Chapter XI (11)

At this period also he is supposed to have conceived and begun the Lusiad. Passionately fond of his country, and proud of her heroes, he believed it to be a glorious task to celebrate their deeds; and while his heart warmed and his imagination was fired with such a subject, he might hope that it would please his sovereign, and that his patriotic labours would bear the fruit of some prosperity for himself. That he hoped much, we know, and felt all the confidence in eventual happiness which the young and ardent naturally feel is certain. How bitter and how blighting was the truth, that as it brought to light, piece by piece, year by year, the course of his life, shewed only barren tracks, storms, and hardship--to end at last in abject wretchedness!

The gleams that a little irradiate the obscurity in which this portion of the life of Camoens is enveloped, shed a very doubtful light upon his motives. Faria y Sousa says, that he returned to Lisbon, and was a second time exiled for the same cause, and then resolved on his expedition to India. But there is no proof of his being banished a second time by any royal order.

The simple facts appear to be these. In 1545 he left the university and began life. He was twenty-one, ardent in his temper, high of hope, of an aspiring but poetic temperament, that could bear all that called him forth to action and glory, but was impatient of obscurity, and the dull sleepy course of hopeless unvaried mediocrity of station and life. He loved, and he was banished.

His heart then spent itself in rhymes, and he conceived the idea of a poem which he deemed to be epic, which spoke of heroes, who were his countrymen, who were but lately dead, and whose path to glory in the east he even saw open before himself. Five years were passed since he had left Coimbra; he was still poor and unprotected: he resolved to be and to do something, and on this, formed the project of going to India. He had formed an intimacy with dom Antonio de Noronha. Dom Alfonso de Noronha (who must have been some relation to this young noble) was at this time named viceroy for India; and the entry in the Portuguese East Indian register shows that Camoens had taken his passage on board the same vessel in which the viceroy sailed. From some reason, however, he changed his intention. Dom Antonio was about to join the Portuguese army in Africa. His father had discovered an attachment between him and dona Margarita de Silva, a lady of high birth and great beauty, but from some unknown cause, not approving of it, he sent his son to Ceuta. Nothing was more natural than that dom Antonio should solicit his friend to accompany him, instead of leaving his native country for the distant clime of India. Other commentators say that the father of Camoens was at that time in Africa, and sent for his son; but facts tend to negative this. We have seen that Simon Vaz was his son's surety on his projected voyage, on board the Don Pedro; nor have we any facility afforded us of reconciling these contradictions.[141] There are several expressions in his poems which indicate that the poet, though innocent, was obliged to go to Africa.[142] These might allude to a paternal command, or simply to the evil fate that pursued him, driven by which, he might term that force, which was only a strongly impelling motive.

[Sidenote: 1550. Ætat. 20.]

While with the troops at Ceuta, Camoens was actively employed, and displayed great bravery on various occasions; on one, he was destined to be a great sufferer, as he lost an eye in a naval engagement which took place in the straits of Gibraltar.

Like Cervantes, Camoens fought for his country and was mutilated in her wars, and received neither reward nor preferment. After passing some time in the burning clime of Africa, he returned to Lisbon; but no better fortune awaited him. He returned, deprived of an eye, and the unfortunate mutilation rendered him an object of ridicule to those very ladies who, eight years before, when he was in the prime of youth and beauty, had welcomed him with distinction. At this period, the biographers state that the object of his faithful and passionate attachment died: this seems a mistake, as we shall afterwards mention; but he was divided from her by obstacles as insurmountable as death. His father was no more. He had sailed to India as commander of a vessel, was wrecked on the Malabar coast, and, escaping from the wreck, arrived at Goa; but did not long survive the loss of his fortunes.

[Sidenote: 1553. Ætat. 29.]

