D. Anrique de Portugal. Some of these moral sayings have considerable subtlety, and they reveal a fine character and insight into the character of others.[217] Most of his poems, in Spanish and Portuguese,[Pg 104] preserved in the Cancioneiro are brief cantigas which prove him to have been a skillful versifier and a typical Court poet. On the other hand, a feeling for Nature, a constant command of metre, and a certain passionate sadness mark out an earlier poet, Duarte de Brito (fl. 1490), the friend of D. João de Meneses, from most of the other writers in Resende’s song-book. The redondilha in his hands is no wooden toy but a living, moving instrument. His most celebrated poem, em que conta o que a ele & a outro lhaconteçeo com huũ rrousinol & muitas outras cousas que vio, is written after the fashion of Diogo Brandam’s Fingimento de Amores and Garci Sanchez de Badajoz’ Infierno de Amor, in imitation of the Marqués de Santillana’s El Infierno de los Enamorados; but there is real feeling in these eighty verses of eleven lines (of which the eighth and eleventh are of four, the rest of eight syllables). The Italian influence, working through Spanish, was already present in Portuguese poetry in the fifteenth century, although Brito writes exclusively in redondilhas, as indeed does the introducer of the new style, Sá de Miranda, in the few and short poems which he contributed to the Cancioneiro immediately before its publication. Duarte de Brito did not condescend to those artificial devices which give us in this Cancioneiro a poem of sixty lines all ending in dos, alliterative stanzas, and other verbal tricks. The real business of the serões, so far as poetry was concerned, was ouvir e glosar motes. These glosas and the similar cantigas and esparsas, short poems of fixed form, often written with skill and spontaneous charm, were merely one of the necessary accomplishments of a courtier. Such a view of poetry could scarcely give rise to great poets, and these versifiers indeed styled themselves trovadores, reserving the name of poet for those who wrote, often but clumsily, in versos de arte mayor, de muita poesia. But, worse still, the poets of the Cancioneiro were often scarcely Portuguese.[218] Many wrote in Spanish, and Spanish influence is to be found at every turn: that of Juan de Mena, Gomez and Jorge Manrique, Rodriguez de la Cámara, Macias, Santillana. Unlike Macias, who is but a name, Santillana[Pg 105] is not mentioned, but his influence is constantly felt. On the other hand, King Dinis, unexpectedly introduced once as a poet by Pedro Homem (fl. 1490)—invoco el rei dom Denis Da licença Daretusa—is nowhere imitated. By method, subject, and foreign imitation, this Court poetry was thus inevitably artificial and uninspired. Perhaps in the whole Cancioneiro the only poem marked by authentic fire is that of the obscure Francisco de Sousa—the few lines beginning Ó montes erguidos, Deixai-vos cair. The contributions of Sá de Miranda, as those of three other famous poets, give no sign of the coming greatness of the contributor. The names of the other three are Bernardim Ribeiro, Cristovam Falcão, and the prince of all these poets, here the humblest of Cinderellas, 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[Pg 107][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,[Pg 108] 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[Pg 109] 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[Pg 110] 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.

[Pg 111]

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[Pg 112] 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[Pg 113] 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[Pg 114] 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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 116] 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[Pg 117] 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[Pg 118] 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[Pg 119] 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[Pg 120] 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[Pg 121] 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

[Pg 122]

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[Pg 123] 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[Pg 124] 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[Pg 125] 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,[Pg 126] 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[Pg 127] 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[Pg 128] 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,[Pg 129] 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,[Pg 130] 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[Pg 131] 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.

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[Pg 133] 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[Pg 134] 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),[Pg 135] 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[Pg 136] 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[Pg 137] 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[Pg 138] 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[Pg 139] 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[Pg 140] 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[Pg 141] 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,[Pg 142] 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[Pg 143] 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.[Pg 144] 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[Pg 145] 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[Pg 146] 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,[Pg 147] 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,[Pg 148] 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[Pg 149] 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[Pg 150] 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[Pg 151] 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[Pg 152] 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]

[Pg 153]

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[Pg 154] 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[Pg 155] 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:

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

After Gil Vicente’s death the autos continued to flourish in number if not in excellence, and evidently answered to a very real popular demand. It was in vain that the Jesuits produced their Latin plays and that serious poets of high reputation sought to wean the affections of the people from the auto to the classical drama.[353] This opposition of the educated did, however, conduce to the swift deterioration of the auto, although some of those of a religious character, chiefly the Nativity plays, still succeeded in reflecting a part of the charm that characterized the Vicentian drama. To Gil Vicente’s lifetime probably belongs the Obra famosissima tirada da Sancta Escriptura chamada da Geração humana, onde se representam sentenças muy catolicas & proueitosas pera todo christã: Feita por huũ famoso autor (1536?). Indeed, the verse runs so easily, the peasants are so natural, that one might almost suspect him of having had a hand in its composition. But the metre (8 8 4 8 8 4) is more monotonous than he would have used throughout. The dramatis personae are angels, peasants,[354] Adam, Justice, Reason, Malice, two devils, a priest, four saints and doctors of the Church, a Levite, the Church, the Heavenly Samaritan. Adam in a scene closely resembling that of the Auto da Alma is tempted by Malice. Justice intervenes, and finally the Samaritan leads him to the estalagem of Holy Mother Church.[Pg 157] The Auto de ds [Deus] padre & justiça & mia [Misericordia] belongs to the same period. It is written in octosyllabic verse and contains a similar medley of peasants, prophets, and abstract virtues. In the first part the angels in Portuguese announce to the Virgin the birth of Christ, and in the second part the peasants, who speak Spanish, go to offer rustic gifts to el muy chiquito donzel. Another early and anonymous play is the Auto do Dia do Juizo, included in the Index of 1559, which for its subject closely follows Gil Vicente’s Auto da Barca do Inferno. A peasant, a false and lying notary, a market-woman who had offered weekly bread and wax to Santa Catharina but had ’robbed the poor people’, a butcher, a miller who had mixed bran in his sacks of flour, are introduced in turn and duly consigned by Lucifer to Hell.

If we only knew the quondam Franciscan monk Antonio Ribeiro Chiado (c. 1520?-91) and his contemporary and rival, the mulatto servant of the Bishop of Evora, by their mutual abuse, we could form no very high opinion of their character or their wit. In bitter quintilhas Chiado reviles the latter for his dark complexion; Afonso Alvarez answers by upbraiding nonno Chiado as the son of a cobbler and a market-woman and for the habits which had made the cloister seem so dismal a place to Frei Antonio do Espirito Santo. Fortunately some of the plays of both of them survive, and we are better able to judge of their merits. The mulatto, who was a valued member of his master’s household and prides himself that Chiado has nothing worse to throw in his face than the colour of his skin, was certainly Chiado’s inferior in wit and talent. Both imitate Gil Vicente without having a vestige of his lyrical genius or greater skill in devising a plot. Alvarez preferred religious subjects. In his Auto de Santo Antonio St. Anthony restores to life the drowned son of two peasants, who are imitated from Vicente’s Auto da Feira.[355] The only other of his plays that we have is the Auto de Santa Barbara, but we know that he also wrote an Auto de S. Vicente Martyr and an Auto de Santiago Apostolo.

[Pg 158]

Chiado’s plays and witty sayings, avisos para guardar and parvoices, appear to have made him extremely popular in Lisbon, Camões recognized his talent, and Lisbon’s most famous street still bears his name in common speech. His boisterous life at Lisbon after leaving his convent may have given him his name Chiado (cf. the chiar of ox-carts), but it existed as a surname earlier. His Pratica de Oito Figuras (1543?), Auto das Regateiras (1568 or 1569), and Pratica dos Compadres (1572), are the work of an accomplished wit who was intimately acquainted with the farces of Gil Vicente and, in the last two, with the prose plays of Jorge Ferreira. Many of Vicente’s types are present, but all in a town atmosphere, in which cards take the place of the rustic dances and lyric yields to epigram, the natural genius of Vicente to a laboured smartness. We have the clerigo de vintem, the ratinho from Beira, the vain pação, the poor fidalgo or escudeiro, the negro with his pidgin Portuguese, the witch, the ill-tempered velha, the trovador chaplain, the ambitious priest, the corrupt judge. The scenes are even more disconnected and less dramatic, and the ingenious redondilhas necessarily seem artificial because their author so often challenges comparison with the more genuine skill of his master, Gil Vicente. Chiado’s Auto de Gonçalo Chambão was reprinted several times in the seventeenth century, but is now unknown. Of his Auto da Natural Invençam (c. 1550) a single copy survives, in the library of the Conde de Sabugosa, whose edition (1917) is of exceptional interest. The play, as reminiscent of Vicente as are the other plays of Chiado, describes the acting of an auto in a private house in the reign of João III, and bears witness to the frequency of such representations at Lisbon and to their extraordinary popularity.

Balthasar Diaz, a blind poet (or jogral) of Madeira, in the first half of the sixteenth century wrote plays which have retained their popularity. He versified at great length traditions of chivalry and of mediaeval saints. We do not possess his Trovas written on the death of D. João de Castro (1548), and many of his plays, Auto da Paixam de Christo, Auto de El Rei Salomão, Auto da Feira da Ladra, have become rare or unknown. One of the best of them, the Auto de Santo Aleixo,[Pg 159] perhaps owes its survival to its subject, akin to the popular theme of a prince in disguise. The rich and noble Aleixo wanders in rags to the Holy Land. The Devil, who tempts him in the form of a wayfarer, declares that now—the eternal querulous ‘now’ of the poets—only the rich are honoured and learning is neglected. Later the Devil becomes a courtier and again tempts St. Aleixo, who is defended by an angel. The Auto de Santa Catherina is a long devout play of which the persons are St. Catherine, her mother, her page, the Emperor Maxentius, a hermit, three doutores, Christ, the Virgin, angels. The saint, who receives news of her mother’s death with admirable equanimity, suffers martyrdom at the end of the play with equal fortitude. Diaz also dramatized the story of the Marques de Mantua. Although devoid of dramatic or lyric talent, he is sometimes interesting. Women, whose dresses and fashions are contrasted in the Auto de Santo Aleixo with the hard toil of the men, are represented in the Auto da Malicia das Mulheres as treating their husbands ‘like negroes’. We do not know whether Diaz spoke from experience, his life is very obscure; but he may have spent his last years in Beira if the passage in his O Conselho para bem casar:

be not merely a reference to Boeotia, any place far from Lisbon.

Traces of Vicente and the Celestina[356] are apparent in Anrique Lopez’ Cena Policiana or O Estvdante, in which a fidalgo and a student[357] figure. The poor escudeiro and his fasting moço are prominent in Jorge Pinto’s Auto de Rodrigo e Mendo. Spanish romances are quoted with great frequency, and Vicente’s En el mes era de Abril is parodied by the moços.[358] Indeed, their knowledge of literature was become embarrassing since, when his master’s guest, invited to a dinner which did not exist,[Pg 160] recites some verses that he has made, Rodrigo has already read them in Boscán and heard them sung in the street.[359]

The exact dates of Antonio Prestes, of Torres Novas, are unknown, but seven of his plays, after having been acted at Lisbon and published in folhas volantes, were first collected by Afonso Lopez half a century after Gil Vicente’s death in the Primeira Parte dos Avtos e Comedias Portuguesas, &c. (1588). The Auto da Ave Maria, written between 1563 and 1587, is an allegorical play in which Reason is vanquished by Sensuality; Heraclitus mourns over her fall while Democritus laughs. A knight in league with the Devil[360] robs in turn an almoner, a ratinho, and Fast, but his pious habit of saying an Ave Maria causes St. Michael to rescue him from the Devil and reconcile him with Reason. Of the profane plays, that with the most definite plot is the Auto dos Dous Irmãos, in which an old man, after refusing to see his sons who have married without his permission, divides all his money between them and is then neglected by both: he is sent from one to the other like King Lear. But the story is feebly worked out here as in the other plays. Their action is mostly that of a puppet show. Sometimes the moço, who always plays a prominent part, seems to be the only link in the plot, as Duarte in the Autos dos Cantarinhos. These moços, who show the author’s acquaintance with Gil Vicente[361] and Lazarillo de Tormes,[Pg 161][362] are quite unlike either Lazarillo or Apariço. They are certainly hungry, but they combine starvation with laziness, presumption and abundant learning. The names of Petrarca and Seneca are on their lips; they read Palmeirim and quote romances of chivalry and Spanish romances glibly.[363] Indeed, the chief interest of these artificial plays is the light thrown on the times: the position of women, the bribery of judges and lawyers, the aping of foreign manners, the mixed styles of architecture. They contain no poetry, little drama, and their wit is seldom natural. Like Prestes, Jeronimo Ribeiro, perhaps a brother of Chiado, was born apparently at Torres Novas. Only one of his plays was published: the Auto do Fisico, written in the last third of the sixteenth century. It has some farcical Vicentian scenes, the inevitable hits against the doctors and lawyers—the moço dresses up as a doutor to receive a simple fisherman from Alfama—and is generally more popular and natural than Prestes’ plays.

Simão Machado (c. 1570-c. 1640), who as a Franciscan monk—Frei Boaventura—ended his life at Barcelona, was also born at Torres Novas. His plays—Comedias portvgvesas (1601?)—are two: Comedia de Dio and Comedia da Pastora Alfea. They are written in Spanish and Portuguese indiscriminately despite Gonçalo’s admonition palrar como Pertigues.[364] The author explains that, well aware of his countrymen’s love of what is foreign, he uses Castilian to save his plays from the neglect often bestowed in Portugal upon works written in Portuguese. His verse is ordinarily the redondilha, although Nuno da Cunha in the first part of O Cerco de Dio makes a speech in oitavas. He has lyrical facility and his peasant scenes are full of life, for instance, the dialogue between the cowherd Gil Cabaço and Tomé the goatherd in Alfea.

The Gospel story was dramatized by Frei Francisco Vaz of Guimarães in a long Auto da Paixão. The oldest edition we have is dated 1559, and it has been often reprinted, with[Pg 162] thirty rough woodcuts. Some of these are very spirited, as that of the cock crowing after St. Peter’s denial, or that of Judas hanging himself. After a long introductory speech in versos de arte maior the play proceeds in redondilhas (over 2,000 lines). Religious subjects have always been favourites with the Portuguese, especially those affording scope for lavish scenic display, not only those of martyred saints, as the Auto de Santa Genoveva, but those based on the New Testament, as the later play Acto figurado da degolação dos Innocentes (1784) in seven scenes.[365]

Two plays, the Auto da Donzella da Torre and Auto de Dom André, are attributed to Gil Vicente’s grandson, Gil Vicente de Almeida. The latter, written before 1559, in which a peasant brings his unlettered son (nem nunca falei Gramatica) to Court, and a ratinho, on becoming a page, promises himself to learn to sing and play on the guitar within a month, has a Vicentian character.

To the beginning of the seventeenth century also belongs the Pratica de Tres Pastores (1626), a Christmas play by Frei Antonio da Estrella, who may perhaps be identified with Frei Antonio de Lisboa, author of the lost Auto dos Dous Ladrões (1603). The three shepherds, Rodrigo, Loirenço, and Sylvestre, are awakened by an angel singing cousas de preço. They agree that the song echoing over the hills is no earth-born music but algum Charubim ou Anjo ou Charafim, and presently they go to Bethlehem to offer their rustic gifts. The author has caught the charm and spontaneity of the earlier Christmas autos. Another seventeenth-century auto of the same kind is the Colloquio do Nascimento do Menino Jesus by the Lisbon bookseller, Francisco Lopez. The scene and conversation of the three shepherds, Gil, Silvestre, and Paschoal, with their assorda ou migas de alho in the cold night—mas como queima o rocio, says Gil—are very naturally drawn. An echo of the satirical side of Gil Vicente’s genius is to be found in the Auto das Padeiras chamado da Fome (1638),[366] in which the various frauds[Pg 163] of the bakeresses, sardine-sellers, market-women, pastry-cooks, and tavern-keepers of Lisbon are shown up by the devils Palurdam and Calcamar, as in the Barca do Purgatorio. There is nothing of Vicente in the Auto novo da Barca da Morte (1732) by a Lisbon author who wrote under the name of Diogo da Costa (Innocencio da Silva, ii. 153, believed that his real name was André da Luz). It consists of a single scene crowded with classical allusions. Death has deprived Midas of his gold, Alexander of his victories, Aristotle of his learning. The actors here are a rich miser, a poor man, a youth, an old man, and Death, whose boat Time steers. The title of the Auto novo e curioso da Forneira de Aljubarrota (1815), also attributed to Diogo da Costa, is misleading, since it is a prose narrative of the experiences of that valorosa matrona, who, dressed as an almocreve, comes to Lisbon with her two bestinhas laden with wine.

Of the twenty-five plays contained in the Musa entretenida de varios entremeses (1658) edited by Manuel Coelho Rebello, No. 17 (Castigos de vn Castelhano) is in Spanish and Portuguese, six are in Portuguese,[367] all the rest in Spanish. Popular plays continued to be written long after the introduction of the classical drama and in spite of the antagonism of the priests. They were often composed in a variety of metres, as the Acto de Sᵗᵃ Genoveva, Princesa de Barbante (1735) by Balthasar Luis da Fonseca, if its verse can be called metre,[368] or the Comedia famosa intitulada A Melhor Dita de Amor (1745) by Rodrigo Antonio de Almeida,[369] which opens with a sonnet and proceeds in redondilhas, hendecasyllables, and prose.

[Pg 164]

In the Christmas plays and peasant scenes some of Gil Vicente’s poetry had lingered; the plays of more fashionable authors caught no gleam of his lyrism, but sketched types and satirized manners successfully, none more so than Mello’s Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz, written, it must be remembered, before Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670). Both kinds, consciously or unconsciously, were derived from Vicente’s genius as manifested in his plays for the Court and of the people.

During Gil Vicente’s lifetime, perhaps, Sá de Miranda had written the two plays, Os Estrangeiros (c. 1528) and Os Vilhalpandos (1538?),[370] with which he introduced classical comedy into Portugal (nearly a quarter of a century before its introduction into France and England). Os Estrangeiros was a novelty[371] in more ways than one, for it was written in prose. Both plays were, as the author admitted, imitated from Plautus and Terence and also from Ariosto, whose comedies were composed in the first third of the century. Os Estrangeiros was, he further observed in a brief introductory letter to the Cardinal Henrique, rustic and clumsy.[372] Its only claim to be called rustic, in character as apart from treatment, consists in a few allusions to popular customs. We would have had it more indigenous. The scene is Palermo, the plot, à la Plautus, consists of the difficulties and differences between father and son, and there is the aio, the vainglorious soldier Briobris, nas armas um Roldão, and the truão who plays the part of gracioso. The action advances in long soliloquies to the final reconciliation between father and son. The character of Os Vilhalpandos, which Mello called ‘a mirror of courtly wit’, is similar, with the difference that Fame instead of Comedy speaks the prologue and the action between son, father, and courtesan is placed in Rome. Both the plays were acted before Cardinal Henrique and printed by his command. As if to mark his initiative in every field, Miranda also composed a classical tragedy entitled Cleopatra (c. 1550), the title of which is of interest as preceding the plays of Shakespeare and Samuel[Pg 165] Daniel (1562-1619). The twelve octosyllabic lines (abcabcdefdef) that survive (from a chorus?) give no idea of its character, but it probably followed closely the Sofonisba (1515) of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550). A Spanish version of Sophocles’ Electra by Hernan Perez de Oliva appeared in 1528, and in 1536 Anrique Ayres Victoria had translated this into Portuguese octosyllabic verse: A Vingança de Agamemnon. The date of the first edition is unknown; the second appeared in 1555. Nor do we know when Cleopatra was written,[373] although it must have been prior to Antonio Ferreira’s classical tragedy acted at Coimbra, Inés de Castro (c. 1557), which has hitherto been considered the first of its kind in Portugal. Written when the author was about thirty, that is, about the time of Miranda’s death, it copied the form of Greek tragedies and, the better to acclimatize this, a thoroughly national subject was chosen—the death of Inés—whereas Miranda had gone to Rome and Egypt. As might be expected from Ferreira’s other work the conception was executed with the careful skill of a conscientious craftsman. The drama has unity, the style is purest Portuguese, the chorus sometimes soars into poetry, as in the celebrated passage Quando amor naceo. That the same high language is spoken throughout, that, as has often been observed, scenes of dramatic opportunity—a meeting between D. Pedro and his father or Inés—are omitted, merely shows that Ferreira had no dramatic instinct. Perhaps the only dramatic passage—and even so it is of more psychological than dramatic interest—is that in Act III: Inés. ‘Ah, woe is me! what ill, what fearful ill dost thou announce?’ Chorus. ‘It is thy death.’ Inés. ‘Is my lord dead?’ Nevertheless, the play was a remarkable achievement, carried out without faltering and with a sustained loftiness worthy of its subject. No one any longer believes that Ferreira copied from the Nise lastimosa by Geronimo Bermudez, published under the pseudonym Antonio da Silva eight years after Ferreira’s death. This is a slightly expanded Spanish translation, closely following the 1587 edition[374] of Inés de Castro, which differs considerably from[Pg 166] that of 1598. The Nise laureada which accompanied it is perfectly insignificant. Like Miranda, Ferreira wrote, besides one tragedy, two comedies, Bristo and O Cioso. There are indications that he had in mind Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ Eufrosina as well as Miranda’s comedies. Bristo soliloquizing is the counterpart of Philtra, and in his dedication of Bristo to Prince João he acknowledges his debt to previous plays.[375] In this comedy, written during some vacation days at Coimbra University, the action is very primitive, but the braggart Annibal and the charlatan Montalvão account for some farcical scenes. His later play, O Cioso (the jealous husband is also handled by Gil Vicente and Prestes), belongs to a higher plane, i. e. to comedy rather than farce, although Bristo is not entirely devoid of character-drawing. Bristo was ‘made public’ (publicada) before 1554, but neither play was published till 1622. Both are remarkable for the correctness and concise vigour of their prose.

The three plays of Camões, written perhaps between the years 1544 and 1549 during his first stay at Lisbon, belong entirely neither to the classical drama nor to the more ancient autos, but combine elements of both. They are written in redondilhas, mostly quintilhas. The third, El Rei Seleuco (1549?), is slighter even than a Vicentian farce. It has a curious prologue scene (Vorspiel auf dem Theater) in prose. The versification is easy, but its chief interest is the important part it may have played in its author’s life. The earliest in date, Filodemo, although it lacks Vicente’s savour of the soil, has a graceful charm and faintly recalls the Comedia do Viuvo. Filodemo, orphan son of a Danish princess and a Portuguese fidalgo, is in love with Dionysa, daughter of his father’s brother, whose son Venadoro is in love with Filodemo’s sister Florimena. Their relationship is unknown, but the discovery of their true birth smoothes the path of love and ends the play. Os Amphitriões,[Pg 167] in Portuguese and Spanish,[376] is based on the Amphitruo of Plautus. The predicaments resulting from the appearance of Jupiter as Amphitrião’s double and Mercury as the double of Sosia are

deftly and humorously worked out in delightfully spontaneous verse.

