But in the poetry of Camoens the national style is combined with correctness and elegance, precisely in the manner which suited the taste of his country: and Portuguese taste has never risen above the degree of cultivation to which Camoens attained. In sonnets the fancy of Camoens was particularly prolific. Like Tasso, he seems throughout the whole of his life to have made it a rule to compose sonnets as long as he could compose verse. The number of his sonnets which have been preserved is three hundred and one. Some appear to be occasional sonnets; and of these several are written in fictitious names. It is known that, in India, Camoens was frequently applied to for poetic aid in affairs of the heart; for according to the spirit of the age a lover could not more elegantly recommend himself to the good graces of a fair lady than by the composition of a tender sonnet; and a poet, like Camoens, who was himself so often poetically occupied with his amatory feelings, would find but little difficulty in celebrating another lady besides his own mistress. Most of his sonnets have love for their theme, and they are of very unequal merit: some are full of Petrarchic tenderness and grace, and moulded with classic correctness; others are impetuous and romantic, or disfigured by false learning, or full of tedious pictures of the conflicts of passion with reason. Upon the whole, however, no Portuguese poet has so correctly seized the character of the sonnet as Camoens. Without apparent effort, merely by the ingenious contrast of the first eight with the six last fines, he knew how to make these little effusions convey a poetic unity of ideas and impressions, after the model of the best Italian sonnets, in so natural a manner, that the first lines or quartets of the sonnet excite a soft expectation, which is harmoniously fulfilled by the tercets or six last lines.[168] In this way he has occasionally imparted a romantically beautiful effect to well known stories in the sonnet form, by the introduction of a single tender idea at the close.[169] Among these sonnets there are likewise some of a moral and religious character. In the series of the minor poems of Camoens, the sonnets are succeeded by seventeen _Canções_ (songs) written on the model of Petrarch’s canzoni. These compositions more particularly prove how deeply Camoens was penetrated with the spirit of the Petrarchic poetry. They also display the utmost elegance of language, combined with the soft harmony of the Italian verse.[170] In these canções, as well as in the other poems of Camoens, the painting of natural scenery, wherever the lyric picture embraces it, presents a character of lively perception, which never could be imitated in the closet by any laboured exercise of the imagination.[171]