Camoens cast hope to the winds, and embarked for India. Stricken by disappointment, rendered despairing by hopeless love--his wearied fancy could build no more airy fabrics of future good fortune to which to escape during the tedious or fearful hours of a long and dangerous voyage. His resource was his poem. He occupied himself with the Lusiad; and, doubtless, found in the glow of inspiration, and in the exercise of his imagination, some relief from sorrow and care, while traversing those stormy and distant seas, which the heroes of his epic had before sailed over, even though he went towards

"That long desired and distant land, which is The grave of every poor and honest man."[143]

He sailed in the San Bento, in which the commodore Fernando Alvares Cabral, who commanded the fleet then going to the east, also embarked. It was the only one of the squadron that reached its destination; the rest being destroyed by tempests. It reached Goa in the September of the same year.

Then Camoens visited India the glorious days of Portugal were at an end. Albuquerque, Almeida, and the heroic Pacheco, who like a fabulous Paladin, withstood whole armies with his single arm, and who died unregarded and unnoticed by his ungrateful sovereign in a hospital in Lisbon, were no more; the disinterestedness, the honour and humanity, that distinguished the administration of Albuquerque, was not imitated by his successors. He had taken Goa, and founded an empire, which the corrupt government of Portugal has caused us to inherit. The local governors too often sought only to enrich themselves; the viceroys were involved in wars occasioned by their tyranny and extortion; and that which Albuquerque intended should be a political and vast dominion tributary to his native land, sunk into mere commercial or piratical speculations. In the same way, the trade with China was stained by oppressions and rapine.

Dom Alfonso de Noronha was still viceroy on Camoens' arrival. He was avaricious and tyrannical. At this time the king of Cochin had applied to the Portuguese for protection against the king of Pimenta. An armament was sent in November; and Camoens, without giving himself time to repose from his long voyage, accompanied it. The artillery of the Portuguese gained for them a signal victory, and the king of Cochin soon sued for peace. "We were to retale an island," Camoens writes in his first elegy, "belonging to the king of Porca, and which the king of Pimenta had seized; and we were successful. We departed from Goa with a large armament, which comprised all the forces there, collected together by the viceroy. With little trouble we destroyed the quiver-armed people, and punished them with death and fire. We were detained in the island only two days, which was the last for some, who passed the cold waters of Styx."

Thus he enrolled his name at once among those adventurers who sought by their gallantry to conquer fortune, and to acquire prosperity and reputation by the sword. Camoens was full of military ardour, but he was a poet, and his disposition was gentle as it was fearless; and Southey well observes, that his better nature induced him, while recording this victory, to envy those happier men whose lives were spent in the exercise of the arts of peace.

On his return to Goa, he was saddened by the news of the death of his young and dear friend, dom Antonio de Noronha. He perished in an engagement with the Moors, near Tetuan, on the 18th of April, 1553. Antonio had been driven from his native country to fall in the destructive African wars, through the obduracy of his father. He was miserable in his exile; as Camoens pathetically describes:--

"But while his tell-tale cheek the cause betrays, To him who marks it with affection's eye, And speaks in silence to a father's gaze The fatal strength of love's resistless sigh; Parental art, resolved, alas! to prove The stronger power of absence over love."

Unimaginative people fancy that when a poet laments in song; his heart is cold. How false this is, persons even of the chilliest fancy can judge if they call to mind, how, in times of vehement affliction, they are more alive, and the world is more alive to them, in images that hear upon their grief, than during periods of monotony. The act of writing may compose the mind; but the boiling of the soul, and quake of heart, that precede, transcend all the sufferings which tame spirits feel. Camoens wrote a sonnet[144] and an elegy on this loss, which he sent in a letter to a friend.