For those so fastidious as to be satisfied neither by the popular autos nor the staid classical plays, yet another kind was provided in the shape of Celestina comedies in prose. Of the life of their author we know scarcely more than that he was very well known in his day. Judging by literary merit only, one might assign the verses written by Jorge de Vasconcellos in the Cancioneiro Geral to Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos (c. 1515-63?), since the poems, alike in the new and the old style, interspersed in his works do not prove him to have possessed high poetical talent. It is as a dramatist and still more as a writer of Portuguese prose that the distinguished courtier of King João III’s reign[377]—deserves a higher place in Portuguese literature than his ungrateful countrymen have habitually accorded him. But the dates forbid the identification of the dramatist with the earlier poet, who was also a notable courtier since he is specially mentioned in Vicente’s Cortes de Jupiter (ii. 404). One of the few definite facts known to us concerning Jorge Ferreira is that affirmed in the preface of his Eufrosina: that this play was the first fruit of his genius, written in his youth.[378] The exact date of Eufrosina is unknown, but it was written after the University had been finally established at Coimbra in 1537—the date of the letter from India (December 20, 1526[379]) is clearly a misprint since mention is made of the siege of Diu (1538). Ferreira de Vasconcellos evidently studied law at the University. If he was born, not at Coimbra but at Lisbon, he may have begun his studies in the capital. At the time of Prince Duarte’s death (1540) he was in his service, as moço da camara, and he[Pg 168] continued as a Court official, first, perhaps, in the service of the heir to the throne, Prince João, who died on January 2, 1554, and then in that of King Sebastião. In 1563 he was succeeded as Secretary (escrivão do Tesouro) by Luis Vicente, probably son of the poet Gil. The document[380] which nominates his successor by no means implies his death, since, as Menéndez y Pelayo[381] observed, his name is unaccompanied by the formula que Deus perdoe or aja. But it is strange, if he did not die till 1585, the date given by Barbosa Machado, that nothing more is heard of him after 1563 (we are told that his son died at the battle of Alcacer Kebir), and that his son-in-law called Aulegrafia, written before the death of Prince Luis (1555), his swan-song.[382] Apart from manuscript treatises which were never published, Jorge Ferreira is the author of four works in prose, the three plays, Eufrosina, Ulysippo, Aulegrafia, and the Memorial da Segunda Tavola Redonda. The latter is an involved romance of chivalry[383] which describes the adventures of the Knight of the Crystal Arms, emulator of the Knights of the Round Table and Amadis of Gaul. Each chapter commences with a brief sententious reflection, from which the reader is plunged into mortal combats of knights, centaurs, giants, and dragons. It begins by giving an account of King Arthur, his disappearance, and the prosperous reign of Sagramor. It ends with a vivid description of the tournament (August 5, 1552) at Enxobregas (= Xabregas) in which the ill-fated Prince João was the principal figure. Barbosa Machado included among Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ works Triunfos de Sagramor em que se tratão os feitos dos Cavalleiros da Segunda Tavola Redonda (Coimbra, 1554). A passage in the Memorial[384] may have led to the belief that this was a second part of the[Pg 169] Memorial, of which the first known edition is that of Coimbra, 1567, but from the preface[385] it appears that the Memorial is the Triunfos. The title Triunfos de Sagramor may have been given to an earlier edition,[386] or it may have been the title of the second half of the work. The author himself declares that his story had been ‘presented’ to Prince João.[387] The editor of Ulysippo in 1618 says that the Memorial had been printed at least twice during the author’s lifetime.[388] Yet it is difficult not to suspect that the date 1554 was a confusion with the year of the death of the prince to whom the work was dedicated. The same uncertainty, as we have seen, prevails as to the date of the first edition of the author’s masterpiece Eufrosina. (He published his plays anonymously, partly perhaps for the same reason that made him insist that his characters represented no definite persons but types.) The earliest edition that we have is that of Evora, 1561, that of Coimbra, 1560, having disappeared, if it ever existed.[389] The words on the title-page, de nouo reuista & em partes acrecentada, need not imply more than that, as we know, the manuscript had circulated among his friends: por muitas mãos deuassa e falsa. As a novelty, invençam noua nesta terra, Eufrosina with its proverbs and its ingenious thoughts and phrases was appreciated in Portugal, whose inhabitants were justifiably proud now to possess a Celestina of their own, a Celestina with less action and rhetoric but more thought and sentiment.[390] Quevedo was loud in its praises, Lope de Vega[Pg 170] perhaps quoted it,[391] its influence on the style of Mello and other Portuguese writers is clear. It was a legitimate success and its modern neglect is all the more deplorable because in this play the Portuguese language, the richness, concision, and grace of which are exalted in the preface, appears in its purest, raciest form. The author’s vocabulary is immense, his sentences admirably vigorous and clear. After heading the E’s in the Index of 1581 (Evphrosina simply, without author) it was reprinted by the poet Rodriguez Lobo in 1616, in a slightly modified form, shorn, that is, of some of the coarser passages and of all reference to the Scriptures.[392] The style is not the only merit of Eufrosina. Despite the lack of proportion in some of the scenes, in which Jorge Ferreira proves himself to have been, like Richardson, ‘a sorry pruner’ (four scenes out of the thirty-nine constitute a quarter of the play), there is a certain unity in this story of the love of the poor courtier Zelotipo de Abreu for Eufrosina, proud and beautiful daughter of the rich fidalgo D. Carlos, Senhor das Povoas, in the little ancient university town above the green waters and willows of Mondego. The numerous other persons are strictly subordinate, and both scenes and characters are skilfully drawn. The artificial construction, the convention by which emotion finds vent in a string of classical allusions, scarcely mar the exceedingly natural presentment of many of the scenes. Charming, for instance, is that in which Eufrosina and her companion and friend Silvia de Sousa, Zelotipo’s cousin, watch from the terrace of their house the river’s gentle flow and along its bank the citizens and students taking the air in the cool of the evening. The play contains as many characters as a modern novel. There is Cariofilo, a gay good-hearted Don Juan; his friend, the more serious Zelotipo, type of the Portuguese lover, the galante contemplativo; D. Carlos, quick to anger but easily appeased; the[Pg 171] pedantic, unscrupulous Dr. Carrasco, whose conversation with D. Carlos gives scope for a vigorous attack on the legal profession; Silvia, who sacrifices her love and gives up to Eufrosina her cousin’s verses that she had so carefully kept; the moços Andrade and Cotrim, greedy, timid, and talkative; the gentleman of Coimbra, Philotimo, a wise and kindly man of the world. Other phases of Coimbra life are shown in the moças de rio and de cantaro, who fetch water or wash clothes in the Mondego and metaphorically toss in a blanket Galindo, the rich D. Tristão’s agent from Lisbon; in the love-lorn student with his Latin, the morose and jealous workman Duarte, proud of his position as official, the resolute goldsmith and his languid daughter Polinia, the old servant Andresa and the merry servant girl Vitoria, and, most prominent of all, Philtra the alcoviteira, deploring the wickedness and degeneracy of the world and full of wise saws—the play contains many hundreds. Eufrosina herself is first described by the lover—brow of Diana, lips of Venus, limbs of Pallas, clear green eyes[393] of Juno, quietly mirthful; then by his servant Andrade—the fairest thing that ever he thought to see, fan in hand, the sleeves of her dress like a ship at full sail[394]—so that we have an effective impression of her beauty. Besides Coimbra life we obtain glimpses of that of the Court at Lisbon and Almeirim in a letter from the courtier Crisandor, of India in a very real and interesting letter from Silvia’s brother, even of Cotrim’s native village. That the unity was not sacrificed to these many by-scenes says much for the author’s skill. This praise cannot be given to his second play written some ten years after the first, Ulysippo (1547?), for here the reader loses his way among the many courses of true love. There are twenty-one dramatis personae, but the principal interest is in the sketch of Constança d’Ornellas, the hypocritical beata,[395] or, rather, that is the most original[Pg 172] part, since in the play as a whole there is a certain monotony after Eufrosina, and many of the proverbs are the same.[396] Excellent as the earlier play in its terse and idiomatic prose,[397] full of interest in the insight it gives into the customs and life of the people, its chief fault is the intricacy, or absence, of plot which makes it difficult reading, and of course it would naturally please less on its first appearance as being no longer a new thing. The author, who knew how the Portuguese prized novidades, appears to have been conscious of this, since his third play, Aulegrafia, written perhaps in 1555,[398] and first published in 1619, was developed on somewhat different lines. It is concerned, as its name implies, exclusively with the Court, and the people and popular proverbs are in abeyance. In its fifty scenes we are introduced to typical Court ladies, noble fidalgos, poor gentlemen and their servants, one of whom considers it mais fidalgo nam saber ler. The play is by its author termed ‘a long treatise on Court manners’,[399] and as such it is admirable and full of interest, however negligible it may be as drama. Its style, moreover, even excels in atticism Ferreira’s other works. The most remarkable character is that of the young (menina e moça) and very wily aunt of Filomela. She is twice described in detail (f. 46 and f. 153 v.), and we perceive that Philtra of the people, the middle-class Constança d’Ornellas, and the aristocratic Aulegrafia are really three persons and one spirit. In Ulysippo one of the lesser personages was the Spanish Sevilhana (mentioned also in Eufrosina), and here a boastful Spanish adventurer is introduced in the person of Agrimonte de Guzman, who disdains to speak Portuguese. The scene of both the later plays is Lisbon. The author drew from his experience here, as previously[Pg 173] at Coimbra, and often describes to the life the persons that he had met. Scarcely any other writer gives us so intimate an idea of the times—of this the latter heyday of Portugal’s greatness—or of the gallant, lovesick, dreaming Portuguese, who considers love as much a monopoly of his country as the ivory and spices of India.[400]

The plays of Luis de Camões (1524?-80) are in a sense typical of his genius, for they show him combining two great currents of poetry, the old indigenous and the classic new. A generation had sprung up accustomed to wide horizons and heroic deeds, and poets and historians regretted that there was no Homer or Virgil to describe them adequately. Camões was not a Homer nor a Virgil, but he was a more universal poet than Portugal had yet produced, and by reason of his marvellous power of expression he triumphantly completed the revolution which Sá de Miranda had tentatively begun. In a sense he was not a great original poet, but in his style he was excelled by no Latin poet of the Renaissance. The eager researches of modern scholars have succeeded in piercing the obscurity that enveloped his life, although many gaps and doubtful points remain. Four or five generations had gone by since his ancestor Vasco Perez had passed out of the pages of history,[401] and some of the intervening members of the family had also won distinction, but Camões’ father, Simão Vaz de Camões, was a poor captain of good position (cavaleiro fidalgo) who was shipwrecked near Goa and died there soon after the poet was born in 1524. Through his grandmother, Guiomar Vaz da Gama, he was distantly related to the celebrated Gamas of Algarve. His mother, Anna de Sá e Macedo, belonged to a well-known family of Santarem.[402] Whether he was born at Lisbon or Coimbra[Pg 175] is still uncertain. His great-grandfather had settled at Coimbra. That Camões studied there scarcely admits of doubt. He alludes to it in his poems, and nowhere else in Portugal could he have received his thorough classical education. In the year 1542 or 1543 he went to Lisbon. The exact dates of events in his life during the next ten years are difficult to determine, but the events themselves are clear enough. His birth and talents assured him a ready welcome in the capital. Whether he became tutor to D. Antonio de Noronha, son of the Conde de Linhares (the Portuguese ambassador whom Moraes accompanied to Paris), or not, he soon had many friends and was probably received at Court. Referring later to this time he is said to have spoken of himself as cheo de muitos favores, and in this popularity he wrote a large number of his exquisite redondilhas and also sonnets, odes, eclogues, and the three autos. But Camões had fallen passionately in love with a lady-in-waiting of the queen, Catherina de Athaide.[403] Tradition has it that he first saw her in church on a Good Friday (1544?). We may surmise that Natercia’s parents objected to the suit of the penniless cavaleiro fidalgo, and that Camões pressed his suit on them with more vehemence than discretion. He was banished from Court, and spent six months in the Ribatejo (Santarem) and two years in military service in North Africa (Ceuta). He admits that he had been in the wrong, but not seriously so, and hints that envy had played its part in his downfall. It is probable that his play El Rei Seleuco had given a handle to the enemies that his growing reputation as a poet had made. It must be confessed that its subject was tactless, for in the play the king gives up his bride to his son, which could easily be interpreted as a reflection on the conduct of the late King Manuel, who had married his son’s bride. The two years in Africa passed slowly. In a letter (Esta vae com a candea na mão) he describes sadness eating away his heart as a moth a garment, and it was with his thoughts in Lisbon that he took part from time to time in skirmishes against the Moors, in one[Pg 176] of which he lost his right eye. Hard blows, scanty provisions, and no chance of enriching oneself as in India were the features of military service in North Africa, and when Camões returned to Lisbon his prospects contrasted sharply with those which had been his when he first came from the University a few years before. He was now nearly thirty,[404] disfigured by the loss of an eye and embittered by the turn his fortunes had taken. He no longer looked on life from the inside, gazing contentedly at the show from the windows of privilege, but was himself in the arena. For the school of Sá de Miranda he had probably never felt much sympathy, considering it too severe and artificial. He wished to live and enjoy, and although the patronage of literary Prince João may have encouraged him to hope for better times, he meanwhile set himself to sample life as best he might, associating with rowdy companions (valentões), who brought out the Cariofilo side of his character at the expense of the contemplative Zelotipo. Whether he had intended to embark for India in 1550, or this be a pure invention on the part of Faria e Sousa, it is certain that he was still in Lisbon on June 16, 1552. On that day the Corpus Christi procession passed through the principal streets. In the crowded Rocio Camões was drawn into a quarrel with a Court official, Gonçalo Borges, and wounded him with a sword-cut on the head. For nearly nine months Camões lay in prison, and then, Borges having recovered and bearing no malice, he was pardoned[405] (March 7, 1553) and released, but only on the understanding that he would leave Portugal to serve the king in India. Before the end of the month he had embarked in the ship S. Bento. Hitherto he had hoped against hope for an improvement in his lot; now he went, he says, as one who leaves this world for the next, and with the words Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea,[Pg 177][406] turned his back on the calumnies and intrigues of Lisbon. In one of his finest elegies[407] he described the voyage, a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, and the arrival at Goa in September 1553. The voyage was full of interest to him, and he made good use of it, becoming what Humboldt called him—a great painter of the sea[408]—but so far as comfort was concerned he fared probably much as would a modern emigrant. His disillusion at Goa is poignantly described in a letter[409] written soon after his arrival. He found it ‘the stepmother of all honest men’, money the only god and passport, and he sends a note of warning to aventureiros in Portugal eager to make their fortune in India. We know from the bitter pages of Couto and Corrêa how difficult it was for a private soldier to thrive there, and the position of a reinol newly arrived from Portugal was precarious. Camões joined a few weeks later (November 1553) in a punitive expedition along the coast of Malabar against the King of Chembe, and in 1554 probably accompanied D. Fernando de Meneses in a second expedition to Monte Felix or Guardafui (Ras ef Fil), the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. After his three years’ service (1553-6) he continued to live at Goa. He had found time to write poetry, and sent home a sonnet and an eclogue on the death of his friend D. Antonio de Noronha. His play Filodemo was acted, probably in the winter of 1555, before the popular Governor Francisco Barreto, who provided him with the post of Provedor Môr dos Defuntos e Ausentes (i. e. trustee for the property of dead or absent Portuguese) at Macao. Whether his satiric verses had anything to do with the appointment we do not know—some have maintained that the Portuguese of Goa appreciated his poetical powers best at a distance—but it is more probable that his appointment was a favour, since every post in India was eagerly coveted, and it was a kinder action to give him a comparatively humble one at once than the reversion to a more lucrative office, filled thrice or even ten times over by the deplorable system of ‘successions’.[410] He set sail in the[Pg 178] spring of 1556, and after touching at Malacca, arrived at the Molucca Islands, the most lawless region in India. Camões himself, according to Storck, was wounded about this time, but in a fight at sea, not in one of the chronic broils at Ternate or Tidore. In 1557 or 1558 he reached Macao, but two years later he was relieved of his post owing to a quarrel with the settlers, whose part was taken by the captain of the silver and silk ship passing from Goa to China. On his authority Camões was sent to Goa, protesting against o injusto mando, which was a common fate of officials in India. He was shipwrecked off the coast of Tongking, lost all his possessions, and arrived penniless and perhaps in debt at Goa in 1560 or 1561. To these four or five chequered years are ascribed the wonderful quintilhas, the most beautiful in the language, Sobolos rios que vam, which may owe something to Vicente’s admirable paraphrase of Psalm l, the canção Com força desusada, the oitavas Como nos vossos, and the completion of the first six books of the Lusiads. Soon after his return he was probably imprisoned for debt, but was released, probably at the instance of the Viceroy, D. Francisco Coutinho, Conde de Redondo, to whom Camões addressed his first printed poem, the ode in Orta’s Coloquios (1563). Camões’ thoughts must have now more than ever turned homeward. Fortune had danced tantalizingly before him, holding out hopes which broke as glass in his hands whenever he attempted to seize them.[411] Of his life between 1564 and 1567 we know nothing. He did not occupy the post of factor of Chaul, the reversion to which indeed he may perhaps only have received after his return to Portugal. He was eager to get home. In 1567 he accompanied Pedro Barreto to Mozambique, glad to get even so far on the return voyage. There poverty and illness delayed him till 1569, when through the generosity and in the company of some friends, among whom was the historian Couto, he was able to embark for Portugal. They reached Lisbon in April, 1570.[412] Sixteen[Pg 179] years had passed. The popular, impulsive, talented youth returned middle-aged, poverty-stricken, and unknown. Antonio de Noronha and many others of his friends were dead. Catherina de Athaide had died in 1556 (although she may have continued to receive Camões’ rapt devotion as the dead Beatrice that of Dante), Prince João, hope and patron of poets, two years earlier. The plague, to which nearly half the city’s population had succumbed, had only recently abated, and Camões may have witnessed the thanksgiving procession in Lisbon on April 20, 1570. Modern critics have even denied him the only consolation which probably remained to him in the patria esquiva a quem se mal aproveitou[413], but there seems no reason to reject the tradition that his mother was alive; in fact she survived him and continued to receive the pension of 15,000 réis[414] granted him from 1572 till his death on Friday, June 10, 1580. It was a sum barely sufficient to support life, and it was not always regularly paid, so that he is reported to have been in the habit of saying that he would prefer to his pension a whip for the responsible officials (almoxarifes). Tradition, to the indignation of reasonable historians, loves to represent a faithful Javanese slave, who had accompanied Camões to Europe, begging for his master in the streets of Lisbon. Camões did not go with King Sebastian to Africa. He may have been already ill when the expedition set out in June 1578—the plague soon began again to ravage Lisbon, and long years of suffering and disappointment must have sapped his strength. Two years later his life of heroic endurance, in patience of the juizos incognitos de Deos,[415] ended. He was perhaps buried in a common grave with other victims of the plague.[416] Long absence had served to strengthen his love for his patria ditosa amada, and the news from Africa left him no heart to battle against disease, content, as he wrote to the[Pg 180] Captain-General of Lamego, to die with his country, with which his name has ever since been intimately linked. Couto and Mariz agree that he brought Os Lusiadas with him virtually complete on his return to Portugal. It was published through the influence of the poet D. Manuel de Portugal in 1572. Camões has often been called the prince of heroic poets, but it is noteworthy that Faria e Sousa in 1685 says that ‘all have hitherto, especially in Spain, considered him greater as a lyric than as an heroic poet’.[417] Os Lusiadas rather than an epic is a great lyrical hymn in praise of Portugal, with splendid episodes such as the descriptions of the death of Inés, the battle of Aljubarrota, the storm, Adamastor, the Island of Venus. Apart from the style, its originality consists in the skill with which in a poem but half the length of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and a fifth of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso the poet works in the entire history of his country. It is this which gives unity to his ten cantos of oitavas, this and the wonderfully transparent flow of the verse, which carries the reader over many weaknesses and inequalities of detail. It is a nobler poem than the crowded garden of flowers in a high wind that is the Orlando Furioso, and at once more human and intense than the Gerusalemme Liberata. Camões, with a wonderful memory and intimate knowledge of the legends of Greece and Rome, read everything, and we find him gathering his material from all sides[418] like a bird in spring, from a Latin treatise of the antiquarian Resende, from the historians Duarte Galvão, Pina, Lopez, Barros, or Castanheda, or literally translating[Pg 181] lines of Virgil, as in his shorter poems he imitated Petrarca, Garci Lasso, and Boscán. Tasso used the mot juste when in a sonnet addressed to Camões he called him dotto e buon Luigi.[419] If, as seems probable, he had early wished to sing the deeds of the Portuguese, the first volumes of Castanheda and Barros must have been an incentive as powerful as the destiny which made him personally acquainted with the scenes of Gama’s voyage and of the Portuguese victories in the East. It seems probable that cantos iii and iv, containing the early history of Portugal, were already written, and that around them he wove the epic grandeur revealed in the histories of the discovery of India. The poem opens with an invocation to the nymphs of the Tagus and to King Sebastian, and then, in a wonderful stanza of the sea (Já no largo oceano navegavam, i. 19), Gama’s ships are shown in mid-voyage. The gods of Olympus take sides, and Venus protects the daring adventurers in seas never crossed before, while Mars stirs up the natives of Mozambique and of Mombaça to treachery (i-ii). In contrast to the natives farther south, the King of Melinde receives them with loyal friendship, and Gama rewards him by relating the history of Portugal (iii-iv). He then continues his voyage, and after weathering a terrible storm brewed by Bacchus, arrives at Calicut (v-vi). After a visit to the Samori (the King of Calicut), the Catual (the Governor) accompanies Gama on board, and Paulo da Gama explains to him the warlike deeds of the Portuguese embroidered on the silken banners of the ships (vii-viii). On the return voyage they are entertained by Tethys and her nymphs in the island of Venus, supposed to be one of the Azores (ix-x), and the poem ends with a second invocation to King Sebastian (x. 145-56). Thus the time of the poem occupies a little over two years (July 1497-September 1499). Into this the previous four centuries had been ingeniously worked, but in order to include the sixteenth century fresh devices were adopted, by which[Pg 182] Jupiter (canto ii), Adamastor (v), and Tethys (x) foretell the future. Almost every land and city connected with Portuguese history finds a place in the poem. Small wonder that it was well received by the Portuguese, combining as it did intense patriotism with hundreds of exotic names. The extraordinary number of 12,000 copies is said to have been printed within a quarter of a century of Camões’ death,[420] and by 1624 the sale had increased to 20,000 and his fame had spread throughout the world. It would have been still stranger if the murmuradores maldizentes had been silent. As early as 1641 we find a critic, João Soares de Brito (1611-64), defending Camões against the charges of plagiarizing Virgil and of improbabilities of time and place.[421] Not every one apparently was of the opinion of the Conde de Idanha, who considered that the only fault of the Lusiads was that it was too long to learn by heart and too short to be able to go on reading it for ever. Montesquieu found in it something of ‘the fascination of the Odyssey and the magnificence of the Aeneid’, and Voltaire, while objecting to its merveilleux absurde, adds: ‘Mais la poésie du style et l’imagination dans l’expression l’ont soutenu, de même que les beautés de l’exécution ont placé Paul Véronèse parmi les grands peintres.’

In 1820 appeared José Agostinho de Macedo’s Censura dos Lusiadas, in which he noted with some asperity Camões’ erros crassissimos. Prosaic lines, hyperbole, the use of the supernatural, lack of proportion,[422] absence of unity, and historical improbabilities are the main heads of his indictment, and he quotes Racine as to Camões’ ‘icy style’. He also has much petty detailed criticism, for he finds in Camões a notavel falta de grammatica. And Macedo was certainly right. Most of the faults he attributes to Camões do exist in the Lusiads. Macedo himself could write more correctly. When he says that the line Somos hum dos da ilha, lhe tornou (i. 53) is unpoetical (não tem tintura de poesia), we agree; it is sheer prose. We can add other instances: the line as que elle para si na cruz tomou (i. 7) is as[Pg 183] unmusical as the rhyming of Heliogabalo, Sardanapalo (iii. 92), or impossibil, terribil (iv. 54). Only Macedo forgot that genius is justified of its children, and that these details are all merged in the incomparable style, imaginative power, and lofty theme of the poem. If a man is unable to feel the heat of the sun for its spots, we will vainly try to warm or enlighten him, but it is not pedantic grammarians such as Macedo[423] who could obscure the fame of Camões. That could only be done by those whom Macedo calls os idolatras camoneanos. Lope de Vega[424] effusively professed to place the Lusiads above the Aeneid and the Iliad, and Camões’ fellow-countrymen have eagerly followed suit. He has also suffered much at the hands of translators. Since the Lusiads is clearly not the equal of the Iliad or the Odyssey, it may be worth while to consider by what reasons Camões really is one of the world’s greatest poets. There is celestial music in much that he wrote, in incidents of the Lusiads such as the death of Inés de Castro,[425] in his eclogues and canções and elegies, in many of the sonnets, and in the redondilhas, most of all perhaps in the seventy-three heavenly quintilhas beginning Sobolos rios que vam. But other Portuguese poets have been musical; Diogo Bernardez in this respect vies with Camões: Camões excels them all in the vigour and transparent clearness that accompany his music. But his principal excellence is that, still without losing the music of his versos deleitosos, he can think in verse[426]—the thought in some of his elegies and oitavas is remarkable—and describe with scientific precision, as in the account of the tromba (Lus. v.[Pg 184] 19-22). Like Milton, he could transform an atlas into a fair harmony of names. His influence on the Portuguese language has been very great. Whether it was wholly for good may be open to doubt—a doubt mentioned by one of his earliest biographers, Severim de Faria, in 1624. The Lusiads, he says, ‘greatly enriched the Portuguese language by ingeniously introducing many new words and expressions which then came into common use, although some severe critics have censured him for this, considering the use of latinized forms a defect in his poem’.[427] An inch farther than he went in this direction, or in that of furia grande e sonorosa, and estilo grandiloquo, would have been an inch too far, and subsequent writers did not always observe his restraint, the sobriety due to his classical education. But his poem certainly helped to fix the language, and he cannot be blamed for the excesses of his followers, or for a change which had begun before his time.[428]

Couto records the theft of the Parnaso in which Camões was collecting his lyrics with a view to publishing them. He must have written many more lyrics than we possess, but even so the number existing is not small. Successive editors have added to them from time to time, and often clumsily. Faria e Sousa, a century after Camões’ death, declared that he had added 200, and, while upbraiding Diogo Bernardez for his robos, was himself the thief. Camões might have been somewhat surprised to find in the first edition of his lyrics (1595) two poems which had been in print in the Cancioneiro de Resende eight years before he was born. This 1595 edition contained but 65 sonnets, but their number grew to 108 (1598), 140 (1616), 229 (1668), 296 (1685), 352 (1860), 354 (1873). D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has already contributed much towards a critical edition, and it is to be hoped that before long it may be possible[Pg 185] to read the genuine lyrics of Camões in a complete edition by themselves.[429] That would certainly cause him to be more widely read abroad. It is perhaps inevitable that a comparison should arise between Camões and Petrarca (although it must be remembered that they are separated by two centuries), yet he would be an extremely bold or extremely ignorant critic who should place the one of them above the other. In genius they were equal, but a different atmosphere acted on their genius, the artistic atmosphere of Italy and the natural atmosphere of Portugal. Petrarca was the more scholarly writer, so that if he perhaps never attains to the rapturous heights occasionally reached by Camões, he also keeps himself from the blemishes which sometimes disfigure Camões’ work. Camões’ life was far more varied, many-coloured as an Alentejan manta,[430] and this is reflected in his poems. Intensely human, he is swayed by many moods, while Petrarca is merged in the narrower flame of his love. Petrarca excels him in the sonnet, for although many of those by Camões are beautiful, and nearly all contain some beautiful passage, he was not really at his ease in this scanty plot of ground. His genius required a larger canvas for its expression. The following lines from his long and magnificent canção Vinde cá are worth quoting because they triumphantly display many of the noblest characteristics of his poetry:

Here we see the force and precision, the amazing ease and rapidity, the crystalline transparency, the sad saudade, and above all the deep sincerity that mark so much of his work. Both[Pg 186] Petrarca and Camões are representative of their country, the latter not only in his poems, in which almost every Portuguese hero is included, but in his character and his life. In his wit and melancholy, his love of Nature, his passionate devotion, his persistency and endurance, his independence and sensitive pride, in his lyrical gift and power of expression, in his courage and ardent patriotism, he is the personification and ideal of the Portuguese nation.

