and the author displays iu it much, talent and erudition in the human sciences." The Lisbon upon which Camoens turned his back in 1553 had sadly changed ; the times were out of joint. A dreadful pestilence had decimated the population ; the intrigues inseparable from a regency, and a young king, the sport of youthful favourites, ruled by the Jesuits, brave and impetuous, already meditating the luckless expedition to Africa, overshadowed both court and kingdom. Remarking this, in his address to the young king Camoens wrote, "The humility of the anchorite
should not be the only virtue of your ministers."At length the epic, dreamed of at Coimbra, commenced in banishment, continued at Ceuta, resumed at Goa and Macao, revised at Mozambique and Sofala, and perfected in a humble room in the Rua de Santa Ana, Lisbon, was issued from the press of Antonio Gocalvez.
The first edition of the Lusiad bears date Lisbon, 1572. Its success was immense, and the despair and malice of the mediocre poets of the court intense. A second edition was issued from the press of Gocalvez in the same year.
Isolated amid this literary strife, Camoens lived retired, and was very poor. He lived in the knowledge of many, and in the companionship of few, inhabiting an apartment in a house adjoining the convent Santa Ana, at the bottom of a small street which led to the college of the Jesuits, where the sole consolation of his later years was his intimacy with some of the fathers. By the death of the Princess Donna Maria, who expired in 1578, Camoens lost the last of his protectors, and was reduced to extreme poverty ; then came the heaviest blow of all, the death of his faithful Javanese Antonio.
Early in the year 1578, after the grand ceremony of the Benediction of the Standards, Dom Sebastiilo, the boy king, departed on his ill-starred expedition to Africa, Bernardes, a court poet and a courtier, being selected in preference to Camoens to accompany the expedition and sing its triumphs. In August occurred the fatal rout of Alcazar-quivir, and the death of the young king, after which, according to the testimony of Bernardo Rodriguez, " Camoens went as one dreaming."
Three months prior to the poet s death, Benito Caldera s Castilian version of the Lusiad was printed at Alcala de Henares, and we may reasonably infer that Camoens saw a copy."
The disaster of Alcazar-quivir shook Portuguese nation ality to its base. In the last letter Camoens penned he alludes to this event. " I have so loved my country that not only do I deem myself happy to die in her bosom but happy to die with her.
The sad sickness unto death came at last, on the 10th of June, 1580. In a small, cheerless room of a shabby house in the Rua de Santa Ana (No. 52 or 54) Luiz de Camoens died, and he was buried in the neighbouring convent of Santa Ana. On the fly-leaf of a copy of the first edition of the Lusiad (said to be in the library of Holland House), and in the handwriting of Fray Jose Indio, a Carmelite monk of Guadalajara, is found the following statement :
" What thing more grievous than to see so great genius lacking success ! I saw him die in a hospital in Lisbon, without a sheet to cover him, after having triumphed in the Indies, and having sailed five thousand five hundred leagues by sea, What warning so great for those, who, by night and day, weary themselves in study without profit, like the spider weaving a web to catch small flies."
Some picturesque and touching, but probably apocryphal narratives are chronicled by Camoens s biographers. One tells of the faithful Javanese Antonio sallying forth at even tide to beg from passers-by the means to procure a modest meal for himself and his master ; another, of Barbara, a mul- alto woman, who, from the scanty store upon her stall and the still scantier treasury of her pocket, spared a daily ration and an occasional silver coin in pity for one she might have known prosperous at Macao ; and a third of a " fidalgo," named Ruy Diaz de Camara, who came to his poor dwelling to complain of the non-fulfilment of a promise of a translation of the penitential psalms, and to whom Camoens replied " When I wrote verses I was young, had ample food, was a lover, and beloved by many friends and by the ladies ; therefore, I felt poetic ardour. Now I have no spirit, no peace of mind ; behold there my Javanese who asks me for two coins to purchase fuel, aud I have none to give him." On his deathbed he is said to hove exclaimed, " Who ever heard that on so small a stage as a poor bed, Fortune should car^ to represent so great misfortune, and I, as if such were not sufficient, place myself on her side, because to dare to resist such ills would appear effrontery."
Camoens was spared the pain and humiliation of seeing a Castilian king upon the throne of Portugal. It is, however, related of Philip II. that, soon after his occupa tion of Lisbon, ho inquired for Camoens, and finding him already dead, gave (as documentary evidence shows) instructions that a pension be granted to the poet s mother, still " very old and very poor." She survived the poet some years.
Of Camoens s personal appearance Manoel Severim de Faria, one of his biographers, writes thus : " He was of middle stature, his face full, and his countenance slightly lowering ; his nose long, raised in the middle, and large at the end. He was much disfigured by the loss of his right eye. Whilst young his hair (like Tasso s) was so yellow as to resemble saffron. Although his appearance was not perhaps prepossessing, his manners and conversa tion were pleasing aud cheerful. He was afterwards a prey to melancholy, was never married, and left no child." On a marble slab fixed in the wall of the church of Santa Ana, Dom Got^alo de Coutinho had an inscription placed; but as both church and inscription perished in the earthquake of 1755, there is some doubt as to its precise wording, and whether " he lived poor and neglected and so died " formed part of it or not.
Amid many tributes to Camoens s memory, those of Manoel de Sousa, Diogo Bernardes, Tasso, and Lope-de- Vega are well known. The last alludes to him as " the divine Camoens," and adds, " Strange fortune that to so much wit and learning gave a life of poverty and a rich sepulchre."
A Spanish biographer of Cervantes has shown " that the most remarkable coincidence of fortune may be traced in the events which marked the lives of Camoens and the author of Don Quixote."
Estimating the popularity of Camoens great epic Os Lusiadas by the number of editions printed in Portugal, it was without ques tion considerable, no less than thirty-eight having been published at Lisbon prior to the year 1700, and in addition four in Spain, three in Castilian and one in Portuguese. There exist translations in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Bohemian, Danish, Swedish, Russian, Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew. The earliest in English is by Sir Richard Eanshaw (London, 1655), and was com posed during his banishment at Tankersley Park, Yorkshire, in 1652. Had he lived to prepare a second edition, many errors and imperfec tions arising from an incomplete knowledge of the Portuguese idiom would, no doubt, have been rectified. He was appointed ambassador to Portugal in 1601, where he remained three years, being then transferred to Madrid, where he died in 166(5. Miekle s Lusiad was first published in 1776, and hardly merits Southey s condemnation (he preferring that of Fanshaw) of "most unfaithful." It is fairly close in places, but much of the force of the original is sacrificed for the sake of smooth versification. Another translation by Musgrave in blank verse appeared in 1826, the latter cantos of which are closer and more effective than the earlier. A version of the first five cantos by Quillinan followed in 1853, rendered with considerable grace anil with greater accuracy than Miekle s. In 1854 appeared a version by Sir Thomas Mitchell.
In estimating the genius of Camoens, it must be remembered that "we build with ready materials, but he dug the quarry, rough-