"I wish so much for a letter from you," he says in this letter, "that I fear that my wishes balked themselves--for it is a trick of fortune to inspire a strong desire for the very purpose of disappointing it. But as I would not have such wrong done me, as that you should suspect that I do not remember you, I determined to remind you by this, in which you will see little more or less than that I wish you to write to me from your native land; and in anticipated payment I send you news from this, which will do no harm at the bottom of a box, and may serve as a word of advice to other adventurers, that they may learn that every country grows grass. When I left Portugal, as one bound for another world, I sent all the hopes I had nourished, with a crier before them, to be hanged, as coiners of false money, and I freed myself from all the thoughts of home, so that there might not remain in me one stone upon another. Thus situated, in the midst of uncertainty and confusion, the last words I uttered were those of Scipio Africanus--'Ingrata patria, non possidebis ossa mea.' For without having committed any sin that would doom me to three days of purgatory, I have endured three-thousand from evil tongues, worse intentions, and wicked designs, born of mere envy,

"to view Their darling ivy, torn from them, take root Against another wall."[145]

Even friendships softer than wax have been warmed into hatred and set alight, whence my fame has received more blisters than the crackling of a roasted pig. Thus they found in my skin the valour of Achilles, who could only be wounded at the sole of the foot; for they were never able to see mine, though I forced many to show theirs. In short, Senhor, I know not how to thank myself for having escaped all the snares with which circumstances surrounded me in that country, except by coming to this, where I am more respected than the bulls of Merciana[146], and live more peacefully than in the cell of friar. This country, I say, which is the mother of rascals, and the mother-in-law of honest men. For those who seek to enrich themselves float like bladders on the water; but those whose inclinations lead them to deeds on arms, are thrown, as the tide throws dead bodies on shore, to be dried up first, and then to decay."

He then proceeds to speak of the women. The Portuguese whom he finds there, he says, are old; and of the natives he dislikes their language--"for if you address them," he continues, "in the style of Petrarch and Boscan, they reply in a language so sown with tares, that it sticks in the throat of the understanding, and would throw cold water on the most burning flame in the world. And now no more, Senhor, than this sonnet, which I wrote on the death of dom Antonio de Noronha, which I send as a mark of how much it grieved me. I wrote an eclogue on the same subject, which appears to me the best I have written. I wished also to send it to Miguel Diaz, who would be glad to see it, on account of his great friendship for dom Antonio, but being occupied by the many letters I have to write to Portugal, I have no time."

Camoens could not remain inactive; he had left a country which, notwithstanding all he had suffered, he fondly loved, because no career was open to him. He sought one in India, and when none presented itself, he cast himself in the first expedition set on foot, however dangerous or tedious it promised to be, and with all the bravery and ardour of his soul, using both pen and sword, endeavoured to fight or write himself into reputation and preferment.

[Sidenote: 1554. Ætat. 30.]

The year following his arrival at Goa, Noronha was succeeded in his viceroyalty by dom Pedro Mascarenhas, who soon after died, and Francisco Barreto acted as governor. The cruising of the Mahometans in the straits of Mecca was very detrimental to the Portuguese trade, and expeditions were sent out to protect the merchantmen, under the command of Manoel de Vasconcellos. On the second occasion, Camoens offered to serve as volunteer, and accompanying Vasconcellos, shared the great hardships of the expedition.

[Sidenote: 1555. Ætat. 31.]

On his return to Goa, he wrote a most beautiful _canzone_, the ninth, descriptive of the wretchedness he endured, in which he pourtrays that corner of the world, "neighbouring a barren, rocky, sterile mountain; useless, bare, bald and shapeless, abhorred of nature, where no bird flies, nor wild beast crouches--where no stream flows, nor any fountain springs, and whose name is Felix. Here my hapless fortune placed me; here, in this remote, rugged, and rocky part of the world, did fortune will that a short space of my short life should be spent, that it might be scattered in pieces about the world; here I wasted my sad, solitary, and sterile days, full of hardship, grief, and resentment; nor had I, as my only adversaries, life, a burning sun, and chilling waters, a thick and sultry atmosphere, — but also my own thoughts. They assailed me, bringing the memory of some passed and brief delight, which once was mine when I inhabited the world, to double the asperity of my adversity, by showing me that many happy hours may be enjoyed; and thus, in these thoughts, I wore out time and life."