Many of Camões’ friends were also lyric poets, but their poems have mostly vanished. One of them, Luis Franco Corrêa, compiled a cancioneiro of contemporary poems which still exists in manuscript. A few later poets, chiefly pastoral, have already been mentioned, but after Camões’ death the star of lyric poetry waned and set, and the only compensation was a brilliant noonday in the realm of prose. Camões was a learned poet, but he also plunged both hands in the songs and traditions of the people. The later poets withdrew themselves more and more from this perennial spring of poetical images and expression, till at last in the ripeness of time Almeida Garrett turned to it again for inspiration, even Bocage, devoted admirer of Camões though he was, having neglected this side of his genius, as was inevitable in the eighteenth century.

Epic poetry scarcely fared better than the lyric, despite a hundred honest efforts to eclipse the Lusiads. A favourite legend of Portuguese and other folk-lore tells how the step-daughter comes from the fairies’ dwelling speaking flowers for words or with a star on her forehead, but her envious half-sister, who then visits the fairies, returns uttering mud and toads or with an ass’s head. If the epic poems of those who emulated the fame of Camões are something better than mud they nevertheless fail for the most part lamentably in that inspiration which Portuguese history might have been expected to give.

wrote Diniz da Cruz (O Hyssope, canto 1). The epic-fever had not abated even in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Madeira poet Francisco de Paula Medina e Vasconcellos[Pg 187] (c. 1770-1824) alone wrote two: Zargueida (1806), Georgeida (1819); and José Agostinho de Macedo in his Motim Literario imagines himself at the mercy of a poet with an epic in sixty cantos entitled Napoleada, and himself became the mock-hero of one in nine: Agostinheida (Londres, 1817), written by his unfortunate opponent Nuno Alvares Pereira Pato Moniz (1781-1827). The strange poet of Setubal, Thomaz Antonio de Santos e Silva (1751-1816), published a Braziliada in twelve cantos in 1815. Of the earlier epics Camillo Castello Branco wrote sarcastically: ‘They contain impenetrable mysteries of dullness and inspire a sacred awe, but they are the conventional glory of our literary history, untouched and intangible.’[431]

Of the two long epic poems of Jeronimo Corte Real (c. 1530-1590?): Svcesso do Segvndo Cerco de Div (1574) and Naufragio, e Lastimoso Svcesso da Perdiçam de Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda, &c. (1594), we may perhaps say that they are excellent prose. He dwells more than once upon the inconstancy of fortune, and this may be something more than a platitude. Of his life little is known. He is by some believed to have been born in the Azores in 1533. A document in the possession of the Visconde de Esperança shows that he died before May 12, 1590. He may have been a musician as well as a poet and a painter. It is probable, but not certain, that he accompanied King Sebastian to Alcacer Kebir and was taken prisoner. Faria e Sousa says that he was too old to go. After varied service by land and sea he wrote these poems when living in retirement on his estate near Evora, and his own experiences stood him in good stead for his descriptions, which are often not without life and vigour, as the account of the battle in canto 18 of the Segundo Cerco de Diu, or of the storm in canto 7 of the Naufragio. The former poem records the famous defence of Diu by D. João de Mascarenhas and its relief by D. João de Castro (1546), in whose mouth is placed a long and tedious speech. The last two cantos (21, 22) are tacked on to the main theme and occupy more than a quarter of the whole. They tell from paintings the deeds of past captains and prophesy future events and the ‘golden reign’ of King Sebastian. The prophetic vision, although it[Pg 188] included a generation beyond the nominal date of the poem (1546), did not extend to the battle of Alcacer Kebir (1578). The hendecasyllables of the blank verse have an exceedingly monotonous fall and the lines merge prosaically into one another.[432] The use of adjectives is excessive, and generally there is an inclination to multiply words without adding to the force of the picture.[433] The same plethora of epithets, elaborate similes, and slow awkward development of the story mark the seventeen cantos—some 10,000 lines of blank verse, with some tercets and oitavas—which constitute the Naufragio. In cantos 13 and 14 a learned man tells from sculptures the history of the Portuguese kings, from Afonso I to Sebastian. The remaining cantos have a more lively interest, ending with the death of D. Lianor in canto 17, but the poet could not resist the temptation to round off with an anticlimax, in which Phoebus, Proteus, and Pan make lamentation. His short Auto dos Quatro Novissimos do Homem (1768) in blank verse is written with some intensity, but the style is the same.[434] His Austriada, composed to commemorate Don John of Austria’s felicissima victoria[435] of Lepanto, consists of fifteen cantos in Spanish blank verse.

Luis Pereira Brandão, born at Oporto about 1540, was present at Alcacer Kebir, and after his release from captivity is said to have worn mourning for the rest of his life. That later generations might also suffer, his epic Elegiada (1588)—in spite of his professed temor de ser prolixo—was published in eighteen cantos. Beginning with the early years of King Sebastian, it recounts the king’s dreams and ambitions, his first expedition to Africa, and the later disastrous adventure. Not even the story of D. Lianor de Sousa (canto 6) nor the excessively detailed description of the battle of Alcacer Kebir (canto 17) rouses the poet from his implacable dullness. The defects of his style have[Pg 189] perhaps been exaggerated, but it is certainly inferior to that of Andrade, with whom he shares the inability to distinguish a poem from a history. The introduction of contemporary events in India (cantos 6, 10, 14), however legitimate in a history, is singularly out of place in an epic.

If the author of the history of King João III’s reign, Francisco de Andrade (c. 1535-1614), brother of the great Frei Thomé de Jesus, regarded his epic O Primeiro Cerco ... de Diu (1589) merely as a supplementary chapter of that history, we can only regret that he did not write it in prose. It is a straightforward account, in excellent Portuguese, of the first siege of Diu (1538), but oitava follows prosaic oitava with a relentless wooden tread, maintaining the same level of mediocrity throughout and rendering it unreadable as poetry. The author begins by imploring divine favour that his song may be adequate to his subject (i. 1-3). It is only when he has passed his two-thousandth stanza that he expresses some diffidence as to whether his ‘fragile bark’ was well equipped for so long a voyage, but he consoles himself, if not his reader, with the sincere conviction that his rude verse cannot detract from the greatness of the deeds which he describes (xx. 1-6).

It was a proud saying of a Portuguese seiscentista that the Portuguese discoveries silenced all other histories.[436] Certainly this was so in the case of the history of Portugal, which was neglected while writer after writer recorded the history of the Portuguese in India. Nor need we quarrel with a vogue which has preserved for us so many striking pictures in which East and West clash without meeting, new countries are continually opening to our view, and heroism and adventure go hand in hand. Sometimes the pages of these historians seem all aglow with precious stones, emeralds from Peru, turquoises from Persia, rubies, cat’s-eyes, chrysolites, amethysts, beryls, and sapphires from Ceylon, or scented with the opium of Cairo, the saffron of Cannanore, the camphor of Borneo, sandalwood from Timor, pepper from Malabar, cloves from the Moluccas. Blood and sea-spray mingle with the silks from China and ivory from Sofala, and among the crowd of rapacious governors and unscrupulous adventurers move a few figures of a simple austerity and devotion to duty, Albuquerque, Galvão, Castro, St. Francis Xavier.

Little is known of Alvaro Velho except that he was one of the immortals (unless he was the degredado (convict) from whose caderno Couto derived his account of the discovery) who accompanied Vasco da Gama on his first voyage. To him is attributed the simple, clear narrative contained in the log or Roteiro da Viagem de Vasco da Gama em 1497, filled with a primitive wonder, which pointed the way to the historians of India. Indeed, it provided material for the first book of a writer who may perhaps be called the first[437] historian of the discoveries ‘enterprised by the[Pg 191] Portingales’. Fernam Lopez de Castanheda (c. 1500-59) was born at Santarem, and in 1528 accompanied his father, appointed Judge at Goa, to India. For the next ten years he diligently and not without many risks and discomforts consulted documents and inscriptions in various parts of the country with a view to writing a history of the discovery and conquest of India, making himself personally acquainted with the ground and with many of those who had played a part in the half-century (1498-1548) under review. After his return to Portugal he continued his life-work with the same devotion for twenty years, during which poverty constrained him to accept the post of bedel at Coimbra University. When he died, worn out by his continuas vigilias, his history was complete, but only seven books had been published: Historia do Descobrimento e Conqvista da India (1551-4). He had at least the satisfaction to know that a part had already been translated into French and Italian. The eighth book, bringing the history down to 1538, was published by his children in 1561, but books nine and ten never appeared. This history of forty years, which has less regard to style than to sincerity and the truth of the facts, is written in great detail. It is a scrupulous and trustworthy record of high interest describing not only the deeds of the Portuguese, ‘of much greater price than gold or silver’, ‘more valiant than those of Greek or Roman’, but the many lands in which they occurred. The narrative can rise to great pathos, as in the account of Afonso de Albuquerque’s death (iii. 154), and is often extremely vivid.[438] The interest necessarily diminishes after 1515, and the seventh book is largely concerned with dismal contentions between Portuguese officials. But the great events and persons, the capture of Goa or Diu, the characters of Gama or Albuquerque, Duarte Pacheco Pereira or Antonio Galvão, stand out the more clearly from the deliberate absence of rhetoric.

Lourenço de Caceres, in his Doutrina addressed to the Infante Luis in twenty short chapters on the parts of a good prince, showed that he could write excellent prose. His death in 1531 prevented him from undertaking a more ambitious work,[Pg 192] which was accordingly entrusted to his nephew João de Barros (1496?-1570).[439] But much earlier and a generation before Lopez de Castanheda’s work began to appear, the most famous of the Portuguese historians had resolved to chronicle the discovery of India. Born probably at Viseu, the son of Lopo de Barros, he came of ancient Minhoto stock and was brought up in the palace of King Manuel. When the Infante João received a separate establishment Barros became his page (moço da guardaroupa). It was in this capacity, por cima das arcas da vossa guardaroupa, that with the active encouragement of the prince he wrote his first work, Cronica do Emperador Clarimundo (1520). It is a long romance of chivalry crowded with actors and events, and contains affecting, even passionate episodes. But the most remarkable feature of this work, written in eight months when the author was little over twenty, is its inexhaustible flow of clear, smooth, vigorous prose, entirely free from awkwardness or hesitation. One may also note that he regarded it merely as a parergon, a preparation for his history, afim de apurar o estilo, that despite its length he assures his readers that he omits all details in order to avoid prolixity, that much of its geography is real—all his works prove the truth of Couto’s assertion that he was doutissimo na geografia—and that each chapter ends with a brief moral. King Manuel, to whom he read some chapters, encouraged him to persevere in his intention to write the history of India, but the king’s death in 1521 delayed the project. In the following year Barros, who meanwhile had married Maria, daughter of Diogo de Almeida of Leiria, is said to have gone out as Captain of the Fortress of S. Jorge da Mina (although probably he never left Portugal) and later became Treasurer of the Casa da India (1525-8), and its Factor in 1532, a post which he retained for thirty-five years. Although he lost a large sum of money in an unfortunate venture in Brazil, this was partly made good by the king’s munificence, and when in 1568, the year after his resignation, he retired to his quinta near Pombal sibi ut viveret he went as a fidalgo of the king’s household[Pg 193] and with a pension over twenty-five times as large as that of Camões.[440] In old age he is described as of a fine presence, although thin and not tall, with pale complexion, keen eyes, aquiline nose, long white beard, grave, pleasant, and fluent in conversation. Before beginning his history he wrote several brief treatises of great interest and importance, Ropica Pnefma (1532), a dialogue written at his country house in 1531 in which Time, Understanding, Will, and Reason discuss their spiritual wares (mercadoria espiritual), and incidentally the new heresies; three short works on the Portuguese language, a Dialogo da Viçiosa Vergonha (1540), and a Dialogo sobre preceptos moraes (1540) in which he reduced Aristotle’s Ethics to a game for the benefit of two of his ten children and of the Infanta Maria. He also wrote two excellent Panegyricos (of the Infanta Maria and King João III) which were first published by Severim de Faria in his Noticias de Portugal in 1655. As a historian he chose Livy for his pattern both in style and system. The first Decada of his Asia appeared in 1552, the second in 1553, and the third ten years later (1563). Their success was immediate, especially abroad—in Portugal, like other historians of recent events, he was accused of partiality and unfairness[441]—copies soon became extremely rare, the first two Decads were translated into Italian before the third appeared, and Pope Pius IV is said to have placed Barros’ portrait (or bust) next to the statue of Ptolemy.[442] Barros had prepared himself very thoroughly for his task. His work as Factor seems to have been exacting—he says that it was only by giving up holidays and half the night and all the time spent by other men in sleeping the sesta, or walking about the city, or going into the country, playing, shooting, fishing, dining, that he was able to attend to his literary labours. Yet he read everything, pored over maps and chronicles and documents from the East, and even bought[Pg 194] a Chinese slave to translate for him. With this enthusiasm, his unfailing sense of order and proportion, and his clear and copious style he necessarily produced a work of permanent value. His manner is lofty, even pompous, worthy of the great events described. If his history is less vivid and interesting than Castanheda’s, that is because he wrote not as an eyewitness[443] or actor in them but as Court historian. He was a true Augustan, and the great edifice that this Portuguese Livy planned and partly built was of eighteenth-century architecture. He was fond of comparing his work to a building in which each stone has its appointed place. The material to his hand must be moulded to suit the symmetry of the whole—Albuquerque had never in his life used so many relative sentences as are attributed to him by Barros (II. v. 9)—and with a pedantic love of definitions and systematic subdivisions we find him measuring out the proportions of his stately structure, while picturesque details are deliberately omitted.[444] The merits of his style have been exaggerated. It is never confused or slovenly, but is for use rather than beauty; its ingredients are pure and energetic but the construction is inartistic and monotonous.[445] It is rather in the forcible, crisp sentences of his shorter treatises than in the Asia that Barros displays his mastery of style. His great narrative of epic deeds is interrupted by interesting special chapters or digressions on trade, geography, Eastern cities and customs, locusts, chess, the Mohammedan religion, sword-fish, palm-trees, and monsoons. It was planned in four Decadas and forty books, to embrace 120 years to 1539, but the fourth was not written and the third[Pg 195] ends with the death of D. Henrique de Meneses (1526). Probably he did not find the dispute as to the Governorship of India a very congenial subject, especially as the feud was resumed in Portugal. Material and notes were however ready, and these were worked up into a lengthy fourth Decada by João Baptista Lavanha (†1625) in 1615, which covers the same ground as, but is quite distinct from, the fourth Decad of Couto. The Asia was only a block of a vaster whole. Europa, Africa, and Santa Cruz were to treat respectively of Portugal from the Roman Conquest and Portuguese history in North Africa and Brazil, while Geography and Commerce were to be the subjects of separate works, the first of which (in Latin) was partly written.

Inseparably connected with the name of Barros is that of Diogo do Couto (1542-1616), who continued his Asia, writing Decadas 4-12. He was born at Lisbon, and at the age of ten entered the service (guardaroupa) of the Infante Luis, who sent him to study at the College of the Jesuits and then with his son, D. Antonio, under Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres, afterwards Archbishop of Braga, at S. Domingos, Bemfica. When thirteen he was present at the death of his talented patron Prince Luis, and remained in the palace as page to the king till the king’s death two years later.[446] Couto then went to seek his fortune in India, and there as soldier, trader, official (in 1571 he was in charge of the stores at Goa),[447] and historian he spent the best part of the following half-century, his last visit to Portugal being in 1569-71. At the bidding of Philip II (I of Portugal), who appointed him Cronista Môr of India, he undertook the completion of Barros’ Asia. Probably he needed little inducement—his was the pen of a ready writer, and the composition of his history was, he tells us, a pleasure to him in spite of frequent discouragement. He had received a classical education; as a boy in the palace he had listened to stories of India[448] and had been no doubt deeply impressed[Pg 196] by the vivid account of the Sepulveda shipwreck.[449] In India he won general respect. At Goa he married the sister of Frei Adeodato da Trindade (1565-1605), who in Lisbon saw some of his Decadas through the press; he became Keeper of the Indian Archives (Torre do Tombo) and more than once made a speech on behalf of the City Councillors, as at the inauguration of the portrait of Vasco da Gama in the Town Hall in the centenary year of the discovery of India, before Gama’s grandson, then Viceroy, and a gathering of noblemen and captains. Couto knew every one—we find him conversing with Viceroy, Archbishop, natives, Moorish prisoners, rich merchants from Cambay or the Ambassador of the Grand Mogul. This personal acquaintance with the scenes, events, and persons gives a lively dramatic air to his work. The sententious generalities of the majestic Barros are replaced by bitter protests and practical suggestions. He is a critic of abuses rather than of persons.[450] He writes from the point of view of the common soldier, as one who had seen both sides of the tapestry of which Barros smoothly ignored the snarls and thread-ends. He displays a hatred of semjustiças, treachery, and ‘the insatiable greed of men’, with a fine zest in descriptions of battles, but he has not Barros’ skill in proportion and the grand style.[451] He can, however, write excellent prose, and he gives more of graphic detail[452] and individual sayings and anecdotes than his predecessor. Nor is he by any means an[Pg 197] ignorant chronicler. A poet[453] and the friend of poets, he read Dante and Petrarca and Ariosto, was old-fashioned enough to admire Juan de Mena, consulted the works of ancient and modern historians, travellers, and geographers, and was deeply interested in the customs and religions of the East. The inequality of his Decadas is in part explained by their history, which constitutes a curious chapter in the fata of manuscripts. He first wrote Decada X, which is the longest and most resembles those of Barros: this was only sent to Portugal in 1600 and was not immediately published, apparently because the period, 1580-8, was too recent. It remained in manuscript till 1788. Meanwhile Couto, working with extraordinary speed, sent home the fourth and fifth Decadas in 1597, the sixth in 1599, and the seventh in 1601. Noting the fact that the last two books (9 and 10) of Castanheda’s history had been suppressed by royal order as being excessively fond of truth (porque fallava nelles verdades), he remarks that, should this happen to a volume of his, another would be forthcoming to take its place. Friends and enemies, indeed the very elements, took up the challenge, but fortunately Couto’s spirit and independence continued to the year of his death. The fourth Decada was at once printed, but the text of the fifth was tampered with and its publication delayed, the sixth was destroyed by fire when ready for publication and recast by Frei Adeodato, the seventh was captured at sea by the English and re-written in 1603 by Couto and sent home in the same year, the eighth and ninth, finished in 1614, were stolen from him in manuscript during a severe illness. This was a crushing blow, but he partially reconstructed them a modo de epilogo and, writing in old age from memory, dwelt, to our gain, on personal recollections: his literary bent appears—his friend Camões, Cristovam Falcão,[Pg 198] and Garcia de Resende are mentioned. Finally Decada xi (1588-97), which, writing to King Philip III in January 1616, he says ‘survived this shipwreck’, has disappeared and Decada xii is incomplete, although the first five books bring the history to the end of the century (1599). His successor in the Goa Archives, Antonio Bocarro, took up the history at the year 1612, in a work which was published in 1876: Decada 13ᵃ da Historia da India. The manuscript of his Dialogo do Soldado Pratico na India (written before the fourth Decada) was also stolen. The indomitable Couto re-wrote it and both versions have survived. They were not published till 1790, the title given to the earlier version being Dialogo do soldado pratico portugues. With its verdades chans, this dialogue between an old soldier of India, an ex-Governor, and a judge forms a most valuable and interesting indictment of the decadence of Portuguese rule in India, where the thief and rogue escaped scot-free, while the occasional honest man was liable to suffer for their sins, and the sleek soldier in velvet with gold ribbons on his hat had taken the place of the bearded conquistadores (Dialogo, pp. 91-2).

Gaspar Corrêa (c. 1495-c. 1565) claims, like Fernam Lopez de Castanheda and Barros, to have been the first historian of the Portuguese in the East.[454] He went to India sixteen years before Lopez de Castanheda and no doubt soon began[455] to take notes and collect material, but he was still working at his history in 1561 and 1563, and his Lendas da India were not published till the nineteenth century. In the year 1506 Corrêa entered the king’s service as moço da camara,[456] and six years later went to India, where he became one of the six or seven secretaries of Afonso de Albuquerque.[457] They were young men carefully chosen by the Governor from among those who had been brought[Pg 199] up in the palace and to whom he felt he could entrust his secrets.[458] Theirs was no humdrum or sedentary post, for they had to accompany the Governor on foot or on horseback, in peace and war, ever ready with ink and paper. Thus Corrêa had occasion vividly to describe Aden in 1513, and helped with his own hands to build the fortress of Ormuz in 1515. After Albuquerque’s death Corrêa seems to have continued to fight and write. In 1526 he was appointed to the factory of Sofala,[459] and in the following year the moço da camara has become a cavaleiro and is employed at the customs house at Cochin.[460] He cannot have remained much longer at Cochin than at Sofala, since he signed his name in the book of moradias at Lisbon in 1529, and in 1530-1, in a ship provided by himself (em um meu catur), went with the Governor of India’s fleet to the attack of Diu. Later he was commissioned by the Viceroy, D. João de Castro, to furnish lifesize drawings[461] of all the Governors of India, so that he must then have been living at Goa. The ever-growing abuses in India and the scanty reward given to his fifty years of service and honourable wounds[462] embittered his last years, and if his spoken comments were as incisive as the indictment of the Governors and Captains contained in the Lendas[463] he must have made enemies in high positions: it seems, at least, that his murder one night at Malacca went unpunished, as if to prove the truth of his frequent complaint that no one ever was punished in India. At the time of his death he may still have been at work, as in 1561 and 1563, on the revision of his Lendas or Cronica dos Feytos da India,[464] originally completed in 1551.[Pg 200][465] The first three books relate the events from 1497 to 1538; the last carries the history down to 1550. The account of the discovery is based on the narrative of one, and the recollections of others, of Vasco da Gama’s companions, and the subsequent events are drawn largely from Corrêa’s own experience. He spared no trouble to obtain first-hand information, from aged officials, Moors, natives, captives, a Christian galley-slave, or a woman from Malabar, distrusting mere hearsay. He lays frequent stress on his personal evidence.[466] Without necessarily establishing the trustworthiness of his work on every point, this method had the advantage of rendering it singularly vivid, and it contains many a brilliantly coloured picture of the East. In many respects he is the most remarkable of the historians of India. It was not for nothing that he had written down some of Albuquerque’s letters to King Manuel.[467] If Albuquerque’s words are still striking when read after four centuries, we may imagine their effect on the boy still in his teens to whom he dictated them. Tinha grande oratoria, says Corrêa, and many years afterwards some of the phrases remained in his memory.[468] He no doubt learnt from Albuquerque his direct, vigorous style, his love of concrete details, his regard for truth. His account of the sack of Malacca—the rifled chests of gold coins and brocades of Mecca and cloth of gold, the narrow dusty streets in shadow in the midday calma—must, one thinks, be that of an eyewitness; yet Corrêa was not in India at the time. The explanation is that it was largely the account of Albuquerque.[469]

Corrêa writes in even greater detail than Lopez de Castanheda. There is no trace of literary leanings in his work; he is sparing of descriptions as interrupting the story.[470] Whole pages have scarcely an adjective, and this gives his narrative clearness and[Pg 201] rapidity, yet he is careless of style. It has been called redundant and verbose, but that is true mainly of the prefaces, which show that Corrêa in a library might have developed into a rhetorical Zurara of boas oratorias. It is, however, no longer the fashion to sneer at this ‘simple and half barbarous chronicler’, this ‘soldier adventurer in whose artless words appears his lack of culture’.[471] His Lendas are infinitely preferable to the sleek periods of Barros and often as reliable, being legendary in little beyond their title, as understood by the ignorant (for the word lenda meant not legend but record or log). They have a harsh flavour of religious fervour and of lust for gold[472] and an intense atmosphere of the East—sangre e incenso, cravo e escravaria, St. James fighting for the Christians, St. Thomas transformed into a peacock, all in a region of horror and enchantment. Corrêa was aware that it was dangerous to write history in India (iii. 9)—periculosae plenum opus aleae—but although he had no intention of immediately publishing it[473] he evidently expected some recognition of his work. The appearance of Lopez de Castanheda’s Historia and Barros’ Decadas must have been a blow almost as cruel as the daggers of his assassins a few years later.

