Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !

Updated: June 17, 2025


Letter to Miss Bishop from Trieste, December 5, 1881. 3. This refers to Camoens: the Commentary, Life, and Lusiads. Englished by R. F. Burton. Two vols. Containing a Glossary, and Reviewers Reviewed, by Isabel Burton. 1880. 4. From her devotional book Lamed, pp. 28, 29. 5. Life of Sir Richard Burton, by Isabel his wife, vol.ii., p. 248.

Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epic poetry; Camoens and Tasso did this the chief subject of the Lusiads is even contemporary history. But evidently success in these cases was due to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of history were combined with a strange and mysterious geography.

But the advantage Camoens has over Tasso seems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensible subject of the Lusiads glows with the truth of experience. But the real subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the real subject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and in both poets the inmost theme is broadly the same.

It is doubtful whether, since the eleventh century and Hildebrand and William the Conqueror, the European stage has been occupied simultaneously by two such men as Chatham and the king of Prussia. The same delight in power, the same glory in dominion, pulsate in the Lusiads and in the dramas of Marlowe, but Marlowe was by far the wider in his intellectual range.

Word Of The Day

dishelming

Others Looking