Camoens returned to Goa, only to again encounter the enmity of fate and malice of men. It was natural for him, to behold with indignation and contempt the extortion and tyranny of the Portuguese government; and he is said to have been excited by these feelings to express his dislike of various individuals that composed it in a satire, which he named "Follies in India," (_Disparates na India_), in which, in general terms, he lashes many potent individuals for their misdeeds. This made him enemies; and being suspected of composing another satire, still more distasteful to several who were named in it, as instituting a feast of canes in honour of the new governor, and getting drunk on the occasion; the persons aggrieved, fearing Camoens' sword as well as his pen, applied for redress to Barreto, and he was glad of the pretence to arrest and banish him to China[147]; or rather, Southey says, we should express it, ordered him to another station; but this is often the worst exile; when a man has sought a new country, where he has friends and prospects, it is an arbitrary and cruel act that drives him out to seek his fortune on unknown shores, where he arrives a stranger, and may be looked on as an intruder; his name already stigmatised by the very circumstances of his removal.

[Sidenote: 1556. Ætat. 32.]

Camoens departed from Goa in the fleet which Barreto despatched to the South. He felt this arbitrary act bitterly. He denounced it as unjust, and went, he says, "loaded with his recollections, his sorrows, and his fortunes, which were for ever adverse." He disembarked, at first, at one of the Molucca Isles; Ternate, as it is supposed: the term of his stay there is uncertain, but there is every reason to suppose that he soon proceeded to Macao.[148] He here held the office of "Provedor dos Defunctos," or commissary for the effects of the deceased; and here again we find a similarity with Cervantes, who was driven to maintain himself by accepting a clerkship; but in this Camoens was more fortunate than the Spaniard; the situation he held was of greater emolument, and he amassed a little fortune while holding it[149]; nor was it a place that demanded much time for the fulfilment of its duties. Camoens found leisure to retire from the details of business, and to pursue his poetical occupations. He was wont to spend much time in a grotto which commanded a view of the sea, and where, apart from the rest of the world, he wrote a great portion of the "Lusiad." This spot is still shown to strangers who visit Macao, as the grotto of Camoens; and an English visitor thus describes it: "It is pleasantly situated on the western shore of the promontory of Macao, and faces the harbour, which divides it on that side from the main land. This promontory is a narrow neck of land, whose stony and barren surface is only rendered habitable by the sea breezes, that blow from three quarters of the compass, and somewhat temper the natural heat of the climate." At this day, the English possessor has beautified it by a plantation of trees, and crowned it with a small Chinese temple, built on the rock, which is a sort of cromlech; the excavation beneath is the cave, or natural grotto, to which the poet resorted, bare in itself, but commanding a beautiful and extensive view:--"the wide sea flecked with verdant isles, the harbour busy with vessels, the line of woody and cultivated coast, bounded by the majestic Montagna, whose pyramidical form and dark aspect add no small charm to the scenery."

Here Camoens continued the "Lusiad;" here Southey supposes that the happiest years of his life were spent. It may be so, but airy and cameleon-like must that happiness have been. His imagination, his desire of fame, the grasp he held of it, as he added to his immortal work, doubtless often fired his soul with that rapture which poets only know; and, as he gathered together some of the world's pelf, he might dream of dona Caterina, of his native Lisbon, and hope to make her his own when he should return; he could look upon the sky and sea, and the beautiful earth, and feel the loveliness of the creation breathe peace and love around him. But still he was exiled and he was alone; his food was hope; far off expectation, and that too of blessings, which he was never doomed to possess; and as doubtless the human soul does unconsciously receive shadows or sunbeams from the future, so his melancholy mood may often have made him wonder, why on an earth so lovely; beneath so sublime a heaven, he should be doomed to solitude and misfortune.