The events of India from 1506-15, chronicled by Castanheda and Barros, necessarily centred round the great figure of Afonso de Albuquerque, and they were recorded afresh by his illegitimate son Bras de Albuquerque (1500-80), whom the dying Governor recommended to the king in his last letter. King Manuel in belated gratitude bestowed his favour on this son and bade him assume the name of Afonso in memory of his father. His Commentarios de Afonso de Alboquerque (1557) were revised by the author in a second edition (1576) four years before his death. They are written in unassuming but straightforward style and furnish a very clear and moderate account based on letters[Pg 202] written by Albuquerque to King Manuel.[474] The author seems to have realized that Albuquerque’s words and deeds speak sufficiently for themselves, but the reflection produced is somewhat pale.

The gallant and chivalrous apostle of the Moluccas, Antonio Galvam (c. 1490?-1557), ‘as rich in valour and knowledge as poor in fortune’,[475] printed nothing in his lifetime but his manuscripts were handed over after his death to Damião de Goes as Cronista Môr.[476] We have only a brief treatise by him published posthumously. Copious in matter rather than in length, for it has but eighty small folios in spite of its lengthy title, this Tratado (1563), or, if we adopt the briefer title from the colophon, this Lyvro dos Descobrimentos das Antilhas & India, is remarkable for the curious observation shown and its vivid, concise style of a man of action. Written in the form of annals, it begins with the Flood, and on f. 12 we are still in the age of Merlin; but the most valuable part consists in the writer’s direct experience—he tells of buffaloes, cows and hens ‘of flesh black as this ink’, of mocking parrots, fires made of earth ‘as in Flanders’. Goes, who had certainly handled the manuscript, may have added this comparison; he evidently interpolated the account of his own travels (ff. 58 v.-59 v.). The life of Galvam gives a further interest to this rare book, for, a man of noble and disinterested character, himself a prince by election, he has always been regarded as a stock instance of the ingratitude of princes. Born in the East, the son of Albuquerque’s old friend, the historian Duarte Galvam, he won fame by his courage and martial qualities, both as soldier and skilful mariner. After subduing the Molucca Islands he, as their Governor (Captain), spent his energies and income in missionary zeal and in developing agriculture. On the expiry of his term as Governor (1536-40) he refused the position of Raja of Ternate,[Pg 203] which the grateful natives besought him to accept. He arrived penniless in Portugal and penniless died seventeen years later in the Lisbon hospital.

Besides the general histories many briefer records of separate regions or events were written, and these are often of great value as the accounts of men who had seen and taken part in what they describe.

Lopo de Sousa Coutinho (?1515-77), father of Frei Luis de Sousa and one of the captains in the heroic siege of Diu (1538)—he is said to have died by accidentally running himself through with his sword when dismounting from his horse—wrote a striking account of the siege, especially of its last incidents, in his Livro Primeiro do Cerco de Diu (1556). The siege of Mazagam (1562) was similarly described in clear, vigorous prose by Agostinho Gavy de Mendonça: Historia do famoso cerco qve o Xarife pos á fortaleza de Mazagam (1607). Jorge de Lemos, of Goa, wrote a careful Historia dos Cercos ... de Malaca (1585), and Antonio Castilho, the distinguished son of the celebrated architect João, published a Commentario do Cerco de Goa e Chaul no anno MDLXX (1572). Events in the Moluccas were briefly recorded in an Informaçam das cousas de Maluco (1569) by Gabriel de Rabello, who went out as factor of Tidore in 1566.

The anonymous gentleman of Elvas who wrote the Relaçam verdadeira (1557) of Soto’s discovery of Florida was a keen observer and related what he saw in direct language. His publisher, André de Burgos, in a short preface washes his hands of the style as insufficiently polished (limado).

The deeds of D. Cristovam da Gama, his conquest of a hundred leagues of territory in Ethiopia, his defeat, torture, and beheadal, are recounted with the vivid details of an eyewitness by Miguel de Castanhoso, of Santarem, who accompanied him on his fatal expedition. This Historia (1564) was published by João da Barreira, who dedicated it to D. Cristovam’s nephew, D. Francisco de Portugal.

Manuel de Abreu Mousinho wrote in Spanish a brief account of the conquest of Pegu by Salvador Ribeiro de Sousa, of which a Portuguese version appeared in the 1711 edition of Mendez Pinto’s travels: Breve discurso em que se contem a conquista do[Pg 204] reyno de Pegu, nearly a century after the original edition, Breve Discvrso en qve se cventa, &c. (1617). The Jornada do Maranhão feita por Jeronymo de Albuquerque em 1614 is ascribed to Diogo de Campos Moreno, who took part in that conquista. It was published in the Collecção de Noticias para a Historia e Geographia das Nações Ultramarinas.[477] The second volume of this collection contains several re-translations of Navegações (by Thomé Lopez and anonymous Portuguese pilots) surviving in Italian in Ramusio. It would require a separate volume to give an account of all the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century narratives of newly conquered countries written in Portuguese and often immediately translated into many European languages, e.g. the Novo Descobrimento do Grão Cathayo (1626) by the Jesuit Antonio de Andrade (c. 1580-1634), or the Relaçam of the Jesuit Alvaro Semmedo (1585?-1658) written in Portuguese but published in the Spanish translation of Faria e Sousa: Imperio de la China (1642). However unliterary, they are often so vividly written as to be literature in the best sense.

Pedro de Magalhães de Gandavo, of Braga, whose Regras (1574) ran into three editions before the end of the century, described Brazil and its discovery in two short works: Historia da prouincia Sãcta Cruz (1576) and Tratado da terra do Brazil first published in 1826 in the Collecção de Noticias. This collection also prints works of the following century, such as the Fatalidade historica da Ilha de Ceilão[478] by Captain João Ribeiro, who had served the king as a soldier for eighteen years in the preciosa ilha de Ceilão. His manuscript, written in 1685, was translated and published in French (1701) 135 years before it was printed in Portuguese. Gandavo’s Historia (48 ff.), his first work (premicias), was introduced by tercetos and a sonnet of Luis de Camões, who speaks of his claro estilo, and engenho curioso. The author himself in a prefatory letter says that he writes as an eyewitness, content with a ‘plain and easy style’ without seeking epithetos exquisitos.

The Jesuit Balthasar Tellez[479] (1595-1675) won considerable fame as an historian and prose-writer in his Cronica da Companhia[Pg 205] de Iesus (2 pts., 1645, 1647) in which he forswears what he calls the artifices and liberties of ordinary seiscentista prose. He also edited the work of the Jesuit missionary Manuel de Almeida (1580-1646), recasting it in an abbreviated form: Historia Geral da Ethiopia a Alta ov Preste Ioam (1660), for which Tellez’ friend, Mello, provided a prefatory letter. Almeida, born at Viseu, had gone to India in 1601 and in 1622 was sent to Ethiopia, where he became the head of the mission. He died at Goa after a life of much hard work and various adventure. In writing his history of Ethiopia he made use of the Historia da Ethiopia of an earlier (1603-19) head of the mission, Pedro Paez (1564-1622), who had started for Ethiopia in 1595 but was captured by the Turks and only ransomed in 1602. Although a Spaniard by birth (born at Olmeda), Paez wrote in Portuguese. A third Jesuit missionary, Manuel Barradas, born in 1572 at Monforte, who went to India in 1612, was also a prisoner of the Turks for over a year at Aden. In 1624 he went to Ethiope, terre maldite, and remained there some ten years. Of his three treatises the most important is that entitled Do Reyno de Tygrê e seus mandos em Ethiopia. The modern editor of these works, P. Camillo Beccari, considers that their authors’ simple style caused their treatises to be regarded rather as the material of history than in themselves history,[480] but their value for us is in this very simplicity and in the detailed observation which bring the country and its inhabitants clearly before us. Scarcely less important, as material for history and as human documents, are the Cartas from Jesuits in China and Japan, especially the collection of 82 letters (Coimbra, 1570), and that of 206 letters (Evora, 1598). The Jesuit Fernam Cardim at about the same time rendered a like service to Brazil in his Narrativa epistolar, edited in 1847 by F. A. de Varnhagen. A more important work on Brazil was that of Gabriel Soarez de Sousa (c. 1540-92)—the[Pg 206] Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, which its modern editor, F. A. de Varnhagen, described in a moment of enthusiasm as ‘the most admirable of all the works of the Portuguese quinhentistas’. Two other works of interest, half history, half travels, are the Jornada do Arcebispo de Goa Dom Frey Aleixo de Meneses (1606) by Antonio de Gouvea, Bishop of Cyrene (c. 1565-1628), in three parts, describing the archbishop’s life and visits in his diocese; and the Discvrso da Iornada de D. Gonçalo Covtinho á villa de Mazagam e sev governo nella (1629). The writer—the admirer of Camões and alleged author of the 1614 life of Sá de Miranda—who, as he says, had grown white in the council-chamber, lived on till 1634. He here relates with much directness his voyage and four years’ Governorship (1623-7).

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

It was only as it were by an afterthought that the historians turned to consider the history of Portugal as apart from separate chronicles of the kings or episodes of Eastern conquest. The historical scheme of João de Barros was too vast to be executed by one man and the European part was never written. André de Resende likewise failed to carry out his project of a history of Portugal. Pedro de Mariz (c. 1550-1615), son of the Coimbra printer, Antonio, in the last four of his Dialogos de Varia Historia (1594) between a Portuguese and an Italian, embraces the whole history of Portugal, but these dialogues, although industriously written in good plain style, were eclipsed by the appearance three years later of the first part of the Monarchia Lusitana[Pg 207] (1597). Its author, a young Cistercian monk of Alcobaça, Frei Bernardo de Brito (1569-1617), in the world Balthasar de Brito de Andrade, at once became known as one of the best writers of his time, and he is still reckoned among the masters of Portuguese prose. His style, clear, restrained, copious, proved that the mantle of Barros had fallen upon worthy shoulders. But, despite his rich vein of humanity, as a historian he is far inferior to Barros and even more uncritical than Mariz. The value of evidence seems to have weighed with him little when it was a question of exalting his language, literature, religion, or country, and he used and incorporated documents entirely worthless. Whether he deliberately manufactured spurious documents to serve his purposes cannot be known, but he seems at least to have quoted authorities which had never existed.[481]

In a word he failed to make good use of the incomparable material which the library of Alcobaça afforded. His was a misdirected erudition, and we would willingly exchange the knowledge of where Adam lies buried, or on what day the world began, or how Gorgoris, King of Lusitania, who died 1227 years after the Flood, invented honey, for accurate details of more recent Portuguese history. Yet he had the diligence and enthusiasm of the true historian and made use, sometimes a skilful use,[482] of coins and inscriptions. His brief Geographia antiga da Lusytania also appeared in 1597, and in the same year the Cistercian Order appointed him its chronicler. Thus he interrupted his main work—the second part of the Monarchia Lusitana was only published in 1609—in order to write the Primeira Parte da Cronica de Cister (1602).[483] This, in many ways his best work, runs to nearly a thousand pages, and treats of the saints of the Order and especially of the life of the charming St. Bernard,[Pg 208] with contemporary events in Portugal.[484] It was to be followed by two other parts, but Brito’s early death at his native Almeida on his way back to Alcobaça from Spain, a year after he had been appointed Cronista Môr (1616), left his work unfinished. He is remembered as a fine stylist, a poet who wrote history rather than as a great historian. Mariana, the Latin original of whose Historia de España (1592) he knew and quoted, is by comparison almost a scientific writer—at least he is not, like Brito, pseudo-scientific.

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

It could hardly, perhaps, be expected that the historians of the reigns of King Manuel and King João III should pass over events in the East as already fully related, and in Damião de[Pg 209] Goes’ Cronica do Felicissimo Rey Dom Emanvel and Francisco de Andrade’s Cronica de Dom João III (1613), although they lose much by compression, they still occupy a disproportionate space. Andrade wrote most correct prose, even in his poems, and the style of his history is excellent, but neither of these works gives any adequate account of the internal history of Portugal, any more than does that of Frei Luis de Sousa on João III’s reign, in which there should have been more scope for originality. The same prominence is given to India in the history of Jeronimo Osorio (1506-80), Bishop of Silves, De Rebvs Emmanvelis Regis Lvsitaniae (1571), written in Latin in order to spread the knowledge of these events per omnes reipublicae Christianae regiones.[485] Osorio, whose father, like Lopez de Castanheda’s, had been a judge (ouvidor) in India, was born at Lisbon, but studied abroad, at Salamanca, Paris, and Bologna. After occupying the Chair of Scripture at Coimbra for a brief space, he went to Lisbon and became secretary to the Infante Luis. In 1560 he was made Archdeacon of Evora and four years later Bishop of Silves. (The see was removed to Faro three years before his death and his title is sometimes given as Bishop of Algarve.) A few remarkable letters in Portuguese, in one of which (1567) he attempted to convert Queen Elizabeth, show that he was skilled in the use of his native tongue; his countrymen delighted to call him the Portuguese Cicero. According to Sousa de Macedo ‘many people came from England, Germany and other parts with the sole object of seeing him’.[486] In England certainly his book was highly prized, and both Dryden and Pope praised Gibbs’ translation, although Francis Bacon noted the diffuseness of Osorio’s style: luxurians et diluta, certainly not a just verdict on the style as a whole; we have but to think of the concise sketches of Albuquerque (De Rebus, p. 380) and King Manuel (p. 478). Osorio acknowledged his ample debt to the chronicle of Goes, which he describes as written ‘with incredible felicity’. Frei Bernardo da Cruz, who accompanied King Sebastian to Africa in 1578 as chaplain, in his Cronica de El Rei D. Sebastião wrote the history of his life and reign and happily[Pg 210] describes him as ‘a young king without experience or fear’. The Cronica do Cardeal Rei D. Henrique (1840) completed the history of the house of Avis. It chronicles in fifty-four diminutive chapters the eighteen months’ reign of the pouco mimoso e severo Cardinal King Henry. It was written in 1586,[487] and, although anonymous, is ascribed with some probability to the Jesuit Padre Alvaro Lobo (1551-1608).

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

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

The painstaking and talented Duarte Nunez de Leam (c. 1530-1608), born at Evora, son of the Professor of Medicine João Nunez, besides genealogical and legal works, Leis extravagantes (1560, 1569), wrote two valuable treatises on the Portuguese language and an interesting Descripção do Reino de Portugal (1610), which he finished in 1599. He also found time to spare from his duties as a magistrate to recast the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal. The Cronicas dos Reis de Portugal (1600) contain those from Count Henry to King Fernando, and the Cronicas del Rey Dom Ioam de gloriosa memoria those of Kings[Pg 211] João I, Duarte, and Afonso V. Shorn of the individuality of the early chroniclers, they yet retain much of interest, and Nunez de Leam would be accorded a higher place as historian were it not for our knowledge of the inestimable value of the originals which he edited and ‘improved’. Two generations earlier Cristovam Rodriguez Azinheiro (or Acenheiro), born in 1474 (he tells us that he was sixty-one in May 1535), had treated the early chronicles in the same way, but only succeeded in retaining all that was jejune without preserving their picturesqueness in his Cronicas dos Senhores Reis de Portugal.[488]

More interesting personally than as historian, the humanist Damião de Goes (1502-74[489]) was one of the most accomplished men of his time,[490] and, thanks partly to his trial before the Inquisition, partly to the not unpleasant egotism with which he chronicled autobiographical details, not only in his Genealogia[491] but in many of his other works, we know more of his life than we know of most contemporary writers. Traveller and diplomatist, scholar, singer, musician, he was a man of many friends during his lifetime, and the tragic circumstances of his last years have won him fresh sympathizers after his death. Born at Alenquer and brought up at the Court of King Manuel, he became page to the king in 1518, and five years later was appointed secretary at the Portuguese Factory at Antwerp. In 1529 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to Poland, and in this and the following years, on similar missions or for his own pleasure, ‘saw and conversed with all the kings, princes, nobles and peoples of Christendom’.[Pg 212][492] He made the acquaintance of Montaigne’s aubergistes allemands, ‘glorieux, colères et ivrognes’, turned aside to visit Luther and Melanchthon at Wittenberg,[493] and was for several months the guest of Erasmus at Freiburg. In Italy he lived with Cardinal Sadoletto at Padua (1534-8) and met Cardinal Bembo and other celebrated men of the day. At Louvain, too, mihi intime carum et iucundum, as throughout Europe, he had many devoted friends. A senator of Antwerp welcomed him in Latin verse on his return from his Scythian travels,[494] Luis Vives addressed affectionate letters to mi Damiane, Albrecht Dürer painted his portrait, Glareanus in his Dodecachordon included music of his composition.[495]

In 1542 he was on his way to Holland with his Flemish wife when he heard that Louvain was threatened by a French force commanded by Longueval and meus ille in Academiam Louvaniensem fatalis amor took him back to share its perils. He played a principal part in the defence, and finally remained a prisoner in the enemy’s hands, quasi piacularis hostia, as he says.[496] His imprisonment in France lasted nine months, and after paying a ransom of 6,000 ducats he went back to Louvain. The Emperor Charles V rewarded him for his services with a splendid coat of arms. In 1545, after twenty-one years of European travel, he returned with his wife and children[497] to Portugal, and three years later was entrusted with Fernam Lopez’ old post, the[Pg 213] Keepership of the Archives. He lived in the Paços d’Alcaçova with a certain magnificence, keeping open house for all foreigners, one of whom records that already in 1565 il se faict fort vieulx. Six years later, on April 4, 1571, he was arrested by the Inquisition and spent twenty months in prison.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that he should have incurred suspicion, nor is it necessary to explain his trial by the enmity of certain persons at Court due to passages in his works. His life had been out of keeping with the gravedades de Hespanha, and the charges against him were numerous and varied. He had eaten and drunken with heretics, he had read strange books, the sound of songs not understanded of the people and organ music had issued from his house at Lisbon, he had omitted to observe fasts, he had called the Pope a tyrant, he set no store by papal indulgences or auricular confession. Even the testimony of his grand-niece is recorded, to the effect that her mother had said of Goes, her husband’s uncle, that he had no more belief in God than in a stone wall (she seems to have had Berkeleian tendencies). As usual it is less the proceedings of the Inquisition than the bad faith of the witnesses that arouse disgust. The poet Andrade Caminha, who apparently came forward of his own accord—we are not told that he was chamado—admitted that certain words of Goes which he now denounced had not seemed so serious to him before he knew that Goes was in the prison of the Inquisition. Goes had already been denounced to the Inquisition in 1545 and 1550, and his book Fides, Religio Moresque Aethiopum (Lovanii, 1540) had been condemned in Portugal in 1541. He was examined frequently in 1571 and 1572, was left for three months without news of his family, and complained of being old, weak, and ill, and that his body had become covered with a kind of leprosy (July 14, 1572). His sentence (October 16, 1572) pronounced him to have incurred, as a Lutheran heretic, excommunication, confiscation of all his property, and the life-long confinement of his person. He was transferred to the famous monastery of Batalha in December, but his death (January 30, 1574) occurred in his own house. His return and his death probably explain one another. He was growing very old in 1565 and we must suppose that his recent experiences had not made him younger. His last request—to[Pg 214] die among his family—was apparently granted, and the further explanations (that he fell forward into the fire, that he died of an apoplexy, was killed by order of the Inquisition, was beaten to death by the lackeys of the Conde da Castanheira, or murdered and robbed by his own servants) are superfluous. His works consist of several brief Latin treatises crowded with interesting facts (especially his Hispania); and in Portuguese the Cronica do Principe Dom Ioam (1567) and Cronica do Felicissimo Rey Dom Emanvel, 4 pt. (1566, 1567). He also found time to translate Cicero’s De Senectute: Livro ... da Velhice, (Veneza, 1534). He had not the imagination of an historian, and unless events have passed before his eyes, or happen to interest him personally, he can be bald and meagre as an annalist. But in any matter which touches him closely, as the expulsion and the cruel treatment of the Jews, or the massacre of new Christians, or the account of Ethiopia, he broadens out into moving and detailed description. The result is that this long Chronicle of King Manuel is a number of excellent separate treatises rather than a history with unity and a sense of proportion. It is the work of a scholar who likes to describe directly, from his own experience. The Cronica do Principe was written some months before that of King Manuel. The latter was a difficult undertaking,[498] for many persons concerned were still alive, and subjects such as the expulsion of the Jews needed delicate handling. For thirty-one years it had hung fire in the hands of previous chroniclers when in 1558 Cardinal Henrique entrusted it to Damião de Goes. After eight years the four parts were ready for press,[499] but the difficulties were not yet over, for certain chapters met with strong disapproval at Court[500] and had to be altered, so that two editions of the first part appeared in 1566 (the first being apparently submitted as a proof and not for sale), but the publication of the work as a whole was not completed before 1567.

[Pg 215]

Scarcely less celebrated than Goes, the archaeologist Lucio André de Resende (1493?-1573),[501] friend of Goes, Clenardus, and Erasmus, left the Dominican convent of Bemfica, in which he was a novice, in order to study abroad, at Salamanca, Paris, and Louvain. ‘Tall, with very large eyes, curling hair, rather dark complexion but of a cheerful, open countenance’, living in his house (as casas de Resende) at Evora among his books and coins, statues and inscriptions—his small garden hedged with marmores antigos as, according to Brito, too often were peasants’ vine-yards—he exercised a considerable influence on the writers of his time[502] and was held in high esteem by the Emperor Charles V and by King João III. The principal of his own works were written in Latin, but besides his De Antiquitatibus Lusitaniae (1593), which was edited by Mendez de Vasconcellos with the addition of a fifth book from notes left by the author, he composed in Portuguese a ‘brief but learned’ Historia da Antiguidade da Cidade de Evora (1553). In his Vida do Infante Dom Duarte (1789)[503] he did not write the ‘very copious history’ which Paiva de Andrade[504] said the subject required. He did better, for this sketch of a few pages is a little masterpiece in which the vignettes, for instance, of the boatman and his figs, or the meal in the mill, must ever retain their vividness and charm. Resende had been the prince’s tutor and writes of what he saw; he shows that he could decipher a person’s character as keenly as a Latin inscription. Resende’s legitimate successor in archaeology, Manuel Severim de Faria (1583-1655), scarcely belongs to the sixteenth century although he wrote verses in 1598 and 1599. He succeeded his uncle as Canon (1608) and Precentor (1609) of Evora Cathedral and resigned in favour of his nephew Manuel de Faria Severim as Canon in 1633 and Precentor in 1642. Living in ancient[Pg 216] Evora when the memory of Resende was still fresh, this antiquary of the pale face and blue eyes, ‘store-house of all the treasures of the past’,[505] with his medals and statues and choice library of rare books, soon rivalled Resende’s fame. His most important works are Discursos varios politicos (1624) containing four essays and the lives of Barros, Camões, and Couto, and Noticias de Portugal (1655).

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

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

Few stories are more intense and affecting than those told by the Portuguese survivors of shipwreck in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Twelve of these appeared in the original collection edited by Bernardo Gomes de Brito (born in 1688): Historia Tragico-Maritima (2 vols., 1735, 6).[507] The earliest and most celebrated is the Relaçam da mui notavel perda do galeão grande S. João [June 24, 1552], an anonymous narrative based on the account of a survivor, Alvaro Fernandez, probably the ship’s mate, which tells of the death of D. Lianor de Sepulveda and her husband with a simple pathos and dramatic power unattained by the many poets who later treated the same theme. But the accounts of the wreck of the S. Bento (1554), the Conceição (1555), the S. Paulo (1561), of D. Jorge de Albuquerque (1565),[Pg 218] and others, are scarcely less moving. The ships, of 1,000 tons, as the Aguia, ‘the largest vessel that had hitherto sailed to India’ (1558), and under, often with rotten rudder, or the whole ship rotten, sepulturas dos homens, with few boats, careless and ignorant pilots, badly careened, overloaded, overcrowded, ill-supplied with worm-eaten biscuit, ‘poisonous’ wine, and insufficient water, seemed to invite destruction. Between 1582 and 1602 alone thirty-eight ships were lost. The sea was not the only enemy: corsairs off the coast of Portugal, French, Dutch, and English, Lutheran heretics who threw overboard beads and missals, or a Turkish fleet ‘in sight of Ericeira’, exacted their toll when all other dangers had been successfully overcome. The story is told immediately after the event, sometimes almost in the form of a diary or log, or years later, by survivors or based on the account of survivors, and it varies according as the narrator is the captain of the ship, a landsman with a dislike of sailors, a plain soldier, a Jesuit priest, a Franciscan monk, a distinguished Lisbon chemist (Henrique Diaz in i. 6), or a famous historian (ii. 3 by Diogo do Couto,[508] ii. 4 by João Baptista Lavanha[509]). All or most of their accounts are masterpieces of vivid phraseology. We follow as in a novel their adventures as the sea ‘breaks into flower—quebrando em frol’, as they are stranded on a desert island, boarded in sight of home, entrapped by savages, devoured by wild beasts, tottering, arrimados em paos, exhausted by thirst and hunger, or prostrated by heat, in comparison with which the calmas of Alentejo ‘are but as Norwegian cold’: toils and perils borne with heroic courage, told with the simplicity of heroes, without adorno de palavras nem linguagem floreada.

