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The first 390 years of it from 1240 to 1632 saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal; Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in England.
Towards the close of the sixteenth century the Portuguese appeared upon the scene, and settled themselves at Macao, the ownership of which has been a bone of contention between China and Portugal ever since. It is a delightful spot, with an excellent climate, not very far from Canton, and was for some time the residence of the renowned poet Camoens.
The poet, as Keats tells us, "pours out a balm upon the world," and in this, his darkest hour, Burton found relief, as he had so often found it, in the pages of his beloved Camoens. Gradually his spirits revived, and he began to revolve new schemes. Indeed, he was never the man to sit long in gloom or to wait listlessly for the movement of fortune's wheel.
The African, with blunt features, thick lips, and woolly hair, sits on the marble steps of the palace in the capital of Portugal, and begs: he is the submissive slave of Camoens, and but for him, and for the copper coins thrown to him by the passers by, his master, the poet of the "Lusiad," would die of hunger. Now, a costly monument marks the grave of Camoens. There is a new picture.
And to this narrowness of mediæval notions of outdoor life, inherited together with mediæval subjects by the poets even of the sixteenth century, must be referred the curious difference existing between the romance poets of antiquity, like Homer in the Odyssey, and the romance poets Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Camoens of modern times, in the matter of how shall I express it? the ideal life, the fortunate realms, the "Kennaqwhere."
It is to be found in the Lusiadas of Camoens, and indicates the culminating point of Portuguese discovery in Africa, as celebrated by the national poet.
Passages from Camoens were frequently in his mouth, and in bitterest moments, in the times of profoundest defection, he could always find relief in the pages of him whom he reverently calls "my master." Later in life he could see a parallel between the thorny and chequered career of Camoens and his own.
Having visited Uriconium, the English Pompeii, the Burtons made for Vichy, where they met Mr. Sartoris. His companions on this journey, as on so many others, were two books one being the anodynous Camoens, the other a volume consisting of the Bible, Shakespeare and Euclid bound together, which looked, with its three large clasps, like a congested Church Service. Mrs.
His family removed thither in March 1652, and during his residence there he amused himself in literary pursuits, and translated Luis de Camoens.
Lucan tried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even more faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is it, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery is valuable?
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