Thus several years were passed. Whatever the emoluments of his place were, or whatever fortune it was that he amassed, or whatever were the charms of his abode, they did not seduce him to stay a day longer than he was obliged. He obtained leave to return to Goa from, or was invited to do so by, dom Costantino de Braganza, the new viceroy, who had known and entertained friendship for him in Portugal. He embarked carrying with him his little fortune. But here fate at once displayed her unmitigated persecution; he was wrecked at the mouth of the river Mecon, and with difficulty reached the shore; carrying in one hand the manuscript of his poem, while he swam with the other. Every thing else that he possessed in the world was lost.[150]

Camoens was kindly received by the natives who lived on the banks of the Mecon; though he says of them with some scorn--

"The near inhabitants brutishly think That pain and glory, after this life's end Even brute creatures of each kind attend."

yet this very belief may have made them more sympathetic and charitable.

He remained on this coast for a few days after his wreck. And here all commentators agree that he wrote what are called his marvellous and inimitable rendondilhas, which commence by an allusion to the Hebrew psalm of exile, "By the waters of Babylon." Southey rejects absolutely the possibility that this beautiful poem could have been written at such an hour of tumult and uncertainty, and brings as proof, that not only, he does not mention his wreck, nor the kindness he received, for which he evidently felt grateful, but speaks of himself as living in exile.

He soon pursued his voyage to Goa, where the viceroy received him with kindness and distinction; and hope might dawn again upon his heart, and he might expect preferment under dom Constantine de Braganza's patronage, who loved him as a friend. But we are almost forced to believe in the influence of a star, and that which ruled the fate of Camoens was full of storm and wreck, and miserable reverses. Dom Constantine, with whose viceroyalty, Faria tells us, ended all good government in India, the succeeding governors being unable to stem the tide and avarice of extortion, was soon replaced by don Francisco de Coutinho, Conde de Redondo. The poet's enemies took advantage of this change to urge against him an accusation of malversation in the exercise of his office at Macao. Don Francisco was said to be the friend and admirer of the poet, but Mickle, in reprobating his general character, accuses him also of deceit towards Camoens--at least he afforded him no protection on this occasion, and this thrice unhappy man was thrown into prison.

In the seventh canto of the Lusiad, the poet breaks off suddenly in the narrative, as if oppressed by the sense of his own woes; and, forced to give a voice to the anguish that wrung his soul, he recalls images of home and bids them assuage the bitterness of his grief, while he recapitulates the various disasters he had sustained--exclaiming,--

"But, O, blind man I! that, unwise and rude, without your clue, Nymphs of Mondego and the Tagan stream, A course so long, so intricate, pursue. I launch into a boundless ocean, With wind so contrary, that unless you Extend your favours, I have cause to think My brittle bark will in a moment sink.

Behold, how long, whilst I strain all my powers Your Tagus singing, and your Portugal, Fortune, new toils presenting and new sours, Through the world drags me at her chariot's tail: Sometimes committed to sea's rolling towers, Sometimes to bloody dangers martial! Thus I, like desperate Canace of old, My pen in this, my sword in that hand hold.

Now by declined and scorned poverty Degraded, at another's board to eat; Now in possession of a fortune high, Thrown back again, farther than ever yet; Now 'scaped, with my life only, which hung by A single thread, even that a load too great; That 'tis no less a wonder I am here, Than Judah's king's new lease of fifteen year.

Nay more, my Nymphs, I thus being made an isle And rock of want, surrounded by my woes, The same, whom I swam, singing all the while, Gave me for all my verses, but coarse prose: Instead of hoped rest for long exile. Or bays, to crown my head which bald now grows, Unworthy scandals they thereon did hail, Which laid me in a miserable jail.[151]

Camoens was easily enabled to prove the falsehood of the charges of which he was accused. And he would have been set free, but Miguel Rodrigues Coutinho, a man of wealth and consequence, but nicknamed Fios-seccos, detained him in prison for a trifling debt; not more, at the very largest computation, than twenty pounds. He petitioned for his release from the viceroy in some sportive verses, in which he ridicules the character of his creditor. The request was such as a man in adversity might prefer to a friend in power, without humiliation; and though the biographers are chary of attributing the merit of his release to the viceroy, and Mickle even asserts that he owed it "to the shame felt by the gentlemen of Goa," it seems likely that dom Francisco did shew his friendship by enlarging him.