Many books of travel were the natural consequence of the discovery of India. The historian João de Barros’ passion for knowledge, especially geographical knowledge, was the first cause[510] of the learned and instructive Chorographia (1561) of his nephew[Pg 219] Gaspar Barreiros (†1574), a description of the places through which he passed on his way to Rome in 1545 to thank the Pope on behalf of the Infante Henrique, Cardinalem amplissimum, for his cardinal’s hat. But this work (edited by his brother, Lopo Barreiros) was an exception. Most of the travel books were concerned with the far East.

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

One of the causes that most moved Portugal to curiosity and acted as an incentive to discovery were the vague rumours of the existence of a mighty Christian prince, the half-mythical Prester John, Negus of Abyssinia. The priest Francisco Alvarez (c. 1470?-c. 1540) set out with Duarte Galvam, first Portuguese Ambassador to Abyssinia, in 1515, but Galvam’s death delayed the mission, and it was not till 1520 that Alvarez and the new ambassador, D. Rodrigo de Lima, reached the Court of Prester John. They remained for six years in the country, and during this time Alvarez recorded in straightforward notes every detail of the country and its inhabitants with minuteness and accuracy. He considered himself old[511] in 1520; he was certainly active: he shoots hares and pheasants, washes unsuccessfully for gold, looks after his slaves, his nine mules, his fourteen cows, and organizes a procession against locusts. On their return, in Alvarez’ friend Antonio Galvam’s ship, to Lisbon, bringing ‘the length of Prester John’s foot’, he was eagerly questioned by king, prelates, and courtiers—the whole Court trooped out along the road from Coimbra to meet them—and when he published his fascinating diary of travel, Verdadeira Informaçam das terras do Preste Joam (1540), it was soon translated into almost every language of[Pg 220] Europe.[512] Frei Gaspar da Cruz of Evora, missionary in China, returned to Portugal in 1569, and in the same year began his Tractado em que se cõtam muito por estẽso as cousas da China (1570). He calls it a singella narraçam, but it contains valuable information about China, nor did the author neglect his style. The Dominican Frei João dos Santos (c. 1550-c. 1625?)[513] was born at Evora about the middle of the sixteenth century, and went out to East Africa and India as a missionary in 1586. He returned to Lisbon in August 1600 and nine years later published his Ethiopia Oriental (1609), an attractive, curious account, written in a clear and easy style, of the natives, their land and customs. It is to be feared that some of the settlers sadly abused his credulity, as in the case of the mercador’s tale of the native sorcerer or the man 380 years old, but this does not by any means impair the interest of his book. More individual and vivid is the Itinerario (1560) of Antonio Tenreiro, who in brief, staccato sentences describes minutely what he saw (the rosaes of red, white, and yellow roses in May near Damascus, the red roses of Shiraz, the fair, white Gurgis, complexioned like Englishmen) during his travels from Ormuz to the Caspian Sea and in Palestine and Egypt, and his overland journey from Ormuz to Portugal (1529) in which, alone with an Arab guide, he spent twenty-two days in crossing the desert. A similar land journey, a generation later, is described with an equal wealth of curious detail in the Itinerario (1565) of Mestre Martim Afonso, surgeon to the Viceroy, Conde de Redondo,[514] while the Franciscan Frei Pantaleam de Aveiro in his Itinerario da Terra Santa, &c. (1593) described his journey to the Holy Land. Not less adventurous were the travels of another[Pg 221] Franciscan, Frei Gaspar de S. Bernardino, who related them with greater parade of erudition in a clear, elegant style in his Itinerario da India por terra (1611), the promised second part of which was unhappily not finished or at least not published. Half a century later the Jesuit Manuel Godinho (c. 1630-1712),[515] in the Relaçam do novo caminho que fez por terra e mar (1665), gave a remarkable account, in a style not untouched by the culteranismo of the time, of his return journey in 1663 from Baçaim. But various and arresting as are the books of Portuguese travellers, they are all eclipsed by the wonderful Peregrinaçam (1614) of Fernam Mendez Pinto (c. 1510-83). This prince of travellers and adventurers was born at Montemôr o Velho. His parents were of humble station, and at the time of King Manuel’s death (1521) he was brought by an uncle to Lisbon in order to earn his living. Although he remained in Portugal for sixteen years, in the service first of a lady of Lisbon and later of D. João de Lencastre,[516] lord of Montemôr o Velho, at Setubal, he was but just in his teens when, crossing in a boat from Alfama, he was captured off Cezimbra by a French corsair as a foretaste of pleasures to come. In March 1537 he set out for India and his odyssey began in earnest. He had no sooner reached Diu than he re-embarked on an expedition to the Straits of Mecca. His hope was to make a rich prize and become muito rico em pouco tempo. He went next with three others on a mission to Ethiopia, and on the return voyage he was captured by the Turks, placed in a subterranean dungeon, and then sold to a Greek renegade, whom he describes as ‘the most inhuman and cruel dog of an enemy ever seen’. Fortunately after three months the Greek sold him for 12,000 réis to a Jew, who brought him to Ormuz. After spending little over a fortnight there he embarked with a cargo of horses for Goa, and later was wounded in a fight with the Turks. He next proceeded to Malacca, and was sent thence on a mission to the King of the Batas, by whom he was made welcome ‘as rain to our rice crops’. After accompanying the[Pg 222] king on a campaign he returned to Malacca, losing his cargo of tin and benjamin on the way. His next mission was to the King of Aaru. He returned to Malacca a slave, as his ship was wrecked, and after fearful sufferings he, the only survivor, was bought cheap by a poor Moorish trader. A trading expedition to Pão and Lugor ended as disastrously: after a fight with Moors he succeeded in swimming wounded to land, but returned penniless to Patane. In despair he joined the freebooting Antonio de Faria, and they preyed on Chinese junks till their ship was weighed down with silver and silk, damask and porcelain. Faria and his men are represented fighting, torturing, murdering, plundering, playing at dice on deck for pieces of silk, praying a litany, and promising rich and good spoil to Our Lady of the Hill at Malacca. After being shipwrecked they joined a Chinese pirate and again built up their fortunes. They weathered a storm by throwing overboard twelve cases of silver, sacked a Chinese city, were received in honour at Liampo (Ningpo), but again inordinate greed for gold proved their ruin, and, after a daring attempt to plunder the rich tombs of the Emperors of China in the island of Calemplui, they were finally stranded in China and arrested as vagabonds. After six weeks in the crowded prison at Nanking the Portuguese were taken to Peking and thence deported to Quansi (Kansu), where they were freed by the timely attack of the King of Tartary. He sent them to Cochin-China, but on the way they entered the service of a Chinese pirate. When they reached Japan only three Portuguese survived, the first Europeans, Mendez Pinto claims, to set foot there. When he brought news of this land to Liampo a trading expedition was hastily equipped and set out in defiance of times and seasons. Few of those who embarked in the nine junks ever saw land again. Mendez Pinto eventually reached Malacca (1544). Pedro de Faria later sent him on a mission to the King of Martavão. Martavão was, however, sacked soon after his arrival, and he was carried a prisoner to Pegu. He escaped by night and after many adventures returned to Goa. He immediately set out again ‘to challenge fortune in China and Japan’. After accompanying the King of Sunda on a war expedition he was again wrecked and spent thirteen days on a raft. Of the[Pg 223] eleven survivors three were eaten by crocodiles and the rest sold as slaves. Released by the King of Calapa, Mendez Pinto served under the King of Siam and returned to Pegu and thence to Malacca. Once more he set out for Japan, and this time his voyage prospered and he came back with a fair profit. At Malacca he was eagerly questioned by St. Francis Xavier (1506-52) as to the conditions in Japan. He seems to have been infected with the saint’s enthusiasm, as were most of those who met him, and after his death he perhaps gave up a considerable fortune in order to return as missionary and ambassador to Japan. Before leaving Goa (April 1554) with St. Francis Xavier’s successor, Padre Belchior, he had been received into the Company of Jesus. After many hardships they landed in China in July 1556. In the spring of 1558, a few weeks after returning to Goa, Mendez Pinto sailed for home and arrived at Lisbon on September 22. The Lisbon officials dallied with his pretensions to reward for his services. During his wanderings in India, Ethiopia, China, Japan, Tartary, and Arabia he had persevered through captivities, battles, and shipwrecks, but four or five years of official evasions broke his spirit, and he retired to live in poverty at Almada. Philip II, stirred to interest in this legendary figure, granted him two bushels of wheat in January 1583, and in July of the same year he died. He had long before left the Company of Jesus, either of his own free will or expelled, perhaps on suspicion of Jewish descent.[517] His name was erased from the Company’s records and letters. Of his twenty-one years of trader, envoy, pirate, and missionary in the far East he wrote for his children a narrative of breathless interest, and, speaking generally, it bears the stamp of truth. We gather that he was brave and adventurous, despite a natural timidity, of a consuming curiosity which often got the better of his fears, pious, temperate, apt to be carried away by fugitive enthusiasms, but persistent, gay, and optimistic in defeat and disappointment. He appears not to have been particularly vain. He does not disguise some of his less creditable actions, and he certainly does not exaggerate his services in[Pg 224] Japan.[518] He may possibly have been one of the three Portuguese who discovered it in 1542: their names are given by Couto (V. viii. 12) as Mota, Zeimoto and Peixoto. Gifted with keen imagination, he could exaggerate[519] when expediency required, but he knew that in the account of his travels exaggeration was not expedient, and he was constantly on guard against the notorious scepticism of his fellow-countrymen.[520] He may have heightened the colour occasionally, but as a rule he writes with restraint, although with delight in a good story and skill in bringing out the dramatic side of events. It is one of the charms of his work that it is very definite in dates and figures, but this also, through inevitable errors and misprints, afforded a handle to the pedantry of critics. The fatal similarity of Mendez and mendacity gave rise to the play on his name: Fernam, mentes? Minto (‘Fernam, do you lie?—I lie’), and Congreve, in Love for Love, by calling him ‘a liar of the first magnitude’ clinched the matter in England. But comparatively early a reaction set in,[521] and modern travellers have unequivocally confirmed the more favourable verdict and corroborated his detailed descriptions of Eastern countries. The mystery of the East, the heavy scent of its cities, its fervent rites and immemorial customs, as well as the magic of adventure, haunt his pages. A hundred pictures refuse to fade from the memory,[Pg 225] whether they are of silk-laden Chinese junks or jars of gold dust, vivid descriptions of shipwreck (the hiss and swell of the waves are in his rich sea-Latin) or the awful pathos of the Queen of Martavão’s death, the sketch of a supercilious Chinese mandarin or of St. Francis Xavier tramping through Japan.

Five years after Mendez Pinto’s return to Portugal a book scarcely less strange than his Peregrinaçam, of atmosphere as oriental and of interest as absorbing although more scientific, was printed at Goa. Its author, Garcia da Orta[522] (c. 1495-c. 1570), born at Elvas, the son, perhaps, of Jorge da Orta, owner of a shop (temdeiro) in that town, studied medicine for ten years (1515-25) at Salamanca and Alcalá, and in 1526 began to practise as a doctor at Castello de Vide. From 1532 to 1534 he was Professor at the University of Lisbon, and in March 1534 sailed with his friend and patron, the insatiable Governor Martim Afonso de Sousa,[523] to India as king’s physician. The East cast its spell over his curious and inquiring mind; he remained under twelve or more Governors and died at a good old age, probably at Goa. There, on the veranda of his beautiful garden, in this land of bellissimi giardini,[524] served affectionately by many slaves, and with the books of his well-stocked library ready to his hand,[525] he would regale his[Pg 226] guests with strange fruits—all the maneiras á gula of India—and with still stranger knowledge. His knowledge was based on personal observation, for although he respected Galen and Dioscorides as the princes of medicine and was possessed of great erudition, he was not disposed to bow blindly to the authority of any writer, Arab or Greek, least of all to Scholasticism, he went to Nature and in his Coloquios dos Simples (1563) recorded what he had seen and heard, the truth without rhetoric, setting aside the mil fabulas of Pliny and Herodotus. These fifty-nine dialogues, arranged in alphabetical order, pay more regard to facts than to style. They are full of varied information and give us a most pleasant insight into the writer’s character, strong, humorous, obstinate, and into his life at Goa. From a scientific point of view they are of great importance: not only did they provide the first description of cholera[526] and of many unknown plants, but after three and a half centuries they retain their scientific interest and value. Begun many years earlier in Latin,[527] they were published in the author’s old age, with an introductory ode by his friend, the poet Camões. Unhappily they became known to Europe chiefly in a garbled Latin version by Charles de l’Écluse (Clusius)—a fifth edition appeared in 1605—from which the Italian and French translations were made. It was not until the nineteenth century that the skilful and eager care of the Conde de Ficalho enabled a larger number of those who read Portuguese to appreciate Orta at his true worth.

Born at Alcacer do Sal, the celebrated scientist Pedro Nunez (1492?-1577?), whose name lives in the instrument of his invention, the nonius,[528] was Cosmographer to Kings João III[Pg 227] and Sebastian and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra (1544-62). Prince Luis and D. João de Castro were his pupils. He wrote indifferently in Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, declared that as science treats of concrete things it can be expressed in any language however barbarous,[529] and, in order to secure for it a wider public, translated into Portuguese the Latin treatise (libellus) De Sphaera by John of Halifax (Joannes de Sacro Bosco): Tratado da Sphera (1537),[530] and into Spanish his own Libro de Algebra en arithmetica & geometria (1567), originally written in Portuguese and addressed to his pupil and friend the Cardinal-King Henrique. His other works, including the De Crepusculis (1542), were written in Latin.

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

The three Roteiros (logs)[532] written by the famous Viceroy[Pg 228] D. João de Castro (1500-48) on his voyages (1) from Lisbon to Goa in 1538, (2) from Goa to Diu, 1538-9, (3) from Goa to the Red Sea in 1541, are decked out with no literary graces. He wrote, he said, for seamen, not for ladies and gallants. Yet the scientific curiosity and enthusiasm of this keen-eyed, broad-minded observer give his descriptions force and truth, the same practical lucidity that marks his letters, which according to his friend Prince Luis contained todas as cousas necessarias e nenhũas superfluas, and they were early prized in Spain as harto notables, muy curiosos.[533] The third Roteiro would seem to have been originally written in Latin, and perhaps translated by Castro at his beloved Sintra home. The manuscript was bought by Sir Walter Raleigh, and it appeared in English in 1625, 208 years before it was published in Portuguese.

Greater historical interest attaches to the letters of an earlier Governor, Afonso de Albuquerque (1461-1515). That grim conqueror of the East might have smiled somewhat sardonically to be numbered among Portugal’s writers. He merely said what he had to say, and there was an end of it, would be his comment. But it is precisely this directness—the powerful grasp of reality and the horror of useless rhetoric—which gives excellence to the prose of his Cartas. These incomparable reports, written to King Manuel in moments snatched from his many occupations as Governor of India (1509-15), sometimes rise to a biblical grandeur and eloquence, as in the splendid passage beginning Goa é vossa; Onor, o rei dele paga-vos pareas. Perhaps, after all, he was not wholly unconscious of his art, and certainly the source of it is clear: as Osorio[534] notices, he was a devoted student of the Bible. In more familiar mood he can give a vivid sketch in a few emphatic words, as when he describes the judge, ‘a little man dressed in a cloak of coarse cloth with a crooked stick[Pg 229] under his arm’, or the impostors who will practise ‘a thousand wiles and deceits for one ruby’.

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

Two writers especially attract attention even in the feast of interest which Portuguese prose in this century offers so abundantly. The son of a distinguished Dutch illuminator and painter settled in Portugal, Antonio de Hollanda, who painted Charles V at Toledo and may have illuminated the Book of Hours of Queen Lianor, Francisco de Hollanda (1518-84), born in Lisbon, painter, illuminator, and architect, in his short treatises Da fabrica que fallece á cidade de Lisboa and Da sciencia do desenho, showed an enthusiasm for his subject[Pg 230] almost out of place in the Portugal of the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he nearly ran into trouble with the Inquisition by seeming to make painting ‘divine’, but prudently altered the passage. His curious and celebrated treatise Da Pintvra Antigva (1548) is written in a style which may be rather rejoiced in than imitated, for, as he tells us, he was more at home with the brush than with the pen, but it is full of ingenious and original remarks. The first part deals in forty-four brief chapters with painting generally, and opens with a fine passage describing the work of God as the greatest of all painters. The second part contains the Quatro dialogos, in the first three of which he records the conversations of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo, Lattanzio Tolomei, and himself in the church of St. Sylvester or in a garden overlooking Rome; conversations which, despite their Portuguese dress, bear the stamp of truth and will retain their fascination so long as interest in art endures. Francisco worked first in the household of the Infante Fernando and then in that of the Archbishop of Evora. In 1537 he set out on a journey to Rome by land (Valladolid, Barcelona, Provence), and in Italy remained from 1538 to 1547. His friendship with Michelangelo continued after his return to Portugal, as a letter from Hollanda to Michelangelo in 1553 proves. The last part of his life he spent in the country between Lisbon and Sintra among the Portuguese whom he had called desmusicos, and despite his comfortable circumstances—he received a pension of 100,000 réis from Philip II—he must often have looked back with regret to the fullness of those nine years in Italy. But his countrymen, thanks largely to the scholarly researches and studies of Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos, are now fully alive to his merits. And, indeed, even in the sixteenth century a passage in Frei Heitor Pinto’s Imagem da Vida Christam sets him side by side with the great Italian.[535] Philipe Nunez, who professed as a Dominican in 1591, wrote on painting in the next century: Arte poetica e da pintura e symmetria (1615). A work on music by Antonio Fernandez of about the same date, Arte de Mvsica de canto dorgam e canto cham[Pg 231] (1626), consists of three treatises which do not profess to be original. Manuel Nunez da Silva wrote on the same subject in his Arte Minima (1685).

In the preface (1570) to his Regra Geral, written in 1565, Gonçalo Fernandez Trancoso[536] (c. 1515-c. 1590) professed not to have sufficient literary skill even for this simple calendar of movable feasts. Yet in the previous year (1569), in which at Lisbon he lost both wife and children in the great plague (a beloved daughter of twenty-four, a student son, and a choir-boy grandson), in order to distract his mind from these sorrows,[537] he wrote a remarkable work, unique of its kind in Portuguese literature; or at least he wrote then the first two books, which appeared under the title Contos e historias de proveito e exemplo (1575).[538] A third part was published posthumously in 1596. The number and kind of the editions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to its popularity, but since the eighteenth century no new edition has been printed and the book has fallen into a strange neglect.[539] Trancoso did not claim originality: he merely collected stories from what he had heard or read.[540] The stories, only thirty-eight in number, are very various. The subjects of many of them resemble those of Franco Sacchetti’s Novelle or Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le xiii Piacevoli Notti, and some are directly imitated from Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone or Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s Gli Ecatommiti or from Matteo Bandello (†1565).[541] But often they are traditions so widespread that they occur in many authors and languages, as that (ii. 7) which corresponds to Straparola’s third Notte and of which Dr. F. A. Coelho recorded twenty-one other foreign versions, besides four popular variants in Portuguese; or i. 17, in which the cunning answers to difficult questions are similar to those in Sacchetti, No. 4 (Mestre Bernabò signor di Milano), and Dr. Braga’s Contos tradicionaes do povo portuguez,[Pg 232] No. 71 (Frei Joam Sem Cuidados). Others are apparently of oriental origin, as the judge’s verdict, worthy of Sancho Panza (i. 15), or the king and the barber (iii. 3). But the subject and place (Lisbon, Oporto, Evora, Coimbra, &c.) of most, although not of the longest, of these tales are Portuguese.[542] Some are trifling anecdotes which acquire a charm and vividness through their popular character and the author’s simple details of description, as the picture of the peasant family near Oporto sitting round the fire after their supper of maize-bread and chestnuts (i. 10). The author is not content that we should draw our own moral, but this scarcely spoils the reader’s pleasure in these malicious and ingenious tales.

Despite inroads of the exotic and all the chances and changes of life and literature in this century, the Portuguese maintained their interest in the romances of chivalry, in which indeed they saw a reflection of their own prowess in the East. Dull as Clarimundo may now seem, it made a great impression in its day, and was eagerly read, from Lisbon to the Moluccas.[543] Even as late as 1589 Bishop Arraez considers it necessary to say that a prince should have better ways of spending his time than ler por Clarimundo,[544] while Rodriguez Lobo, thirty years later, brackets it with Amadis and Palmeirim.[545] Many a young page and escudeiro must have aspired not only to pore over the cronicas but to write one of his own.[546] The facility of a Barros is, however, given to few, and both Jorge Ferreira’s Memorial and Moraes’ Palmeirim de Inglaterra were written later in life. Francisco de Moraes (c. 1500-72),[547] a well-known courtier in the reign of King João III, whose Treasurer he was, and a Comendador of the Order of Christ, in 1540 accompanied the Portuguese Ambassador, D. Francisco de Noronha, to Paris as Secretary,[Pg 233] and at the French Court he fell passionately in love with one of the ladies-in-waiting of Queen Leonor (sister of the Emperor Charles V and widow of King Manuel of Portugal) named Claude Blosset de Torcy. His love was not returned: there was a great discrepancy of age between them, his knowledge of French was very slight, and his passion robbed him of wit and reason. If the Duc de Châtillon was favoured, or if the English Ambassador gave Mademoiselle de Torcy his arm, Moraes would flare up in jealousy, and when in the presence of the queen the elderly lover went down on his knees la belle Torcy (to whom Clément Marot had addressed one of his Étrennes and who eventually married the Baron de Fontaines) prayed him not to continue to make her as well as himself ridiculous. Moraes, after leaving France in 1543, or early in 1544, recovered from his passion and married in Portugal. Of his subsequent life little is known; he appears to have returned to France, and in 1572 he was murdered at the entrance of the Rocio, the central square of Evora. His Cronica de Palmeirim de Inglaterra, written in France or Portugal or both, was probably published in 1544, but the earliest existing Portuguese edition is that of Evora, 1567, which contains the dedication to the Infanta Maria, written over twenty years earlier (1544). Chiefly remarkable for the excellence of its style, Palmeirim will always retain its place in Portuguese literature as a masterpiece of prose, musically soft, yet clear and vigorous. Cervantes considered it worthy to be preserved in a golden casket like the works of Homer,[548] but few of its readers will now differ from the more modern and moderate opinion of Menéndez y Pelayo that ‘it requires a real effort’ to read the whole of it. The effort required to read the miserable Spanish translation of 1547-8 is infinitely greater. The fact that this translation is of earlier date than any surviving Portuguese edition gave rise to the theory that Moraes had translated his work from the Spanish. No competent critic now believes this; any doubts that may have lingered were dispelled wittily and for ever in Mr. Purser’s able essay (1904).[Pg 234] The Spanish version, with its painful efforts to avoid lusitanismos and its palpable mistranslations (such as suavidad or alegria for saudade), shows less knowledge of the sea, of Ireland,[549] and of Portugal. Moreover, the preference of the author of Palmeirim for Portugal is obvious, and the passage in which ladies of the French Court are introduced corresponds to Moraes’ Descvlpa de hvns amores,[550] first published with the Dialogos in 1624. Moraes himself would probably not have been greatly troubled by the impudent claim set up for Luis Hurtado and Miguel Ferrer. To have made a masterpiece out of their book would have been an achievement as great as to have made it out of old French and English legends in Paris. Palmeirim’s predecessors, Palmerin de Oliva (1511), Primaleon (1512), and Platir (1533), were probably all genuinely Spanish, although some doubts have been raised as to the first of the line, Palmerin de Oliva attributed to a cryptic lady, a femina docta called Agustobrica.[551] Its successors were as genuinely Portuguese: to Moraes’ parts 1 and 2 Diogo Fernandez added parts 3 and 4 (1587), concerned with the deeds of Palmeirim’s son, Dom Duardos,[552] and Balthasar Gonçalvez Lobato parts 5 and 6 (1602), in which are told those of his grandson, Dom Clarisol de Bretanha. Three brief but very lively and natural Dialogos (1624) show that Moraes was not only an excellent stylist but a keen observer. The fidalgo and escudeiro, the lawyer and the love-lorn moço, are all clearly and wittily presented.

