perfectly resemble the sonnets, canções, and similar poems with which in reality they constitute one species. Passages in the Spanish language are occasionally interspersed. In the collected works of Camoens, a separation is made of his poems in the Italian style and the Italian syllabic measure, from those which are composed in redondilhas, and which afford examples of an improved national style. In this style also he has enriched every species of poetic composition practised in Portugal and Spain. Much and justly celebrated are the redondilhas in which he poured forth the inmost feelings of his soul, on his return from Macao to Goa, after he had narrowly escaped death by shipwreck.[176] The number of his smaller poems, in all the possible forms of the old lyric style, proves how much, as a poet, he was attached to his native country. Romantic, gallant and comic plays of fancy and wit, glossed mottos in the Spanish style, voltas[177] in the genuine Portuguese manner, and other poetic trifles in the Portuguese and Spanish languages, appear to have been dealt out at every opportunity with a profuse hand by Camoens. In these compositions he paid no rigid attention to the correctness and elegance of the ideas, and indeed no mental sport of this kind seems to have been too homely for him. He even composed in honour of a lady, a romantic mythological _a b c_ in redondilhas, in which, in correspondence with the initial letters, the names Artemisia, Cleopatra, Dido, Eurydice, Phædra, (spelt Fedra, according to the Italianized orthography of Camoens) Galatæa, &c. are played on in succession. But in some of these compositions, the simplicity and amenity of the old lyric style are combined with a peculiar grace, which alternately defies[178] and disarms[179] the severity of criticism.