He continued in India, and pursued his military career as a volunteer. On all occasions he displayed undaunted bravery; and his companions in arms loved him for the heroic as well as cheerful spirit which he displayed in all reverses, and during every hardship.

At this period he is supposed to have heard of the death of dona Catarina de Atayde[152], who, in her grave, was not more lost to him than on earth, while such far seas lay between them; yet the thought of her was dear and consolatory. When recording that two blows befell him at the same time, the one the loss of fortune, he continues:--

"And greater ill--the other blow destroyed The gentle one, whom I so deeply loved, Perpetual Recollection of my soul!"[153]

Of Catarina's story we may say, as Shakspeare's Viola does of her own history, it was "a blank." She loved, she wept, she died. Her lover won her heart, and then was driven by fate to other lands at an immeasurable distance, and the course of long years promised no return. He fondly laments and commemorates her loss in poems which breathe tenderness and love in all its purity and truth.[154] He addressed her in that heaven which she had reached, and adjured her:--

"Prefer thy prayer To God, who took thee early to his rest, That it may please him soon amid the blest To summon me, dear maid, to meet thee there."

He had lost all; poverty clung to him, and the last hope of seeing her he loved again, was taken away. Fame and glory only remained. His poem was finished; and weary of hard services in wars--whose objects he condemned, and in reward for which he received but the slender pay of a volunteer--he desired to return to his native country, to publish his poem, and to receive the welcome of his friends, and perhaps the reward of his sovereign. He had left Portugal with an embittered spirit; but his misfortunes in India made him turn with a longing eye to his native land, where he might hope that his enemies would cease to persecute him, and he obtain favour from his sovereign.

Pedro Barreto (a name unlucky for the poet) was appointed governor of Sofala, in the Mozambique, and invited Camoens to accompany him. Whether he offered him an office, or only allured him with the hope of facilitating his return to Portugal, Sofala being on the way, we are not told. It seems likely that Camoens went, induced by the latter motive, and trusting to the friendship of a low-minded and hard-hearted man. Arrived at Sofala, he obtained no situation; it was his place to dine at the governor's table, to follow in his train, and to tell the world that he, a gallant soldier and a poet, who inherited immortality, was the dependant of Pedro Barreto. His proud spirit revolted, and he was content to endure the extreme of poverty, rather than play the servile part of parasite and hanger-on. It is probable that some absolute quarrel ensued, or at least that Barreto was so ill pleased with the independent deportment of the man whom he believed that he held in his power, that he expressed his dissatisfaction with an insolence which Camoens resented. At this juncture some of his Indian friends arrived in the Santa Fé; they found him in a most deplorable condition, dependent on others for his subsistence; in want of clothes and every necessary. They supplied his wants, and invited him to accompany them, a proposal Camoens gladly accepted; when the dastardly and malevolent Barreto refused to permit his departure, until he had been paid 200 ducats, which he alleged he had spent in his behalf. The newly-arrived gentlemen, indignant at this meanness, were only the more eager to rescue their friend out of such a person's hands: they subscribed the money, and as Faria expresses it, "ransomed him; so that at the same time the person of Luis Camoens, and the reputation of Pedro Barreto, were bought and sold at the same price;" and if, as men of genius and virtue fondly think, renown for good or ill in this world is an acquisition to be sought, or to be avoided, even with the loss of life, Pedro Barreto, as he counted his paltry ducats, had better have cast them and himself into the sea, than have put them into his pocket; but even the sea could not have washed out the stain of moral infamy. These friends of Camoens were cavaliers, who loved literature and honoured the writer. Their names have been preserved: Hector da Sylveira, Duarte de Abreu, Diogo de Couto, Antonio Cabral, Antonio Serram, and Luis de Veyga. He was the intimate friend of Hector da Sylveira, who showed himself the most active and friendly, and who contributed the largest share to the payment of the debt, even if he did not, as has been asserted, pay the whole. Sylveira is mentioned in a Barmecide feast, Camoens describes as having given at Goa; and they composed redondillhas and other light verses together. The reputation of Couto is known. He was an historian of great merit.