Amador Arraez in one of his dialogues defines mysticism thus: ‘There is a theology called mystic, as being hidden and unintelligible to those who have no part in it. It is attained by much love and few books and with much meditation and purity of heart, which alone suffices for its exercise, and consists mainly in the noblest part of our will inflamed in the love of God, its full and perfect good.’[553] ‘Our will inflamed’: perhaps these words explain the excellence of the style, the intensity and directness, of the writers in this mystic theology. Style, so shy and elusive to Flaubert and his disciples, came unsought to the religious writers of the sixteenth century, because they wrote not with an eye on verbal artifices but out of the fullness of the heart, ‘self-gathered for an outbreak’; and their works can still be read with pleasure by priest and pagan. Mysticism, inherent in the character of the Portuguese, runs through a great part of their literature; we find it, for instance, in the merry poetry of Gil Vicente or in the precious accents of Soror Violante do Ceo. Strength of character, aloofness, rapt enthusiasm, singleness of purpose: these are the qualities of mysticism at its best, and if it also manifests itself in vagueness and confusion, this was not so with the great mystic and religious writers of the golden age of Portuguese literature. To them mysticism was not a cloudy goodness or an abstract perception-dulling humanity, not a mist but a pillar of fire, in the light of which the facts and details of reality stood out the more clearly. But if the intensity of many of the mystics has its natural complement in the fervour and directness of their prose, this was not always the case, and it was not only in profane works that the Portuguese language fell into the pitfalls of culteranismo. All the more remarkable is the purity, the exquisite taste, the[Pg 236] simplicity and charm of some of the later, seventeenth century, prose. The secret of this prose lay in fact in culteranismo itself, the points and conceits of which were based on a recognition of the value of words. All the seiscentistas set to playing with words as with unset stones of price. The more critical or inspired writers joined in the game but selected the genuine stones, leaving the rest to those who did not care to distinguish between gems and coloured glass.

A faint vein of mysticism is to be found in the work of Frei Heitor Pinto (c. 1528-1584?), who was born at the high-lying little town of Covilhan and professed in the famous Convento dos Jeronimos at Belem in 1543. After taking the degree of Doctor of Theology at Siguenza he in 1567 competed for a Chair at Salamanca University, but came into collision with Fray Luis de Leon, and in a bitter contest between the Hieronymite and Augustinian Orders Pinto was defeated. He returned to Portugal, became Professor of the new Chair of Scripture at Coimbra University in 1576, Rector of the University and Provincial of his Order.[554] After the death of the Cardinal-King he appears vehemently to have espoused the cause of the Prior of Crato. King Philip accordingly invited Pinto to accompany him to Spain—he was one of the fifty excluded from the amnesty of 1581—and scandal added that the king had him poisoned there in 1584. Pinto was an eminent divine, a man of wide learning, a master of Portuguese prose, and he appears to have inspired his pupils with affection; but King Philip could scarcely have considered him worth poisoning, especially when removed from his sphere of influence. No doubt he went to Spain with extreme reluctance—on other occasions of his busy life when the affairs of his Order drove him to France and Italy he had sighed in tears (in spite of his interest in travel, his love of Nature, and especially his antiquarian curiosity[555]) for his quiet cell at Belem, ‘where he had lived many years in great content’. Perhaps too he[Pg 237] had not forgotten his defeat at Salamanca. ‘King Philip’, he now said sturdily, ‘may put me into Castille but never Castille into me.’ Pinto wrote commentaries on various books of the Old Testament, which were published in Latin, but his principal work consists in the dialogues, a maneira dos de Platão, of his Imagem da Vida Christam (1563), followed by the Segunda Parte dos Dialogos (1572). The first part has six dialogues, the subjects being true philosophy, religion, justice, tribulation, the solitary life,[556] and remembrance of death. The five of the second part treat of tranquillity of life, discreet ignorance, true friendship, causes,[557] and true and spurious possessions. It is impossible to read a page of these dialogues and not be struck by the extraordinary fascination of their style. It is concise and direct without ever losing its harmony. Perhaps its best testimonial is that its magic survives the innumerable quotations, although one may regret that the work was not written, like the Trabalhos de Jesus, in a dungeon instead of in a well-stocked library.[558] Apart from the proof it affords of the exceptional capacity of the Portuguese language for combining softness and vigour, the work contains much ingenious thought, charming descriptions, and elaborate similes. Some twenty editions in various languages before the end of the century show how keenly it was appreciated. It was certainly not without influence on the Dialogos (1589) of the energetic and austere Bishop of Portalegre, Amador Arraez (c. 1530-1600), who spent his boyhood at Beja and professed as a Carmelite at Lisbon a year after Frei Thomé de Jesus and two years after Frei Heitor Pinto had professed in the same city. Like the former he studied theology at Coimbra.[Pg 238][559] Cardinal Henrique, when Archbishop of Evora, chose Arraez to be his suffragan, and in 1578 appointed him to the see of Tripoli. Three years later he was made Bishop of Portalegre by Philip II. He resigned in 1596, and spent the last four years of his life in retirement, in the college of his Order at Coimbra. A few weeks before his death he wrote the prefatory letter for the revised edition of his great work.[560] It consists of ten long dialogues between the sick and dying Antiocho and doctor, priest, lawyer, or friends. The longest, over a quarter of the whole, is a mystic life of the Virgin, and of the others some are purely religious, as Da Paciencia e Fortaleza Christam, some historical or political (Da Gloria e Triunfo dos Lusitanos; Das Condições e Partes do Bom Principe). That on the Jews (Da Gente Judaica) is marred by a spirit of bitter intolerance; on the other hand there is an outspoken protest against slavery. The whole of this interesting miscellany, which incidentally discusses a very large number of subjects,[561] is tinged with mystic philosophy, and at the same time shows a keen sense of reality. In style as in degree of mysticism it stands midway between Pinto’s Imagem and the Trabalhos de Jesus. It is evident that its composition, although less artificial than that of the Imagem, has been the subject of much care, and the author declares in his preface that while adopting a ‘common, ordinary style’, to the exclusion of forced tricks and elegances, he has striven after clearness and harmony (the two postulates of his contemporary, Fray Luis de Leon). The result is a treasury of excellent prose, in which the harmonious flow of the sentences in nowise interferes with precision and restraint, that grave brevity which Arraez notes as one of the principal qualities of Portuguese. It can rise to great eloquence (as in the lament of Olympio) without ever becoming rhetorical or turgid.

The prose of Pinto and Arraez was a very conscious art, that of the still greater Frei Thomé de Jesus (1529?-82) was the man, and the man merged in mysticism, without thought of[Pg 239] style. He was the son of Fernam Alvarez de Andrade, Treasurer to King João III, and of Isabel de Paiva. One of his brothers was the celebrated preacher Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1528-75), another the historian Francisco de Andrade; a third, Frei Cosme da Presentação, distinguished himself in philosophy and theology, but died at the age of thirty-six at Bologna, while the work of a nephew (son of Francisco de Andrade), Diogo de Paiva de Andrade (1576-1660), Casamento perfeito (1636), is counted a classic of Portuguese prose. His sister D. Violante married the second Conde de Linhares. As a boy at the Augustinian Collegio de Nossa Senhora da Graça at Coimbra he is said to have been all but drowned while swimming in the Mondego. He professed at the Lisbon convent of the same Order in 1544, went to Coimbra to study theology, and then became master of novices at the Lisbon convent.[562] Here in 1574 he planned a reform of the Order, but when all was ready for the secession of the new Recoletos an intrigue put an end to the scheme, which a kindred spirit, Fray Luis de Leon, later carried into effect. Frei Thomé was permitted to retire to the convent of Penafirme by the sea, near Torres Vedras, where he might hope to indulge his love of quiet and solitude. He was, however, appointed prior of the convent and Visitor of his Order, and in 1578 was chosen by King Sebastian to accompany him to Africa. At the battle of Alcacer Kebir, as he held aloft a crucifix or tended the wounded, he was speared by a Moor and taken prisoner to Mequinez. Here he was loaded with chains and placed in a dungeon, and as the slave of a marabout received ‘less bread than blows’. The Portuguese Ambassador, D. Francisco da Costa, intervened, and he was removed to Morocco. Frei Thomé had borne all his sufferings with the most heroic fortitude, and now, broken in health but not in spirit, he refused to lodge at the ambassador’s and asked to be placed in the common prison. During a captivity of nearly four years, regardless of his own fate,[563] with unflagging devotion he ministered[Pg 240] to the numerous Christian prisoners, and was occupied to the last with their needs. Costa, who shared the general respect and affection for this saint and hero, visited him as he lay dying (April 17, 1582). Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella! It was during his captivity that he composed the work that has given him the lasting fame earned by his life and character, writing furtively in the scant light that filtered through the cracks of the prison door.[564] These fifty Trabalhos de Jesus (2 pts., 1602, 9) embrace the whole life of Christ, and deserve, more than Renan’s Vie de Christ, to be called a gracious fifth Gospel. Each trabalho is, moreover, followed by a spiritual exercise, and these constitute a Portuguese De Imitatione Christi. Rarely, if ever, has such glow and fervour been set in print: none but the very dull could be left cold by these transports of passionate devotion. The prose wrestles and throbs in an agony of grief or rapture, of mysticism carried to the extreme limit where all power of articulate expression ends.[565] Frei Thomé de Jesus is a master of Portuguese prose not by any arts or graces but through the white heat of his intensity. No book shows more clearly that style must always be a secondary consideration, that if there be a burning conviction excellence of style follows. It could evidently only have been written by one who had greatly suffered, indeed by one who still suffered, one who expressed in these fervid accents of heavenly communion an oblivion of self and an energy habitually employed in eager earthly service of his fellow men. In a prefatory letter (November 8, 1581) addressed to the Portuguese people he declared his intention of publishing as it stood this masterpiece of mystic ecstasy, which he believed to have been written by divine inspiration.[566]

Another celebrated treatise of a mystic character is the Voz do[Pg 241] Amado (1579) by the learned Canon D. Hilariam Brandão (†1585). The religious works of this century are very numerous. We may mention the anonymous Regras e Cautelas de proueito espiritual (1542), which is written in biblical prose and deals with the fifteen perfections or excellences of charity and kindred subjects; the dialogues Desengano de Perdidos em dialogo entre dous peregrinos, hũ christão e hũ turco (Goa, 1573) by the first Archbishop of Goa, D. Gaspar de Leão (†1576), and the Dialogo espiritual: Colloquio de um religioso com um peregrino (1578) by Frei Alvaro de Torres [Vedras] (fl. 1550), who was drowned in the Tagus when on the way to his convent at Belem.

D. Joana da Gama (†1568), a nun of noble birth who directed a small community founded by herself at Evora, a few miles from her native Viana, published a short collection of moral sentences in alphabetical order, followed by a few poems (trovas): Ditos da Freyra (1555). She insists, perhaps a little too emphatically for conviction, on her lack of intelligence and ability, and says that these sayings were written down for herself alone and that she purposely avoids subtleties (ditos sotijs), but her aphorisms contain some shrewd personal observation. Fact and legend have combined to weave an atmosphere of romance about the life of Manuel de Sousa Coutinho, better known as Frei Luis de Sousa (1555?-1632). A descendant of the second Conde de Marialva, he early entered or was about to enter the Order of Knights Hospitallers at Malta, but was captured by the Moors in much the same way and at about the same time (1575) as was Cervantes. He was taken to Algiers, and may have known Cervantes there, or the statement that he became Cervantes’ friend may have been an inference from the latter’s mention of him in Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda; they may have met in Lisbon in 1590, or at Madrid. Sousa Coutinho returned to Portugal in 1578, and some years later married D. Magdalena de Vilhena, widow of D. João de Portugal, one of all the peerage that fell with King Sebastian at Alcacer Kebir. Sousa Coutinho, at the invitation of his brother in Panama, is said to have gone thither in the hope of making a fortune, but the date is not clear. His unbending patriotism was immortalized when as Governor of Almada in 1599 he burnt down his house rather[Pg 242] than receive as guests the Spanish Governors of Portugal. The prospect of riches at Panama may have seemed especially alluring after this rash act. He appears to have lived quietly in Portugal for some years before 1613, when both he and his wife entered a convent. Their act has been variously explained as due to melancholy disposition or to the early death of their daughter, D. Anna de Noronha. Probably after her death the example of their friend the Conde de Vimioso and the conviction that the only abiding pleasure is the renunciation of all the rest were prevalent factors in their decision. The legend, however, related by Frei Antonio da Encarnação and dramatized two centuries later by Garrett, records that D. João de Portugal, D. Magdalena de Vilhena’s first husband, had been not killed but taken prisoner in Africa, and after many years’ captivity he reappears as an aged pilgrim and bitterly reveals his identity. In the convent of Bemfica, where he had professed in September 1614, Frei Luis de Sousa was consulted on various matters by the Duke of Braganza and others who valued his fine character and clear judgement, but he did not live to see the Restoration. He was entrusted by his Order with the revision of works left by another Dominican, Frei Luis de Cacegas (c. 1540-1610). These he re-wrote, giving them a lasting value by virtue of his style. The first part of the Historia de S. Domingos, ‘a new kind of chronicle’ as he calls it in his preface addressed to the king, appeared in 1623, but the second (1662) and third (1678) parts were not published in his lifetime. A fourth part (1733) was added by Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina (1660-1740), who among other works wrote a curious miscellany of verse and prose, romance and literary criticism, entitled Seram politico (1704). In the biography of the saintly and strong-willed Archbishop of Braga, Vida de D. Fr. Bertolomeu dos Martyres (1619), the excellence of Sousa’s style is even more apparent, for it has here no trace of rhetoric and the pictures stand out with the more effect for the economy with which they are drawn—the dearth of adjectives is noticeable. The archbishop’s visits to his diocese give occasion for charming, homely glimpses of Minho. Neither of these books is the work of a critical historian (in the Vida, for instance, winds and waves obey the archbishop), but the[Pg 243] latter, especially, is in matter and manner one of the masterpieces of Portuguese literature, a livro divino, as a modern Portuguese writer called it.[567] The Annaes de El Rei Dom João Terceiro, written at the bidding of Philip IV, was published in 1844 by Herculano, who described the work as little more than a series of notes, except in the Indian sections, which summarize Barros. It is as a stylist, not as a historian, that Frei Luis de Sousa will always be read, and read with delight.[568] The subject of his biography, Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres (1514-90), wrote in Portuguese a simple Catecismo da Dovtrina Christam (Braga, 1564), resembling the Portuguese work of his friend Fray Luis de Granada (1504-88): Compendio de Doctrina Christãa (Lixboa, 1559).

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

Like Frei Luis de Sousa, Frei Manuel da Esperança (1586-1670) became the historian of his Order in the Historia Seraphica da Ordem dos Frades Menores (2 pts., 1656, 66). We know from remarks in the second part that he paid the greatest attention to its composition, for which he had prepared himself by reading hũa multidão notavel of books on that and kindred subjects. Similar excellence of style marks the later work of the Jesuit[Pg 244] Francisco de Sousa (1628?-1713), O Oriente conquistado (2 vols., 1710), in which he chronicles the history of the Company in the East.

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

The sermons for which the Dominican Frei Pedro Calvo (born c. 1550) was celebrated were published in Homilias de Quaresma (2 pts., 1627, 9), and at the repeated request of a friend he wrote his Defensam das Lagrimas dos ivstos persegvidos (1618) to prove that ‘tears shed in time of trouble do not lessen merit’. The Sermões (1618) and Considerações (1619, 20, 33) of Frei Thomas da Veiga (1578-1638), like his father a Professor of Coimbra University, are written in a style of great excellence, as, although a trifle more redundant[570] and latinized, is that of his contemporary, like him a Franciscan, Frei João da Ceita[Pg 245] (1578-1633), whose prose has a natural grace and harmony, if it is less pure and indigenous than that of Luz. His best known works are the Quadragena de Sermoens (1619) and Quadragena Segunda (1625). Two more volumes of Sermões (1634, 5) appeared after his death. Two slightly later writers were Frei Cristovam de Lisboa (†1652), brother of Manuel Severim de Faria, and Frei Cristovam de Almeida (1620-79), Bishop of Martyria. The former, author of Jardim da Sagrada Escriptura (1653) and Consolaçam de Afflictos e Allivio de Lastimados (1742), in the preface to his Santoral de Varios Sermões (1638) deplores the new fashion of certain preachers who hide their meaning under their eloquence. He is himself sometimes inclined to be florid. Bishop Almeida attained a reputation for great eloquence even in the days of Antonio Vieira.[571] His Sermões (1673, 80, 86) are simpler than those of Vieira, but for the reader their prose lacks the quiet precision of Ceita, Veiga, or Luz, whose sermons may be considered one of the sources from which a greater master of Portuguese, Manuel Bernardes, derived his magic. The Jesuit Luis Alvarez (1615?-1709?), who was born a few years after Vieira, and lived on into the eighteenth century, also had a great reputation as a preacher. The fire is absent from the printed page, but his works, Sermões da Quaresma (3 pts., 1688, 94, 99), Amor Sagrado (1673), and Ceo de graça, inferno custoso 1692), are notable for the purity of their prose.

The religious works of the seventeenth, as of the sixteenth century are very various in subject and treatment. Frei João Cardoso (†1655), author of Ruth Peregrina (2 pts., 1628, 54), also wrote a lengthy commentary on the 113th Psalm in twenty-one discourses: Jornada Dalma Libertada (1626). Ten years earlier a Jew, João Baptista d’Este, had published in excellent Portuguese a translation of the Psalms: Consolaçam Christam e Lvz para o Povo Hebreo (1616). His title was suggested by[Pg 246] that of a far more remarkable book by another Jew, Samuel Usque (fl. 1540), Consolaçam ás Tribulaçoens de Israel, written probably between 1540 and 1550[572] and first printed at Ferrara by Abraham ben Usque in 1553. The author was the son of Spanish Jews who had taken refuge in Portugal, where he was born, probably at the end of the fifteenth century.[573] His famous work is an account of the sufferings of the Jewish race. In three dialogues Jacob (Ycabo), Nahum (Numeo), and Zachariah (Zicareo) converse as shepherds. Israel, in person, relates his sorrows down to the fall of Jerusalem, an event which is described in detail, and so on to the persecutions in European countries (novas gentes), and at the end of each dialogue the prophets administer their comfort. The book closes with a chorus of rapturous psalms in biblical prose, rejoicing at the coming end of Israel’s tribulations and calling for vengeance on their enemies, and thus finishes on a note of joyful faith and courageous hope, without an inkling of charity. The first dialogue, which condenses Old Testament history, has a rhythmical, luxuriant style, rich in Oriental imagery, but later, where Roman history is the authority, or in the tragic account of the persecution of Jews in Portugal[574] under João II and the two succeeding kings, the style is shorn of rhetoric. Nor is there a trace of false ornament in a long passage of wonderful eloquence, Israel’s final complaint and invocation to sky and earth, waters and mortal creatures. The agony and awful glow of indignation at these recent events had a restraining influence on the style, which loses nothing by this simplicity. Quieter descriptions are those of the shepherd’s life and of the chase in the first, and of spring and evening in the third part.

The Jesuit Diogo Monteiro (1561-1634), when towards the end of his life he published his Arte de Orar (1631), promised, should his ‘great occupations’ allow, to print very soon the[Pg 247] second volume dealing with the divine attributes. This did not appear in that generation: Meditações dos attribvtos divinos (Roma, 1671). The Arte de Orar contains twenty-nine treatises (604 ff.). Its subjects are various (of the virtue of magnificence; of the esteem in which singing is held by God, &c.), and they are presented with fervour and clear concision, and especially with a complete absence of oratorical effect. Quintilian takes part in one of the six dialogues which compose the Peregrinaçam Christam (1620) by Tristão Barbosa de Carvalho (†1632); he is on a pilgrimage from Lisbon to the tomb of Saint Isabel at Coimbra, but he expresses himself in excellent Portuguese, modelled perhaps on that of Arraez. The prose of the Retrato de Prvdentes, Espelho de Ignorantes (1664) by the Jesuit Francisco Aires (1597-1664) often rises to eloquence, notably in the fervent prayers. His Theatro dos Trivmphos Divinos contra os Desprimores Hvmanos (1658) is of a more practical character. The Franciscan Frei Manuel dos Anjos (1595-1653) laid no claim to originality in his Politica predicavel e doutrina moral do bom governo do mundo (1693), written in a clear and correct but slightly redundant[575] style.

Frei Luis dos Anjos (c. 1570-1625) in his Iardim de Portugal (1626) gathered edifying anecdotes of saintly women from various writers, and set them down in good Portuguese prose. The Franciscan Frei Pedro de Santo Antonio (c. 1570-1641) in his Iardim Spiritual, tirado dos Sanctos e Varoens spiritvaes (1632) contented himself with translation of his authorities, adding, he modestly says, ‘some things of my own of not much importance’. He carefully avoided interlarding his Portuguese with Latin, his object being fazer prato a todos. Even more humble is the work of the Cistercian Frei Fradique Espinola (c. 1630-1708), who compiled in his Escola Decurial (12 pts., 1696-1721) an encyclopaedia of themes so various as the fate of King Sebastian, the duties of women, and the habits of storks. Although it lacks the literary pretensions of the[Pg 248] Divertimento erudito by the Augustinian Frei João Pacheco (1677-?1747), it contains some curious matter. A similar miscellany of anecdotes and precepts was written by João Baptista de Castro in the eighteenth century: Hora de Recreio nas ferias de maiores estudos (2 pts., 1742, 3).

The life of the ardent Frei Antonio das Chagas (1631-82) abounded in contrasts. Born at Vidigueira, of an old Alentejan family, Antonio da Fonseca Soares began his career as a soldier in 1650; a duel (arising out of one of his many love affairs), in which he killed his man, drove him to Brazil, and it was only after several years of distinguished service[576] that he returned to Portugal, perhaps in 1657. In 1661 he attained the rank of captain, but in the following year abandoned his military career, and in 1663 professed in the Franciscan convent at Evora, exchanging the composition of gongoric verse for a voluminous correspondence in prose, and his unregenerate days of dissipation for a glowing and saintly asceticism. (Trocando as galas em burel e os caprichos em cilicios are the words with which he veils the real sincerity of his conversion.) Preferring the humbler but strenuous duties of missionary in Portugal and Spain to the bishopric of Lamego, he founded the missionary convent of Varatojo, and died there twenty years after his novitiate. During those years he built up and exercised a powerful spiritual influence throughout Portugal, and it continued after his death. Few of his poems survive, since he committed the greater part of his profane verse to the flames, but some of his romances may still be read. It is, however, as a prose-writer, especially in his Cartas Espirituaes (2 pts., 1684, 7), that he holds a foremost place in Portuguese literature. There is less affectation in these more familiar letters than in his Sermões genuinos (1690) or his Obras Espirituaes (1684). The very titles of some of his shorter treatises, Vozes do Ceo e Tremores da Terra, Espelho do Espelho, show that he had not even now altogether escaped the false taste of the time, and artificial flowers of speech, plays on words, laboured metaphors and antitheses appear in his prose. But if it has not the simple severity of[Pg 249] a Bernardes, it possesses so persuasive, so passionate an energy, and is of so clear a fervour and harmony that its eloquence is felt to be genuine.

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

Vieira dying is reported to have said that the Portuguese language was safe in the keeping of Padre Manuel Bernardes. The aged Jesuit, who maintained his interest in literature to the end, may have received Bernardes’ Luz e Calor[578] (1696) in the last year of his life, and the Exercicios Espirituaes (2 vols., 1686) had appeared ten years earlier. Other works, Sermões e Praticas (1711),[579] Nova Floresta (5 vols., 1706-28), Os Ultimos Fins do Homem (1727), Varios Tratados (2 vols., 1737), were soon forthcoming to justify the prophecy. Manuel Bernardes (1644-1710), the son of João Antunes and Maria Bernardes, was born at Lisbon, studied law and philosophy at Coimbra[Pg 250] University, and at the age of thirty entered the Lisbon Oratory, where he spent thirty-six years. That was all his life, yet through his books this modest, humorous, austere priest has exercised a profound influence not only, as Barbosa Machado declares, in guiding souls to Heaven, but in moulding and protecting the Portuguese language. His style is marked in an equal degree by grace and concision, intensity and restraint, smoothness and vigour.[580] With him the florid cloak, in which many recent writers had wrapped Portuguese, falls away, leaving the pith and kernel of the language; the conceits of the culteranos disappear, and the most striking effects are attained without apparent artifice. In his hands the pinchbeck and tinsel are transmuted into delicate pieces of ivory. The charm of his style is difficult to analyse, but it may be remarked that his vocabulary is inexhaustible, his precision unfailing, that he is not afraid to employ the commonest words, and that the construction of his sentences is of a transparent simplicity, as bare of rhetoric as is the poetry of João de Deus. His reputation as a lord of language has survived every test. His works are not merely the deliciae of a few distant scholars but an acknowledged glory of the nation, praised by that literary iconoclast Macedo, and quoted as an authority in the Republican Parliament of 1915. The most popular of his works are Luz e Calor, and especially the Nova Floresta, in which moral and familiar anecdote go quaintly hand in hand, but if one must choose between excellence and excellence his masterpiece is the Exercicios Espirituaes, in which thought and expression often rise to sublime heights. One may perhaps compare him with Fray Juan de los Ángeles (†1609). His simple doctrines spring from the heart and, winged by shrewd knowledge of men, touch the heart of his readers. One of his more immediate followers was Padre Manuel Consciencia (c. 1669-1739), author of a large number of works on moral and religious subjects, the best known of which is A Mocidade enganada e desenganada (6 vols., 1729-38).

