143, 144) and the work ends with twelve stanzas addressed to King Sebastian (x.) 145-56). It will be seen that Voltaire was right in describing the Lusiads as 'une nouvelle espèce d'épopée'. It is a bundle of episodes, and on the central theme, Gama's voyage of discovery, is hung with great skill the whole of Portugal's glorious history. Gama is present throughout, and the time of the action is eighteen months (March 1498 to September 1499). Although present throughout, Gama is, however, not prominent. Camões could sum up a character or a situation in a concentrated phrase, and if the critics, as Burton remarked (124), find him poor in character painting', that is partly because it was not his object to sing of one hero but of a thousand, while the time of the poem really covers many centuries. With a fine audacity Camões begins his poem with the words As armas e os barões: arms and the men I sing, as compared with Virgil's Arma virumque (125). He takes for his subject a whole

nation, and as a result his epic, like Milton's Paradise Lost, is without a hero. On such lines it required true genius to compose a spirited and living poem. The voyage of Gama gives a faint unity of action and the sense of proportion is as a rule maintained. Exception has been taken to the long story of Magriço, but it should be noted that the action is not interrupted, the ships are sailing on o'er seas before untraversed while the story is being told. On the other hand the eighth canto is stationary, and in Paulo da Gama's narrative we go back to the third canto. No doubt Camões had found that there was too much material to be included in that canto if the proportion of the poem was to be preserved; patriotism forbade its omission, aesthetic sense reserved it for a later place. Others find fault with the artificial presentment of the globe in the last canto as a piece of dead matter in the living flow of the poem. The introduction of the heathen gods was early impugned and the Censor (126) was care

ful to point out that they were demons. To us the artistic lapse in this respect is the passage in which the poet goes out of his way to explain that these gods are fabulous and have no existence outside the poet's mind. Yet to Camões' pagan Renaissance sense of beauty they were very real, and but for the intervention of Venus the Portuguese would have ended their enterprise at Mombasa. We must, however, excuse what was evidently an afterthought, intended to win the good graces of the Censor. It has been objected, again, that Camões' poem is imitative. For the general plan as well as for many details of the execution he went to Virgil, for the matter to many contemporary literary sources. So various indeed are the sources, so rich is the poem in history, geography, and mythology, that one marvels to think that most of it must have been composed far from a library, and one marvels too at the way Camões gives even the closest imitation a magic of his own and lightly and

triumphantly bears aloft a burden of learning on the wings of his genius. The style in which the Lusiads is composed has been praised and blamed. Portuguese critics often hold that real poetic diction in Portugal begins with Camões, and it is true that Portuguese poets had hitherto written for a narrower circle. Writers who wished to be more widely read used Latin or Spanish. When the Bishop of Silves published his Latin chronicle of King Manuel's reign in 1571 it did not cover different ground from that of Goes' Portuguese chronicle, but being in Latin it aspired to penetrate 'per omnes Reipublicae Christianae regiones'. Camões was a universal poet, and, writing in Portuguese, he enlarged the language to make it an instrument capable and worthy of its higher responsibilities and the new place of Portugal in the world. His introduction of latinisms did not impair the vigour of his own verse, but it led to abuses later. Camões had prayed for 'hua furia grande e sonorosa' (Caminha

is supposed to refer to Camões in one of his epigrams: 'dizes que um poeta ha de ter furia') and an 'estilo grandilocuo e corrente', and very occasionally he falls into that turgidity which became so pronounced in later Portuguese, but as a rule his style is clear, direct, and natural, the despair of the translators. More serious than these alleged defects are the prosaic lines and passages and slovenly rhymes in the Lusiads. Often three successive rhymes are formed by the past tense of a verb: -avam, -avam, -avam; but Camões was too natural a poet to set great store by the rhyme, and the transparent flow of his verse does not in fact depend on any such artificial aid. It was inevitable that a poem so closely bound to reality should sometimes brush the ground; the wonder is that it soars so often: the poet's patriotic fervour and furia give it an epic spiritanda rapidity, an immortalis velocitas, which carries the reader over the weaker stanzas, some of which, when observed separately, are found to be halting and