authority, and satirizes those who have a title to their name but no deeds to match (108). He satirizes, too, among others, the dandies (109) and censorious critics (andão emendando o mundo e não se emendão a si). He himself possessed all the conditions for ideal happiness. He was an intense lover of Nature, and content with little, asking only for books and quiet study. Witty and melancholy, like so many of his countrymen, his impressionable nature made him a prince of lovers. If we may believe his biographers he was passionately in love with the lady of the gold hair at Coimbra, three, or at least two, D. Caterinas de Ataide at Lisbon, Dinamene, Nise, and the Chinese captive, the slave-girl Barbara, and the Princess Maria. 'Em varias flammas variamente ardia' (110). But although we know how beautiful could be the verse elicited by his passing devotion to a slave-girl (not necessarily black), tradition has rightly made his love and life centre round one figure, the testa de neve e de ouro, early

parted from him. Camões with money and happiness might have continued to live quietly in the florida terra, but he would not have written his incomparable lyrics. A cruel fate drove him from the crystal streams, the lovely woods and hills of Coimbra, first to the intrigues of Lisbon, then to the hardships of Africa, and finally! to the Babel beyond the seas, exiled from Sion:

Ca nesta Babylonia donde mana

Materia a quanto mal o mundo cria... Ca neste escuro caos de confusão Cumprindo o curso estou da natureza. Vé se me esquecerei de ti, Sião! (111)

He must have found that his new life had its compensations and that for so ardent a lover of his country a career of action and hard blows and broadening acquaintance with the far-flung empire was not without value. Otherwise he could scarcely have preserved his keenness and turned his experience to such marvellous account in his verse. His poems and a few books

went with him in his wanderings (112). The depth of his learning, shown so lightly and gracefully in his poems, has struck all his readers, and, although no doubt acquired early in life, it could only have been kept alive by an eager mind and a wonderful memory. But it was natural that he should sing of the instability and injustices of fortune and the constant change and decay of all mortal things. Camões, by nature very human, sensitive, contemplative, as it were quietly passionate, could adapt himself to circumstance. His lyric gift could turn to satire, and he preserved his gaiety in Lisbon and India. in order not to appear 'an owl among sparrows', although all the while he might be 'thirty or forty leagues away in the wilderness of thought' (113). In his youth in Lisbon he was prompt enough| with word or sword, so that his friends could call him the Swashbuckler. He was, one might say, overdoing his part, and the increasing sense of instability might tempt him to recklessness. The

true Camões remained behind this mask, ready for fresh suffering and devotion, till a long series of misfortunes brought him back to Lisbon, cold, weary, and disillusioned, dead to the world. He had genius and does not seem to have been wholly incapable of minting it into talents for daily use; he had courage and endurance, he made many friends: why was he not materially more successful? The Couto MS. speaks of his natureza terrivel, we hear of his complaining about the nonpayment of his pension, although any such asperity must have been the result, not the cause, of his failure. But he probably had that disinterested love of plain speaking which is the terror of officials, and although he could write to a great nobleman like the Count of Cascaes, asking for the rest of his promised gift, since he had only received the half of one stuffed chicken out of six (iv. 94), or to a fidalgo for a promised shirt (iv. 55), he was perhaps essentially too independent and critical of those in authority (every one will remember

a score of famous passages in the Lusiads, cf. iii. 84, vi. 98, vii. 80-7, viii. 41, 54, ix. 27-9, x. 24, 25) to find favour, while the original manner of his going to India was against him. If Mariz' account of his liberality and extravagance is not a mere phrase (114) of the kind considered indispensable by early biographers or eulogists, Camões did not methodically build up his fortune, or, when he did, shipwreck intervened. But indeed the example of Galvão before he sailed, or of Mendez Pinto and Gaspar Corrêa later, might have told him all that he could wish to know about the prospects of a penniless Portuguese beyond the seas, and Camões was not the first man of exceptional gifts who returned broken from India. The great prizes went not to talent, but to the great fidalgos. A character so impulsive, loyal, and affectionate as that of Camões, so responsive to passing events, must inevitably have become blunted by eight years of Lisbon and seventeen years of India in that age, and when at last he found leisure