Philip II entered his new capital under triumphal arches on June 29, 1581, and the subjection of Portugal to Spain during the next sixty years in part accounts for the fact that nowhere was the decadence of literature in the seventeenth century more marked than at Lisbon. For Spain in her sturdy independence and reaction from rigid classicism had led the way in those precious affectations which invaded the literatures of Europe, and the universal malady, gongorism with its Lylyan conceits and cultured style, now found a ready welcome in Portugal. The literary style which corresponded to the Churriguerresque in architecture naturally proved congenial to the land of the estilo manuelino. King Philip was glad to conciliate and provide for Portuguese men of letters,[581] but if in the preceding centuries many of them wrote in Spanish, that tendency was now necessarily strengthened. Another cause of decadence was no doubt the Inquisition, although its influence in this respect has been greatly exaggerated. It required no immense tact on the part of an author to prevent his works from being placed on the Index. An examination, for instance, of the differences between the 1616 edition of Eufrosina and the condemned 1561 edition shows that the parts excised were chiefly coarse passages or unsuitable references to the Bible (this was also the charge against the letters of Clenardus). That remarkable mathematician, Pedro Nunez, pays a tribute to the enlightened patronage of letters by Cardinal Henrique, the most ardent promoter of the Inquisition in Portugal: qui cum nullum[Pg 252] tempus intermittat quin semper aut animarum saluti prospiciat aut optimos quosque auctores evolvat aut literatorum hominum colloquia audiat.[582]

No literary figure in Portugal of the seventeenth century, few in the Peninsula,[583] can rank with D. Francisco Manuel de Mello (1608-66). Born at Lisbon,[584] he belonged to the highest Portuguese nobility and began both his military and literary career in his seventeenth year. He wrote in Spanish, although, in verse at least, he felt it to be a hindrance,[585] and it was not till he was over forty that he published a work in Portuguese: Carta de Guia de Casados (1651).[586] Few men have accomplished more, and towards the end of his life he could say with pride that it would be difficult to find an idle hour in it. He was shipwrecked near St. Jean de Luz in 1627 and fought in the battle of the Downs in 1639. He was sent with the Conde de Linhares to quell the Evora insurrection in 1637, and took part in the campaign against revolted Catalonia (1640), which he described in his Guerra de Cataluña[587] (1645), written em varias fortunas and recognized as a classic of Spanish literature. A man frankly outspoken like Mello must have made many enemies, enemies dangerous in a time of natural distrust. During the Catalan campaign he was sent under arrest to Madrid, apparently on suspicion of favouring the cause of an independent Portugal,[588] and a little later, when he was in the service of the King of Portugal, the suspicion as to his loyalty recurred. On November 19, 1644, he was arrested at Lisbon on a different charge. It appears that a servant dismissed by Mello revenged himself by implicating his former master in a murder that he had committed[Pg 253] (of a man as obscure as himself). Whether he did this of his own initiative or at the bidding of Mello’s enemies is uncertain, but they saw to it that Mello once in prison should not be soon released. They might, probably did, assure the king that this was the best place for one ‘devoted to the cause of Castile’. There are other theories to account for Mello’s long imprisonment, the most romantic of which—that he and the king were rivals in the affections of the Condessa de Villa Nova, and, meeting disguised and by accident at the entrance of her house, drew their swords, the king recognizing Mello by his voice—is now generally abandoned. Although no evidence of Mello’s participation in the murder was forthcoming, he was condemned to be deported for life to Africa, for which Brazil was later substituted. It was only in 1655, after eleven years of more or less[589] strict confinement, that he sailed for Brazil. João IV died in 1656 and two years later Mello returned to Portugal: he was formally pardoned[590] and spent the last years of his life in important diplomatic missions to London, Rome, and Paris. The unfaltering courage and gaiety with which he faced his adventures and misfortunes win our admiration, but his life can strike no one as literary. Yet it is probable that but for his long imprisonment he would never have found leisure to write many of his best works, and prosperity might have dimmed his insight and dulled his style—that style (influenced no doubt by Quevedo and Gracián) which is hard and clear as the glitter of steel or the silver chiming of a clock, with concinnitas quaedam venusta et felix verborum.[591] Even when full of points and conceits it retains its clearness and trenchancy, and in his more familiar works he is unrivalled, as the Carta de Guia de Casados, in which, innuptus ipse, he brings freshness and originality to the theme already treated in Fray Luis de Leon’s La Perfecta Casada (1583), Diogo Paiva de Andrade’s sensible but less caustic Casamento Perfeito (1631), and Dr. João de Barros’ Espelho de Casados[Pg 254] (1540),[592] or the pithy and delightful Cartas Familiares, of which five centuries—a mere fragment—were published at Rome in 1664, with a rapier-thrust of his wit and a maxim of good sense on every page, preserving for us some vestige of what Frei Manuel Godinho described as his ‘admirable conversation’ when he met him at Marseilles in 1633.[593] The Epanaphoras de varia Historia Portugueza (1660) are unequal and often excessively detailed.[594] Three of the five are, however, the accounts of an eyewitness and as such are full of interest: the Alteraçoens de Evora (i), the Naufragio da Armada Portuguesa em França (ii), and the Conflito do Canal de Inglaterra (iv).[595]

Mello’s knowledge of men was as wide as his knowledge of books, and both appear to great advantage in his Apologos Dialogaes (1721). An individualist in religion[596] and politics,[597] an acute thinker and a keen student of men and manners, he found no dullness in life even at its worst and no solitude, for, if alone, his fancy instilled wit and wisdom into clocks[598] and coins[599] and fountains.[600] The first three Apologos contain incisive portraits in which types and persons are sharply etched in a few lines: the poor escudeiro, the beata, the Lisbon market-woman, the litigious ratinho, the fidalgo from the provinces,[601] the ambitious priest, the shabby grammarian,, the worldly monk, political place-hunter, miles gloriosus, or melancholy author, a tinselled nobody boiling down the good sayings of[Pg 255] past writers. The fourth Apologo entitled Hospital das Lettras (1657) is devoted more especially to literary criticism; Mello with Quevedo, Justus Lipsius, and Traiano Boccalini (who died when Mello was five) makes a notable scrutiny of Spanish and Portuguese literature. As a literary critic Mello is excellent within limits. Himself an artificial writer, although as it were naturally artificial, bred at Court, versed in social and political affairs, he considered that the proper study of mankind was man, and, like Henry Fielding a century later, admired ‘the wondrous power of art in improving Nature’.[602] For him the country and Nature, the bucolic poetry and prose of Fernam Alvarez do Oriente, the ingenuous narratives of the early chroniclers, had no charm; he preferred Rodrigo Mendez Silva’s Vida y hechos del gran Condestable (Madrid, 1640) to the Cronica do Condestabre.[603] But all that was vernacular and indigenous attracted him, as is proved in his letters, in his lively farce Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz (1676), and in the Feira dos Anexins, which is a long string of popular maxims and of those plays upon words in which Mello delighted. His poetry—Las Tres Musas del Melodino (1649), Obras Metricas (1665)—is marred by the conceits which in his prose often serve effectively to point a moral or drive home an argument. It is far too clever. When in a poem ‘On the death of a great lady’ we find the line contigo o sepultara a sepultura we do not know whether to laugh or weep, but we suspect the sincerity of the author’s grief, and although he wrote some excellent quintilhas, most of his poems, which are, as might be expected, always vigorous, are too sharp and thin, stalks without flowers, the very skeletons of poetry. It is to his prose in its wit and grace, its shrewd thought, its revelation of a sincere and lofty but unassuming character, its directness,[604] its bom portugues velho e relho, that he owes his place among the greatest writers of the Peninsula.

The taste in poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries[Pg 256] is seen in two collections, partly Spanish, partly Portuguese: Fenix Renascida (5 vols., 1716-28) and Eccos que o Clarim da Fama dá (2 vols., 1761, 2). The latter is sufficiently characterized by its title, too long to quote in full. As to the former the Phoenix seems to have given real pleasure to contemporary readers, but for us the bird and song are flown and only the ashes remain, from which a sixteenth-century poem such as the sonnet Horas breves stands out conspicuously. The subjects are often as trivial as those of the Cancioneiro published two centuries earlier and more domestic: to a cousin sewing, to an overdressed man, to a large mouth, a sonnet to two market-women fighting, another to the prancing horse of the Conde de Sabugal, on a present of roses, two long romances on a goldfinch killed by a cat, verses sent with a gift of handkerchiefs or eggs or melons, or to thank for sugar-plums—the Fenix rarely soars above such themes. The magistrate Antonio Barbosa Bacellar (1610-63) figures largely, with glosses on poems by Camões, a romance A umas saudades, a satirical poem A umas beatas. His romances varios are mostly in Spanish, but a few of his sonnets in Portuguese have some merit. The fifth volume opens (pp. 1-37) with a far more elaborate satire by Diogo Camacho (or Diogo de Sousa): Jornada que Diogo Camacho fez ás Cortes do Parnaso, the best burlesque poem of the century, in which the author did not spare contemporary Lisbon poets.[605] The poems of Jeronimo Bahia likewise cover many pages. He it is who bewails at length the sad fate of a goldfinch. In oitavas he wrote a Fabula de Polyfemo a Galatea,[606] and in octosyllabic redondilhas jocular accounts of journeys from Lisbon to Coimbra and from Lisbon into Alentejo (on a very lean mule) which are sometimes amusing. His sonnet Fallando com Deos shows a deeper nature, and the collection contains other religious verse, notably that of Violante Montesino, better known as Soror Violante do Ceo (1601-93). Here,[607] as in her Rythmas varias (Rouen, 1646) and Parnaso[Pg 257] Lusitano de divinos e humanos versos (2 vols., 1733), this nun, who spent over sixty years in the Dominican Convento da Rosa at Lisbon, and who from an early age was known for her skill upon the harp and in poetry—admiring contemporaries called her the tenth Muse—showed that she could write with simple fervour, as in the Portuguese deprecações devotas of the Meditações da Missa (1689) or her Spanish villancicos. But she could also be the most gongorical of writers, her very real native talent being too often spoilt by the taste of the time.[608] Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda (1595-1644), another femina incomparabilis, like Soror Violante and Dercylis considered the tenth Muse and fourth Grace, wrote almost exclusively in Spanish, nor can her Soledades de Buçaco (1634) or her epic Hespaña Libertada (2 pts., 1618, 73) be considered a heavy loss to Portuguese literature. Soror Maria Magdalena Euphemia da Gloria (1672-? c. 1760), in the world Leonarda Gil da Gama, in Brados do Desengano (1739), Orbe Celeste (1742), and Reino de Babylonia (1749), rarely descends from the high-flown style indicated in these titles. On the other hand, the Franciscan nun of Lisbon, Soror Maria do Ceo (1658-1753), or Maria de Eça, in A Preciosa (2 pts., 1731, 3) and Enganos do Bosque, Desenganos do Rio (1741), among much verse of the same kind has some poems of real charm and an almost rustic simplicity.

By reason of a certain intensity and a vigorous style D. Francisco Child Rolim de Moura (1572-1640), Lord of the towns of Azambuja and Montargil, although more versed in arms than in letters, wrote in Os Novissimos do Homem (1623) a poem quite as readable as the longer epics of his contemporaries, despite its duller subject (man’s first disobedience and all our woe). The four cantos in oitavas are headed Death, Judgement, Hell, Paradise.[Pg 258][609] Of the life of Manuel da Veiga Tagarro we know little or nothing, but his volume of eclogues and odes, Lavra de Anfriso (1627), stands conspicuous in the seventeenth century for its simplicity and true lyrical vein. There is nothing original in these four eclogues, but the verse is of a harmonious softness. In the odes he succeeds in combining fervent thought with a classical restraint of expression. He aimed high; Horace, Lope de Vega, and Luis de Leon seem to have been his models. Some measure of the latter’s deliberate tranquillity he occasionally attained. The works of the ‘discreet and accomplished’, keen-eyed and graceful D. Francisco de Portugal (1585-1632) appeared posthumously[610]: Divinos e humanos versos (1652) and (without separate title-page) Prisões e solturas de hũa alma, consisting of mystic poems mostly in Spanish in a setting of Portuguese prose, and, in Spanish, Arte de Galanteria (1670), of which a second edition was published in 1682. Lope de Vega praised the ‘elegant verses’ of the Gigantomachia (1628) written by Manuel de Galhegos (1597-1665). That he could write good Portuguese poetry the author showed in the 732 verses of his Templo da Memoria (1635), in the preface of which he declares that it had become a rash act to publish poems written in Portuguese but quotes the example of Pereira de Castro and of Góngora as having used the language of everyday life and plebeian words without indignity.

The later epics testified to the perseverance of their authors rather than to their poetical talent. They are perhaps less guilty than the critics, who should have discouraged the kind and recognized that the Lusiads were only an accident in Portuguese literature, the accident of the genius of Camões. As a rule the epic spirit of the Portuguese expressed itself better in prose. Gabriel Pereira de Castro (1571?-1632) forestalled Sousa de Macedo in his choice of a subject. His Vlyssea, ov Lysboa Edificada, Poema heroyco (1636) was published posthumously by his brother Luis, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it should have run through six editions. The structure of the poem, in ten cantos of oitavas, is closely[Pg 259] modelled on that of the Lusiads, and the gods of Olympus duly take a part in the story. He sings, he says boldly, to his country, to the world and to eternity, but his sails flap sadly for lack of inspiration and enthusiasm, and his daring enjambements[611] do not compensate for the dullness of theme and treatment. If, for instance, we compare his storm[612] with that of the Lusiads (vi. 70-91) it must be confessed that the former has much the air of a commotion in a duckpond. Ulysses on his way to Lisbon visits (canto 4) the infernal regions, is astonished to meet kings there, and (canto 6) relates the siege and fall of Troy.

The life of Bras Garcia de Mascarenhas (1596-1656) was more interesting than his verses. He was born at Avó, near the Serra da Estrella, and his adventures began early, for he was arrested on account of a love affair (1616) and made a daring escape from Coimbra prison after wounding his jailer. His careful biographer, Dr. Antonio de Vasconcellos, has shown that there is no record of his having studied at Coimbra University. Subsequently he travelled and fought in Brazil (1623-32), Italy, France, Flanders, and Spain, and in 1641, as captain, raised and commanded a body of horse known as the Company of Lions. As Governor of Alfaiates, the ‘key of Beira’, he was wrongfully accused of having a treasonable understanding with Spain and imprisoned at Sabugal, some ten miles from Alfaiates (1642). He obtained a book (the Flos Sanctorum), flour, and scissors and cut out a letter in verse to King João IV, who restored him to his governorship and gave him the habit of Avis. His long epic Viriato Tragico (1699) contains some forcible descriptions and has a pleasantly patriotic and indigenous atmosphere—one feels that he is singing os patrios montes as much as the hero—but in style it differs little from prose. Tedious geographical descriptions, dry catalogues of names, a whole stanza (vii. 39) composed exclusively of nouns, another (iv. 63) of proper names, incline the reader less to praise than sleep,[Pg 260] from which he is only gently stirred when the sun is called a solar embaixadora. In the prevailing fashion of the time the author works in lines of Camões, Sá de Miranda, Garci Lasso, Ariosto, and other poets. While the work was still in manuscript another poet, and perhaps a relation, Andre da Silva Mascarenhas, helped himself liberally to its stanzas (they number 2,287) for his epic A Destruição de Hespanha (1671). He could have given no better proof of the poverty of his genius. Francisco de Sá de Meneses (c. 1600-1664?), although less true a poet than his cousin and namesake the Conde de Mattosinhos, won a far wider fame by his epic poem Malaca Conqvistada (1634), in which he recounts a heroica historia dos feitos de Albuquerque. The reader who accompanies his frail bark[613] through twelve cantos of oitavas feels that he has well earned the fall of Malacca at the end. For although the author is not incapable of vigorous and succinct description he too often decks out the pure gold of Camões’ style[614] with periphrases and Manueline ornaments which delay the action. The sun is ‘the lover of Clytie’ or ‘the rubicund son of Latona’. He stops to tell us that a diamond won by Albuquerque had been ‘cut by skilled hand in Milan’, and some of his more elaborate similes are not without charm. Canto 7 tells of the future deeds of the Portuguese in India. The gods interfere less than in the Lusiads (Asmodeus plays a part in canto 6), but the general effect is that of a great theme badly handled. After the death of his wife, the author spent the last twenty years of his life (from 1641) in the Dominican convent of Bemfica as Frei Francisco de Jesus.

Antonio de Sousa de Macedo (1606-82), moço fidalgo of Philip IV and later Secretary of Embassy and Minister (Residente) in London (1642-6) and Secretary of State to the weak and unlettered Afonso VI, wrote at the age of twenty-two Flores de España, Excelencias de Portugal (1631). This historical work of considerable interest and importance was written in Spanish por ser mais universal, but he returned to Portuguese presently in[Pg 261] a curious prose miscellany, Eva e Ave (1676), and in the epic poem Vlyssippo (1640) in fourteen cantos of oitavas. He seems to have felt that interest could not easily be sustained by the subject, the foundation of Lisbon by Ulysses. Accordingly, following the example of Camões, he inset various episodes. Canto 6 summarizes the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, canto 10 describes a tapestry adorned with future Portuguese victories, in canto 11 the Delphic Sibyl foretells the deeds of Portugal’s kings, down to Sebastian, in canto 12 the wise Chiron prophesies of her famosos varões. The style is correct, but the poem as a whole is commonplace. Vasco Mousinho de Quevedo, of Setubal, although no records of his life remain, won high fame by his epic poem in oitavas (twelve cantos) Afonso Africano (1611), in which ‘the marvellous prowess of King Afonso V in Africa’ is described. The poem, admired by Almeida Garrett, is particularly wearisome because it is largely allegorical. The king conquering Arzila represents the strong man subduing the city of his own soul, the Moors are the spirits of the damned, and seven of their knights representing the seven deadly sins are defeated by seven Christian knights who stand for the virtues.

The poverty of profane prose, compared with its flourishing condition in the preceding century, is also remarkable. A few historians of the seventeenth century have already been mentioned. The literary academies, of which the most famous were the Academia dos Generosos (1649-68) and the Academia dos Singulares (1663-5),[615] existed rather for the interchange of wit and complimentary or satiric verses than for the encouragement of historical and scientific research. The Conde da Ericeira’s Portugal Restaurado and Freire de Andrade’s Life bear no comparison with works of the Quinhentistas. Yet it was the second golden age of Portuguese prose, as the names of Manuel Bernardes and Vieira prove. The latter’s letters, with those of Frei Antonio das Chagas and Mello, are in three different kinds—the political, religious, and familiar—the most notable written in the century.[Pg 262] Gaspar Pires de Rebello in the preface to his Infortvnios tragicos da Constante Florinda (1625) excuses himself for its publication on the ground that ‘not spiritual and divine books only benefit our intelligence’. The book, which records the love of Arnaldo and Florinda, of Zaragoza, shows the modern novel growing through Don Quixote out of the Celestina plays and the romances of chivalry, but has little other interest. A second part was published in 1633, and Novellas Exemplares, six stories by the same author, in 1650. Numerous other works appeared with more or less alluring or sensational titles but contents disappointingly dull. Mattheus de Ribeiro (c. 1620-95), in his Alivio de Tristes e Consolação de Queixosos (1672, 4), shows greater skill than Pires de Rebello in the invention of the story, but it is marred by the diffuse and pedantic style—April becomes an ‘academy in which Flora was opening the doors for the study of flowers’. The pastoral novel ended in sad contortions with the Desmayos de Mayo em sombras de Mondego (1635) by Diogo Ferreira de Figueiroa (1604-74). Its title and the three involved sentences which cover the first three pages (ff. 10, 11) convey an adequate idea of its character and contents.

Of several prose works written by Martim Afonso de Miranda, of Lisbon, in the first third of the century, the most important is Tempo de Agora (2 pts., 1622, 4). It contains seven dialogues dealing with truth and falsehood, the evils of idleness, temperance, friendship, justice, the evils of dice and cards, and precepts for princes. Much of their matter is interesting and the comments incisive, especially as to the prevailing luxury in food and dress. They tell of the infinite number of curiously bound books at Lisbon, of the soldiers unpaid, ‘eating at the doors of convents’, of the delight in foreign fashions, and the craze for ‘diabolical’ books from Italy to the exclusion of livros de historias and books in Portuguese. The anonymous Primor e honra da vida soldadesca no Estado da India (1630), edited by the Augustinian Frei Antonio Freire (c. 1570-1634), is a different work from Geronimo Ximenez de Urrea’s Diálogo de la verdadera honra militar (1566), which it resembles slightly in title. It is divided into four parts and contains various episodes[Pg 263] of the Portuguese in the East and some curious information. Miguel Leitão de Andrade (1555-1632) went straight from Coimbra University to Africa with King Sebastian. After the battle of Alcacer Kebir he succeeded in escaping from captivity, followed the cause of the Prior of Crato, and was imprisoned under Philip II. In his book, in twenty dialogues, Miscellanea do Sitio de N. Sᵃ da Lvz do Pedrogão Grande (1629), he disclaims any purpose of writing history. It reveals an inquiring and observant but uncritical mind, interested in fossils, inscriptions, astrology, the early history of Portugal, etymology, heraldry, and the ‘infinite wonderful secrets of Nature daily being revealed’. It contains a graphic account of his escape from Fez, but on the whole, in spite of attractive passages and interesting details, scarcely merits its great reputation. Do Sitio de Lisboa (1608), which Mello praises as aquelle elegantissimo livro, by the author of Arte Militar (1612), Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos, is written in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher, a soldier, and a politician, and deserves its place among the minor classics of Portuguese literature.

The famous love letters of the Portuguese nun Marianna Alcoforado (1640-1723), which bring a breath of life and nature into the stilted writing of that day, only belong to Portuguese literature in the sense that Osorio’s history belongs to it—by translation. They first appeared in indifferent French (Lettres Portvgaises, Paris, 1669) and were not retranslated, or, if we accept the theory that the nun originally wrote them in French[616]—French suranné et dénué d’élégance—translated into Portuguese for a century and a half: Cartas de uma Religiosa Portugueza (1819).[617] Meanwhile, even before their obscure author died in the remote[Pg 264] and beautiful city of Beja, they had been translated into English and Italian and had received over fifty French editions. Colonel (later Marshal) Noël Bouton, Comte de Saint-Léger, afterwards Marquis de Chamilly (1636-1715), accompanied the French troops sent to help Portugal against Spain, and was in Portugal from 1665 to 1667. Marianna Alcoforado, belonging to an old Alentejan family, was a nun in the convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição at Beja. Her five letters, written between the end of 1667 and the middle of 1668 after her desertion, in their artlessness, contradictions, and disorder, vibrate with emotion. They are a succession of intense cries like the popular quatrain:

Sometimes, it is true, a trace of French reason seems to mingle with the ingenuous Portuguese sentiment, and it is almost incredible, although of course not impossible, since omnia vincit amor, that the nun should have written certain passages. From these and not on the amazing assumption of Rousseau that a mere woman could not write so passionately—he was ready to wager that the letters were the work of a man[618]—one may suspect that the lover, who did not scruple to hand over the letters to a publisher (unless he was merely guilty of showing them to his friends), sank a little lower and edited them, adding a phrase here and there more peculiarly pleasing to his vanity.[619] In that case the nun actually wrote these letters, full of passion and despair, and perhaps in French, to her French lover; but we only read them as they were touched up for publication by another hand.