Camoens felt keenly the depth of adversity in which he had sunk. "Oh, how long drawn out," he exclaims in a sonnet, "year by year, is my weary pilgrimage! I go hastening towards age, while my ills increase; every bright hope becomes a dark deceit, and I follow a good which I never reach. I fail midway in the path, yet falling a thousand times, I have still hoped." And in another, driven by despair into feelings unlike his natural ones, he asks, "where he may find a desert place, unvisited even by the brute creation; some gloomy wood or darksome forest--a place as dismal as his own thoughts, wherein to dwell for ever!"

During the voyage home, however, his spirit revived, refreshed by the kindness and admiration of his friends. They read, they praised, and anticipated success for the "Lusiad." Couto wrote a commentary on it, which was unfortunately lost; and the same writer tells us that Camoens employed himself, on the passage, in composing a work of great erudition and philosophy, which he entitled "Parnasso de Luis Camoens," and which Couto says was stolen from him, and irretrievably lost. Late commentators suppose that this must have been a collection of his minor poems: but as Couto speaks of its erudition, and had read it, he would have been aware of this, and expressed himself differently.

The sanguine spirit of the poet, to whom kindness was medicine, and the hope of fame the dearest joy, again dared look forward--again he trusted. [Sidenote: 1569. Ætat. 45.] A young and gallant monarch had just ascended the throne, and he hoped to propitiate his favour by his patriotic work. The moment of his landing, however, was unfavourable; for the plague was raging at Lisbon, and the minds of even the great and prosperous were absorbed by the fear of death. The political state of the kingdom was also disadvantageous. Sebastian had succeeded to the crown when only three years old. The queen, Catherine of Austria, had been appointed regent by the will of the late king; but the cardinal Henrique, uncle to the infant sovereign, so disgusted her with his intrigues, that she resigned her power in his favour. Henrique did not show himself unworthy of the trust; but as Sebastian grew up, the courtiers around him were eager that he should take the government of the kingdom into his own hands. Sebastian's own heart was set on military glory and conquests in Africa: a project favoured by all the young and ambitious, and deprecated by the experienced, who saw only a useless expenditure of life and money in the design. The cardinal, meanwhile, endeavoured to prolong his sway. Camoens must have found it difficult to trim his sail between the actual power of the cardinal and the anticipated influence of the favourites of the king. He wrote the verses in which he dedicates his poem to the young monarch; he corrected and polished it; but the publication lingered, and it was two years after his return to his native country before it appeared. It was hailed with enthusiasm, and reprinted within the year. [Sidenote: 1571. Ætat. 47.] The king heard of it, it is said, and granted the poet a pension of 15,000 reis--about five pounds sterling--and required him to live within the precincts of the court, and obtain its payment half-yearly. A soldier who had fought as Camoens had done for his country, would have had his sufferings and mutilation better rewarded. It has been impossible to discover what occasioned the paltriness of the grant; if, indeed, it was not his half-pay as a military man, rather than a pension given to the poet. Some commentators fancy that the cardinal scowled on the poem, as likely to excite the martial ardour of the king, which he wished to repress. This fear almost seems to have gone the length of withholding the book altogether; for had Sebastian read the poem, he would surely have found in it a voice that echoed the emotions of his own heart, and would have regarded its writer with more favour; and when he sailed on his ill-fated expedition to Africa, and selected Diego Bernardes to accompany him as his poet, he would rather have chosen a man who could so well achieve and so well describe deeds of arms, as Camoens had proved that he could do.[155]

