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Updated: May 17, 2025
The garden and grotto were interesting, and the bronze bust which rests on a block whereon is engraved a poem to Macao by an English scholar, Sir John Bowring, is fine in design and execution. It is interesting to note that through "The Lusiads" Camoëns was permitted to return to Portugal to end his days, he having been banished twice because his views were too outspoken.
Macao's chief claim to renown is its association with Camoëns, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century, whose epic poem, "The Lusiads," has been translated into most known languages. This poem was written during his ten years' residence in Macao, and the garden, grotto, and bust of Camoëns are all a memorial tribute from a fellow countryman, Lorenco Marques.
Poisonous plants covered the site of the Viceregal Palace, and monster bats hung by their heels at the corners of tombs. Thoughts of Camoens continued to impinge on his mind, and in imagination he saw his hero dungeoned and laid in iron writing his Lusiads. A visit to the tomb of St. Francis Xavier also deeply moved him. To pathos succeeded comedy.
This cause, in the "Æneid," is the founding of Rome; in the "Jerusalem Liberated" it is the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; in the "Faerie Queene" it is the triumph of the virtues over the vices; in the "Lusiads" it is the discovery and conquest of the Indies; in the "Divine Comedy" it is the salvation of the human soul.
In September Burton visited Calicut the city above all others associated with Camoens, and here he had the pleasure of studying on the spot the scenes connected with the momentous landing of Da Gama as described in the seventh and most famous book of the Lusiads.
We were earlier in our return than we had at first intended, as Parliament was called together so soon; but our house was not ready, and my family had to stay in the country for some little time. It is very good of you to send me the Lusiads. I am keeping them for those delightful days of quiet and enjoyment which are to be had sometimes in the country, but not in these stormy days in London.
If Spenser, instead of losing himself in mazes of allegoric romance, had sung of Crécy and Agincourt, of Drake, Frobisher, and Raleigh, he might have given us a national epic in the same sense in which the term applies to The Lusiads. With such a history, so written in stone and song, what wonder if pride of race is one of the mainsprings of Portuguese character!
Burton had brought with him to Egypt his translation of The Lusiads, which had been commenced as early as 1847, and at which, as we have seen, he had, from that time onward, intermittently laboured. At Cairo he gave his work the finishing touches, and on his return to Trieste in May it was ready for the press.
He most creditably utilised this period of enforced rest by writing The Lusiads, a poem which his countrymen are inclined to over rate.
So in the Lusiads, while the conflict and the crisis, as shown in the national energy of colonization in the East, are clear, the machinery of the heavenly plot frankly reverts to mythologic and pagan forms and loses all credibility.
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