A work which has nothing in common with these fervent love letters except an enigmatic origin is the Arte de Furtar, which in part at least probably belongs to the seventeenth[Pg 265] century. It is a curious and amusing treatise on the noble art of thieving in all kinds, private and official, civil and military. Its anecdotes are racy if not original. Two of the happiest incidents (in caps. 6 and 41) are copied without acknowledgement from Lazarillo de Tormes.[620] The author seems to have had misgivings that he had presented his subject in too favourable a light, for he ends by assuring his reader thieves that many tons of worldly glory are not worth an ounce of eternal blessedness, and promises them before long another ‘more liberal treatise on the art of acquiring true glory’. These tardy qualms did not save his book from the Index. The first edition, purporting to be printed at Amsterdam, bears the date 1652[621] and attributes the work to Antonio Vieira. That attribution may be set aside. Were there no other reasons for its rejection it would suffice to read the book or even its title in order to be convinced that it is not from the veneravel penna of that great statesman and preacher. He might dabble in Bandarra prophecies, but would scarcely have sunk to the picaresque familiarities of the Arte de Furtar or occupy himself with the sad habits of innkeepers, the long stitches of tailors, or the price of straw. It has also been attributed, without adequate ground, to Thomé Pinheiro da Veiga (1570?-1656), the author of a lively account of the festivities at the Spanish Court and description of Valladolid in 1605, entitled Fastigimia (it mentions Don Quixote and Sancho (p. 119) but says nothing of Cervantes), and to João Pinto Ribeiro (c. 1590-1649), the magistrate who played a notable part in the Restoration of 1640 and wrote various short treatises such as Preferencia das Letras ás Armas (1645); and even less plausibly to Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo (1618?-80), statesman and diplomatist, an indifferent poet but an excellent writer of prose and a careful although not[Pg 266] original historian. His halting verses and his treatises were collected in his Obras (2 vols., 1743). Of the latter the Summa Politica has been shown by Snr. Solidonio Leite[622] to be copied almost word for word from the work of identical title by D. Sebastião Cesar de Meneses (†1672), Bishop of Oporto and Archbishop of Braga. Both author and book were too well known for Ribeiro de Macedo to claim it as his own. He seems merely to have translated it from the original Latin published at Amsterdam in 1650, a year after the first Portuguese edition. The work is remarkable for acute thought and clear and concise expression. A work of a similar character is the well-written Arte de Reinar (1643) by P. Antonio Carvalho de Parada (1595-1655). The Tratado Analytico (1715), by Manuel Rodriguez Leitão (c. 1620-91), a controversial treatise written to prove the right of Portugal to appoint bishops, is also the work of a good stylist. Some would say the same of one of the best-known books of the seventeenth century, the Vida de Dom João de Castro (1651), by Jacinto Freire de Andrade (1597-1657). The author, born at Beja, was suspected at Madrid of nationalist inclinations, and retired to his cure in the diocese of Viseu; after the Restoration he refused the bishopric of Viseu. His book has often been regarded as a model of Portuguese prose. Pompous and emphatic,[623] it may be described as inflated Tacitus, or rather a mixture of Tacitean phrases, conceits, and rhetorical affectation. But if as a whole it is more akin to Castro’s garish triumph at Goa than to the scientific spirit of his letters, it scarcely deserves the severe strictures which followed excessive praise[624]: it might even become excellent if judiciously pruned of antitheses and artifice.[625] The second Conde da Ericeira,[Pg 267] D. Fernando de Meneses (1614-99), wrote a Historia de Tangere (1732) and the Vida e Acçoens d’El Rei D. João I (1677), which ends with an elaborate parallel between Julius Caesar and the Master of Avis. Equally clear but far more artificial is the style of the third Count, D. Luis de Meneses (1632-90), in the best-known historical work of the century in Portuguese: Historia de Portugal Restaurado (2 pts., 1679, 98). Its author ended his life by leaping from an upper window into the garden of his palace on a May morning in a fit of melancholy.

The great prose-writer of the century, Antonio Vieira (1608-97), was born in the same year and city as D. Francisco Manuel de Mello and spent a life as unquiet. He was not literary in the same sense as Mello, but he has always been considered one of the great classics of the Portuguese language. He was the son of Cristovam Vieira Ravasco, escrivão das devassas at Lisbon, but at the age of seven he accompanied his parents to Brazil (1615) and began his education in the Jesuit college at Bahia. In 1623, by his own ardent wish, long opposed by his parents, he became a Jesuit novice and professed in the following year. Before he was thirty he was Professor of Theology in the Bahia college and a celebrated preacher, the sermons in which he encouraged the citizens of Bahia in the war against the Dutch being especially eloquent. In 1641 he was chosen with Padre Simão de Vasconcellos to accompany D. Fernando de Mascarenhas, son of the viceroy, to Europe in order to congratulate King João IV on his accession. Vieira preached in the Royal Chapel on New Year’s Day, 1642. Both his sermons and his conversation greatly impressed the king, and from 1641 to the end of the reign (1656) his influence was great although not unchallenged. They were critical years in Portugal’s foreign policy, and Vieira, who refused a bishopric but was appointed Court preacher, was entrusted with several important missions—to Paris and The Hague (February-July 1646), London, Paris, and The Hague (1647-8), and Rome (1650). In 1652 he returned to Brazil as a missionary in Maranhão, and during two years roused the bitter hostility of the settlers by his protection of the slaves[Pg 268] or rather by his opposition to slavery. In 1655 he again left Lisbon for Maranhão,[626] and during five arduous years showed unfailing courage and energy in dealing with natives and settlers. The latter in 1661 attacked the mission-house and arrested and expelled the Jesuits. At home King João, Vieira’s friend, was dead. Differences arose between the Queen Regent supported by Vieira, and her son, and one of the first acts of the latter on taking power into his own hands was to banish Vieira to Oporto and later to Coimbra. Here in the spring of 1665[627] he wrote that curious work Historia do Futuro (1718), which was to interpret Portugal’s destiny by the light of old prophecies, but of which only the introduction (livro anteprimeiro) was printed. An even stranger book, in which he had paid serious attention politically to the prophecies of Bandarra, was denounced in 1663, and in October 1665 Vieira was consigned to the prison of the Inquisition at Coimbra. His sentence was not read till 1667 (December 24), and it condemned him to seclusion in a college or convent of his Order and to perpetual silence in matters of religion. The deposition of King Afonso VI (1667) and the accession of his brother Pedro II altered Vieira’s prospects, and his eloquent voice was again heard in the pulpit. After preaching before the Court in Lent 1669 he proceeded to Rome on business of the Company and spent six years there. He preached several times in Italian, and Queen Christina of Sweden, who had settled in Rome in 1655, offered him the post of preacher and confessor, which he refused. In August 1675 he returned to Lisbon, where he was coldly received by the Prince Regent, and in 1681 retired to Brazil. In the same year he was burnt in effigy by the mob at Coimbra. A special brief given to him by the Pope secured his person from the attacks of the Inquisition. But even at Bahia he was not free from troubles and intrigues. His activity continued to the end of his long life. In 1688 he preached in Bahia Cathedral, and was Visitor of the Province of Brazil from 1688 to 1691. Even in 1695 we find him, although feeble and[Pg 269] broken, writing letters and eager to finish his Clavis Prophetica[628] (or Prophetarum), which now lies in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris and elsewhere. Seventy years earlier he had been entrusted by the Jesuits with the composition of the annual Latin letters of the Company. Vieira’s vein of caustic satire no doubt made him numerous enemies and increased the difficulties which his advocacy of the Jews and slaves and his fearless stand against injustice and oppression were certain to produce. Ambitious and fond of power, he could devote himself to causes which entailed a life of toil and poverty. An energetic if unsuccessful diplomatist, an ingenious thinker, a statesman of far-reaching views, he was also a fantastic dreamer, but his dreams and restlessness rarely affected the sanity of his judgement. The works of this great writer and extraordinary man are an inexhaustible mine of pure and vigorous prose, at its best in his numerous Cartas, written in selecta et propria dictio, nusquam verbis indulgens sed rebus inhaerens. A Portuguese critic, Dias Gomes, notes his ’sustained elegance’, and we may sometimes sigh for an interval of Mello’s familiarity or Frei Luis de Sousa’s charm. In his famous Sermões he bowed intermittently to the taste of the time for conceit and artifice. He condemned the practice in a celebrated sermon, but indeed a certain humorous quaintness was not foreign to his temperament, and in the obscurity, at least, of the cultos he never indulged. When inspired by patriotism or indignation his words soar beyond cold reason and colder conceits to a fiery eloquence. Among writers whom he influenced was the Benedictine Frei João dos Prazeres (1648-1709), of whose principal work, O Principe dos Patriarchas S. Bento, or Empresas de S. Bento, only the first two volumes were published. Closer imitators of Vieira were Frei Francisco de Santa Maria (1653-1713), author of O Ceo Aberto na Terra (1697) and many sermons, and the Jesuit preacher Antonio de Sá (1620-78), whose Sermões Varios appeared in 1750.

The eighteenth century did not kill literature in Portugal any more than in other countries, but poetry had lost its lyrism, and under the influence of French and English writers assumed a scientific, philosophical, or utilitarian character. No mighty genius arose in Portuguese literature at the bidding of João V (1706-50), but the king’s lavish patronage gave an impulse, and he founded the Academia Real de Historia in 1720. A crop of scholars and poets followed in the second half of the century, so that it was not without some unfairness that Giuseppe Baretti wrote of the Portuguese in 1760 that di letteratura non hanno punto fama d’essere soverchio ghiotti ... quel poco que scrivono, sia in prosa sia in verso, è tutto panciuto e pettoruto.[629] It was the age of Arcadias: the famous Arcadia Ulyssiponense[630] (1756-74) and the Nova Arcadia founded in 1790 (i. e. precisely a century after the Italian Arcadia). All the poets of the century belonged to one or other of these societies or made their mark as dissidentes from them. One of the founders of the Nova Arcadia, Francisco Joaquim Bingre (1763-1856), lived on into the middle of the nineteenth century, and a few of his poems were collected under the title O Moribundo Cysne do Vouga (1850). A typical eighteenth-century poet is D. Francisco Xavier de Meneses (1673-1743), fourth Conde da Ericeira, who in turning to literature was but following the traditions of his family. A staunch defender of pure Portuguese against those who, he said, disfigure and corrupt the language by the introduction of foreign words and phrases, he wrote a large[Pg 271] number of works in prose and in verse. The best known of them is his Henriqueida (1741), a heroic poem on the conquest of Portugal by Count Henry in twelve long cantos of prosaic oitavas. It may contain lines more inspiring than these:

but they do not really differ greatly from the rest of the poem. The large quantity of poetry still written at the beginning of the century had met with severe criticism in Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina’s Seram Politico. He slyly calls the egloga campestre ‘poesia ervada’. The objects of the Arcadia of 1756 were to free Portuguese literature from foreign influences and restore the purity of the language. If to some extent it merely substituted French or Italian influence for Spanish, its cry was also back to the classics and to the Portuguese quinhentistas. As to the language its services were invaluable, for at a time when French influence was great in Portugal and in the rest of Europe it checked the use of gallicisms; as to literature the attempt to write poetry on an ordered plan was perhaps foredoomed to failure: it plodded along in an artificial atmosphere of Roman gods and antiquities, and became hidebound in imitation of the Horatian ode.

Pedro Antonio Corrêa Garção (1724-72), one of the first members and most prominent poets of the Arcadia, did good service in his determined efforts to deliver his country’s literature from foreign imitations and the false affectation of the time, and to revert to the classics, Greek, Roman, and Portuguese. He even prophesied that Gil Vicente’s day would come. His master was Horace, grande Horacio, and his Horatian odes, if they show no remarkable lyrical gift, have a dry native flavour in the purity of their language. He was also successful in reviving the cultivation of blank verse. There is a fine sound in some of the sonnets in which he sings Marilia, Lydia, Belisa, Maria, Nise, writes to a friend to ask for a doubloon or for Spanish tobacco, sends birthday congratulations or laughs at a bald priest: the themes are mostly of this level. His satirical vein is marked in his two short comedies in blank verse, Theatro[Pg 272] Novo, a skit on the drama then in vogue, and Assemblêa ou Partida, in which certain Lisbon types are ridiculed and which contains the famous and much overpraised Cantata de Dido. Corrêa Garção’s days ended tragically in prison. The motive of his arrest is not clear. Tradition wavers between a love intrigue and political reasons,[631] and declares that the Marques de Pombal, whom he had offended, signed the order for his release on the very day of the poet’s death after eighteen months of imprisonment.

Pombal was effusively praised by Domingos dos Reis Quita (1728-70), a Lisbon hairdresser who wrote bucolic poetry melodiously, but with perhaps even less originality than we have learnt to expect in that kind since the time when Virgil mistranslated Theocritus. The influence of Bernardez and Camões is clear,[632] in many passages too clear, and he had undoubtedly caught something of their skill and harmony in technique. But his poems leave the impression that he had no real feeling for the rustic life which they describe; no doubt he was more at home with the scissors than with the faithful Melampus or the nymphs and shepherd’s pipe. When he is relating an event, such as the earthquake of 1755, which touched him nearly, his ready flow of verse deserts him, in spite of his skill in improvisation,[633] although the sonnet written on the same occasion, Por castigar, Senhor, stands out with a certain majesty from most of his other sonnets, which are mere slices of eclogue. If his mellifluous idylls show no individuality, his return to the classic poets of Portugal was, as with other Arcadian poets, a welcome change from the Spanish influence, the mao uso, as he calls it, of ‘rude strangers from the Manzanares’ (Eclogue 6). His tragedies and pastoral drama Licore are not more original.[Pg 273] One of his tragedies, Inés de Castro, suggested that of João Baptista Gomes (†1813), Nova Castro, which had a great vogue in its day but is now scarcely more remembered than Osmia (1788), a tragedy of which the blank verse has vigour, although it is often scarcely distinguishable from prose. This play, published anonymously, was long attributed to Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo (1754-1817), but its real author was D. Theresa de Mello Breyner, Condessa de Vimieiro, who married her cousin, the fourth Count, in 1767.

It was a cruel kindness to edit the works of Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva (1731-99) in six volumes, for, despite the fame of his high-flown Pindaric odes, his three centuries of sonnets and his other lyrics are not of conspicuous merit and are often imitative. Having nothing to say, Elpino Nonacriense, like too many of the Arcadian poets, said it at inordinate length. Que enorme confusão! he exclaims in an elegy on the Lisbon earthquake, and most of his poems are on a like plane of thought and expression. The son of a Sargento Môr,[634] he was born at Lisbon, and after studying law at Coimbra was appointed a judge at Castello de Vide. With Manuel Nicolau Esteves Negrão (†1824) and Theotonio Gomes de Carvalho (†1800) he founded the Arcadia Ulyssiponense, of which he drew up the statutes in September 1756. The first aim of these early Arcadians was, as we have noticed, to break the shackles of Spanish influence and gongorismo, which was, indeed, on the wane in the land of its birth. Diniz da Cruz’ own poems were written in good idiomatic Portuguese. In O Hyssope he satirizes with telling vigour the use of gallicisms, and his comedy O Falso Heroismo is thoroughly Portuguese in subject and treatment. From 1764 to 1774 he was stationed at Elvas, and here a quarrel between the bishop, D. Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean, D. José Carlos de Lara, furnished him with the subject of his celebrated mock-heroic poem O Hyssope. The legend runs that he was summoned to read his satire to the all-powerful Pombal in the presence of the infuriated bishop, and that the poem proved too much for the gravity of the minister, who appointed him a judge at Rio de[Pg 274] Janeiro (1776). Thence he was transferred to Oporto (1787), but in 1790 was again appointed to Rio de Janeiro, and showed himself merciless in sentencing the Brazilian poets Claudio Manuel da Costa, Gonzaga, and Ignacio José de Alvarengo Peixoto (1748-93), accused of conspiring to secure the independence of their country. O Hyssope was first published in 1802, three years after the author’s death. The idea of the poem was derived from Boileau’s Le Lutrin. Boileau would have been horrified by its eight cantos of slovenly and monotonous blank verse, which often scarcely rises above prose; but as a satire on the times and in its grotesque portraiture of prelate and lawyer and notary it is sometimes irresistibly comic. The mock-heroic Benteida, written by Alexandre Antonio de Lima of Lisbon (1699-c. 1760?) and published fifty years before O Hyssope, consisted of three cantos of oitavas. Two editions appeared in 1752, published at ‘Constantinople’ as written by ‘Andronio Meliante Laxaed’. Pedro de Azevedo Tojal (†1742) had used the same metre for his Foguetario (1729). The burlesque poem O Reino da Estupidez (1819), written in four cantos of easily-flowing blank verse by the Brazilians Francisco de Mello Franco (1757-1823) and José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva (1763-1838), is professedly an imitation of aquelle activo e discreto Diniz na Hyssopaïda, only the butt here is not the Chapter of Elvas but the professors of Coimbra University.

Like the less celebrated poet son of an Alentejan painter, José Anastasio da Cunha (1744-87), artillery officer, mathematician, Professor of Geometry at Coimbra, who translated Pope and Voltaire and had milk in his tea and buttered toast on a fast-day, Francisco Manuel do Nascimento (1734-1819), better known as Filinto Elysio,[635] was denounced to the Inquisition. His thrilling escape in the year of Cunha’s condemnation for apostasy and heresy (1778) brought him almost as much fame as his poems. The son of a Lisbon lighterman and a humble varina,[636] he was accused of not believing[Pg 275] in the Flood and of throwing ridicule on the doctrine of original sin, and by another witness of being simply an atheist. He succeeded in locking up in his own rooms the official sent to arrest him early on the 4th of July, hid for eleven days in Lisbon, and then, disguised as a poor man carrying a load of oranges, escaped on a boat bound for Havre. Had this persecution come earlier, the disquieting atmosphere of Paris, into which he was now transplanted and where, except for a few years at The Hague, he lived for the rest of his life, might have given some originality to his talent. But his mind and poetic style were already fixed, and through every political disturbance he continued his steady flow of Horatian odes and similar artificial verse. He wrote for seventy years (Lamartine notes the précoces faveurs of his muse), and at the age of sixty-four calculated that he had already composed 730,000 lines, probably too modest an estimate. He received by royal decree an amnesty and the restoration of his property, but never returned to Portugal. His influence on younger Portuguese poets was nevertheless great. Bocage, when his verses were praised by the older poet, exclaimed:

His influence was bad and good. It encouraged a dry and artificial classicism, but also careful versification in pure Portuguese. Although the poems of Lamartine’s divin Manuel are no longer even by his countrymen held to be divine, they may be read with satisfaction by virtue of their indigenous expressions and a hundred and one allusions to popular traditions. It was by these characteristics that he expressed his revolt from the Arcadia. Half a long life spent in Paris was unable to imbue Filinto with the mimo de fallar luso-gallico, against which he vigorously protested to the end. This purity of style gives excellence to the many translations which he was obliged to write for a bare livelihood, and his native land is present even in his closest imitations of Horace (Falernian becomes louro Carcavellos). Unfortunately his contemporaries and successors were not always so discreet.

[Pg 276]

The genial satirist Nicolau Tolentino (1741-1811), son of a Lisbon advocate, after studying law at Coimbra spent some years teaching rhetoric to the raw youth (bisonhos rapazes) of Lisbon. He was perpetually discontented with his lot or ready to profess himself so. ‘Long years have I already spent in begging,’ he says candidly, ‘and shall perhaps pass my whole life in the same way.’ He harps on his poverty; the kitchen, he complains, is the coolest room in his house. In 1781 he obtained a comfortable post in the civil service, his poems were printed for him in two volumes twenty years later, he would receive a pheasant from one friend, a Sunday dinner of turkey from another, he acknowledges a thousand benefits, and still begs on. Before he had had time to grow rich the habit had become incurable. His was no lyrical gift, but he imitated with success the quintilhas of Sá de Miranda,[637] in which much of his work is composed (O Bilhar is in oitavas). He writes naturally; his style is thoroughly Portuguese, often prosaic. His satire, repressed for personal reasons rather than from any failure of wit or talent, reducible to silence by the gift of a pheasant, lacks independence and thought, but sheds a gentle light on the manners of the time—on the travelled coxcomb who returns to Portugal affecting almost to have forgotten Portuguese, or the rich nun who knows by heart whole volumes of the Fenix Renascida—and one or two of his entertaining sonnets are likely to endure. The Obras Poeticas of the Marquesa de Alorna (1750-1839), in Arcadia Alcippe, are now more often praised than read, but her poetry is scarcely inferior to that of many even more celebrated writers of the time. As a child she defied the anger of the Marques de Pombal. She was detained with her sister Maria and her mother D. Leonor de Almeida in the convent of Chellas from the age of eight till the death of King José (1777). Two years later she married the Count of Oeynhausen, who became minister at Vienna in 1780. After his death in 1793 she lived partly in England, but spent the last twenty-five years of her life in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, and exercised considerable[Pg 277] influence on young writers—not Garrett but Bocage, and especially Herculano—and thus with Macedo formed a link between the poets of the Arcadia and the nineteenth century. Her works contain over 2,000 pages of verse. There are sonnets and odes, eclogues, elegies, epistles, translations or paraphrases of Homer, Horace, Claudian (De raptu Proserpinae), Pope (Essay on Criticism), Wieland, Thomson’s Seasons, Goldsmith, Gray, Lamartine, and the Psalms. There is a long poem on botany which notices more than a hundred kinds of scented geranium, and indeed the range of her subjects is very wide, from May fireflies to the ‘barbarous climate’ of England, from Leibniz to the ascent of Robertson in a balloon. Classical allusions are everywhere; she even drags in Cocytus in a sonnet on the death of her infant son. At the same time we have a constant sense of high ideals and love of liberty.

The compositions of the ‘pale, limber, odd-looking young man’, which ‘thrilled and agitated’ William Beckford in 1787, now scarcely move us, vanished the fire and glow which Bocage (1765-1805) brought to his improvisations. For the reader they are for the most part carboni spenti. His parents were a Portuguese judge and the daughter of a French vice-admiral in the Portuguese Navy, and he enlisted in an infantry regiment in the town of his birth, Setubal, in 1779. Ten years later he deserted at Damão, and after wandering in China reached Macao and thence Goa, which he still found a stepmother to poets, and Lisbon. Here he continued to live a dissipated life, till in 1797 his revolutionary opinions and his poem A Pavorosa Illusão da Eternidade brought him first to the Limoeiro and then for a few months to the prison of the Inquisition. His unstable romantic spirit was influenced as much by the French Revolution during the latter years of his life as by the wish in his youth to become a second Camões, but he wrote an elegy on the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, which he described as ‘a crime from Hell’. He supported life during his last years principally by translation. He was himself his chief enemy, and he was also the victim of the critics who applauded his improvisations until he no longer distinguished between poetry and prose, sense and absurdity. No better Portuguese pendant[Pg 278] to the celebrated line of blank verse ‘A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman’ will be found than that in one of Bocage’s elegies: Carpido objecto meu, carpido objecto. The undoubted talent of Elmano Sadino, as he was in Arcadia, was thus frittered away in occasional verse in which his fecund gift of satire found expression, and a great poet was lost to Portuguese literature. His impromptu sallies against rival poets, such as Macedo, brought him contemporary fame, but in some of his poems, especially the sonnets, we have proof of a possibility of greater things. No doubt his work is disfigured by pompous phrases[638] and hollow classical allusions. He did not always rise above the bad taste of the period; he was unable to concentrate his talent or separate prosaic from poetical subjects. Thus he sang of an ascent in a balão aerostatico in 1794, and saw in the vil mosquito a proof of the existence of God. But his was nevertheless a very real and above all a very Portuguese inspiration,[639] and some of his sonnets have force and grandeur and hover on the fringes of beauty, especially when they voice his unaffected enthusiasm for Portugal’s past greatness and heroes.

One of the foremost poets of the Nova Arcadia was Belchior Manuel Curvo Semedo (1766-1838), two volumes of whose Composições Poeticas appeared in 1803. A crowd of secondary lights revolved round the great planets of the two Arcadias. The poems of Alfeno Cynthio, Domingos Maximiano Torres (1748-1810), are not without vigour (Versos, 1791). Their unfortunate author died a political prisoner at Trafaria. The gay and lively Abbade of Jazente, Paulino Antonio Cabral[640] (1719-89), was the son of an Oporto doctor, and was parish priest at Jazente (near Amarante) from 1753 to 1784. His poems are still read for their pleasant satire, but he was careless of literary fame. Some of the sonnets of both these writers deserve not to be forgotten.[Pg 279] João Xavier de Mattos (†1789), a fourth edition of whose Rimas appeared in the year after his death, is now remembered chiefly for some of his sonnets, as that beginning Poz-se o sol, with its melancholy charm. He was a true but not a great or original poet. Born at Oporto, the son of a Brazilian father and a Portuguese mother, Thomas Antonio Gonzaga (1744-1807?) was a judge at Bahia when he was accused of taking part in the Republican conspiracy of Minas Geraes (1789), and after three years’ imprisonment was deported (1792) to Mozambique, where he died several years after his sentence had expired. Some of his Horatian and Anacreontic lyras in many metres, addressed to Marilia and collected under the title A Marilia de Dirceo (Dirceo being his Arcadian name), are graceful lyrics of an idyllic character. Of the other poets implicated in the conspiracy, Claudio Manuel da Costa (1729-69), who was found dead in his prison cell, was an Arcadian poet of the Italian school, and shows a gentle love of Nature in his sonnets. Of the hundred sonnets printed in his Obras (1768) some are in Italian. The eclogues number twenty. In Brazil at this time, as earlier in Portugal, patriotism if not poetry suggested epics. José Basilio da Gama (1740-95), who spent the greater part of his life in Portugal and died at Lisbon, wrote O Uraguay (1769) in five cantos of prosaic blank verse—an account of the struggle between Portuguese and Indians. José de Santa Rita Durão (c. 1720-84), Doctor in Theology (Coimbra), composed an epic entitled Caramurú (1781) on the discovery of Bahia in the sixteenth century by Diogo Alvarez Corrêa. This poem in ten cantos of oitavas is inferior to O Uraguay, but it contains some interesting notes on the country and the customs of Brazil.[641]