But the most remarkable of all Caminha’s works are his epitaphs and epigrams, of which no Portuguese poet has bequeathed so many to posterity. His _Epitafios_ which amount to eighty-one, and his _Epigrammas_ which exceed two hundred and fifty in number, are almost all written in octave verse. In these little pictures of reflection and sentiment, which derive so much of their value from correctness and elegance, a limited fancy aided by solid taste is capable of rising above the level of prose. The labour which Andrade Caminha bestowed on the composition of his epitaphs and epigrams, sufficiently proves that he felt what was his proper vocation at the foot of Parnassus. But even there he could not travel without a guide, and the spirit of his age induced him to choose Ausonius for his conductor. He had, like Ausonius, sufficient talent for the proper keeping of the tenderness, precision and energy which distinguish the serious epigram of the Greeks; but in his imitation of the style of the Greek epigram, he missed the refined correctness of Ausonius by confounding poetic with prosaic simplicity. Of the eighty-one epitaphs which Caminha composed in honour of celebrated and exalted individuals, not one can claim an equal rank with the best ancient productions of the same kind. In most of them the reader finds only dry encomiums accompanied by trivial reflections.[190] In others the ideas rise but very little above the level of the commonest observation.[191] In Caminha’s epitaphs the result of the epigrammatic compound of the ideas, where he wishes to be uncommon, has sometimes a singularly frigid effect; as, for example, when speaking of the hero Affonso d’Albuquerque, he pompously says: “He sprang from kings, he honoured kings, and he subdued kings.”[192] Even the language of powerful feeling sinks, as in the epitaph on Ferreira, beneath the common place of the reflections.[193] The serious epigrams are more ingenious, though even they are, for the most part, merely agreeable plays of fancy.[194] In some the formality of the diction produces a very happy effect; in others the epigrammatic expression of feeling displays an astonishing degree of romantic intensity;[195] a few are truly excellent.[196] To this last class, however, the comic epigrams of Caminha do not belong. A truly comic turn of thought is scarcely ever to be found in them, and it is only occasionally that they betray a poignant conceit.[197] But it must be acknowledged that a poet of more fertile fancy would find it difficult to write nineteen strictly comic epigrams on an ugly face, (_a uma feissima_.) BERNARDES.