II

THE year 1542 is usually considered. that in which Camões left Coimbra for Lisbon. One of the chief elements in the calculation of dates for this period of his life is his remark, in the letter Desejei tanto, that when he left Lisbon for India in March 1553 he had undergone 3,000 days of gossip, slander, and ill-will. As this must refer to his stay at Lisbon, the biographers have conscientiously subtracted about a year for his banishment in the Ribatejo and two years for his service in North Africa, so that the eight years or 3,000 days would indicate 1542 as the date of his arrival at Lisbon. But it is really doubtful whether the poet would be so meticulous. By 'over 3,000 days' he must have meant the eight years or so since he had left the quiet of his beloved

Coimbra, the saudosos campos do Mondego, and gone forth into the world. The olhar sereno and gesto delicado as well as the saudosos campos held him captive, but for those unblessed with this world's goods it had become essential in the sixteenth century to repair to Lisbon in search of a career, and thither, perhaps in 1545, at the age of twenty-one (Miguel Leitão de Andrade was twenty-three when he left Coimbra in 1578), Camões now turned, leaving his heart and perhaps his home behind him, and saying good-bye to many friends, including his cousins Bento and Simão Vaz de Camões. His relations with the latter, who was, like himself, a cavaleiro fidalgo, were probably resumed a few years later. Simão Vaz became a special favourite of the young Prince João (1537-54), so devoted a patron of letters. The prince was only eight in 1545, so that, whatever hopes his intimacy with Simão Vaz may have raised in the poet's mind later, it could hardly have begun early enough to assist him on his first arrival at

The

Lisbon or to introduce him at Court. That even towards the end of the prince's life Simão Vaz did not live permanently at Lisbon is proved by the fact that, when arrested at Lisbon for an offence committed at Coimbra, he had come thither on business from Coimbra (30). June 15, 1553, is not the date of his arrest, but the date of the document giving the reason of his arrest, a very different matter. offence alleged in this document-breaking into the convent of Santa Anna at Coimbra-may have been committed considerably earlier. Weavers of hypothesis might even infer that Simão Vaz, relying on the prince's favour, was making a last effort on behalf of the poet to communicate with the testa de neve e de ouro at Coimbra. It is curious that Simão Vaz should in June 1553 be confined in the Lisbon prison which his cousin Luis had left but three months earlier. The poet's imprisonment, however, brings us to one of the solid facts of his biography, and we are first confronted with a whole series of

more or less plausible suppositions and traditions. Dr Storck believes that he left Coimbra in 1542 and became tutor to the young D. Antonio de Noronha, son of the second Conde de Linhares, that D. Francisco de Noronha who, as Ambassador in France, had Francisco de Moraes, the author of Palmeirim de Inglaterra, on his staff and married into the literary family of the Treasurer of João III, his young wife, D. Violante, being sister of the historian Francisco de Andrade and of the mystic Frei Thomé de Jesus. This connexion with the Noronhas would bring Camões into relations with prominent men of letters as well as with the great families of the Court. There is no evidence in favour of the theory, in itself plausible enough, except the fact that Camões knew and liked D. Antonio de Noronha, one of the most promising young men of the day, and mourned his early death in North Africa in sonnet and eclogue. This acquaintance, however, can be easily explained by the well-known fact that

D. Antonio was another favourite of the young Prince João. The biographers who bring Camões to Lisbon in 1542 and place his first exile in 1549 have nothing with which to fill these seven long years. Camões spends them instilling wisdom. into that precocious youth D. Antonio, precocious even for that time (his mother) married when she was twelve) if he began studying under Camões in 1542: he was only seventeen when killed at Ceuta on April 18, 1553. Others place Camões' exile earlier, and believe that he returned to, not left, Lisbon in 1549, and, although we can here merely choose among hypotheses, the latter chronology seems the more probable. Whether Camões was actually introduced at Court or not, it is clear that he would be so far admitted to the palace as to watch the doings of the inner circle after the fashion of the young fidalgos in Jorge Ferreira's Aulegrafia, one of whom so singularly reminds the reader of Luis de Camões. When he first arrived in Lisbon he would, as cavaleiro fidalgo,