But in mentioning this we anticipate. Sebastian did not undertake his fatal expedition until the lapse of several years. Meanwhile the darkest shadows clouded the poet's fate. No court favour, no preferment was extended to him. Her he loved was dead; his poem was finished, published, read, admired; yet it proved barren of any advantage, except what he must have felt to be empty reputation, to its unfortunate writer. The poetry of his life faded before realities the most heartbreaking and oppressive. He continued to reside at Lisbon. He did not write, for he had fallen into a state of ill-health, the consequence of the many hardships he had endured, and the climate of India. He lived, he says, "in the knowledge of many, and the society of few." He enjoyed the acquaintance and conversation of some learned men, who belonged to the convent of S. Domingos de Lisboa, near which he lived.

The most melancholy circumstances attended his last days. He was sick and poor; his very life was supported by charity. His servant Antonio, a native of Java, by whom some say his life was saved when wrecked on the coast of Cochin, whom he had brought with him from India, was accustomed to steal out at night, and beg for bread, to support his miserable master during the following day.

While in this afflicting state, a fidalgo, Ruy Diaz de Camara, paid him a visit in his wretched dwelling, to complain that he had not fulfilled a promise which the poet had made of translating the penitential psalms. Camoens regarded with resentment the man who could urge him to write while starving. "When I wrote those verses," he replied, "I was young, well off, and in love; I possessed the affection of many friends, and was favoured of ladies, which imparted a poetic fire. Now I have neither spirit nor peace of mind for any thing. There stands my Javanese, who asks me for two pieces, to buy fuel, and I have none to give him." We are told, though it seems incredible, that "the cavalier closed his heart and purse and quitted the room." Thus shewing himself as base-minded as he was silly. Yet even in this state, so keen and patriotic were the poet's feelings, that his illness is said to have been increased by the tidings of Sebastian's overthrow and death in Africa.

Prophesying that the ruin of his country would result from this defeat, he says, in a letter written at that time,--"At least I shall die with it!"--and this sad reflection was a consolation. Southey conjectures that those friends who were kindest to him perished in this defeat, and that thus he lost that aid which had hitherto stood between him and absolute want.

[Sidenote: 1778. Ætat. 54.]

At length illness and suffering reduced him to so low a state that he was incapable of all exertion. He felt that his death was near, and, as a last effort, he expressed in a letter some of the bitter feelings excited by the miserable circumstances with which it came attended. [Sidenote: 1779. Ætat. 55.] "Who ever heard," he says, "that fortune should wish to represent such vast misfortunes on the little theatre of a poor bed! and I, as if they were not sufficient, make myself her ally; for it would appear effrontery to attempt to resist such ill."

But the last scene was saddest of all. He breathed his last in an hospital. The month and day of his decease are alike unknown. The sheet in which he was shrouded was the gift of a noble, Don Francisco de Portugal, whose name deserves no praise for so meagre an offering to the dead, whose life a small portion of wealth might have rendered easy. A moralising monk watched his last hours. "How miserable a thing," he writes, "to see so great a genius so ill rewarded! I saw him die in a hospital at Lisbon, without possessing a shroud to cover his remains, after having borne arms victoriously in India, and having sailed 5500 leagues:--a warning for those who weary themselves by studying night and day without profit, as the spider who spins his web to catch flies."[156]

After his death his body was removed to the church of Santa Anna, where he was interred; but no tomb or monumental inscription marked the spot, till sixteen years after his death, don Gonçalo Coutinho placed a stone to his memory, with this inscription--

HERE LIES LOUIS DE CAMOENS, PRINCE OF THE POETS OF HIS TIME. HE LIVED POOR AND MISERABLE, AND THUS DIED, IN THE YEAR MDLXXIX.