quaintly alluring eclogues of Ribeiro and Sá de Miranda, with the works of Fernam Lopez, described by Robert Southey as ‘the best chronicler of any age or nation’, _naïf, exact, touchant et philosophe_[21]; of Gil Vicente, almost as far above his contemporary Juan del Enzina as Shakespeare is above Vicente; of Bernardim Ribeiro, whose _Menina e moça_ is the earliest and best of those pastoral romances which led Don Quixote to contemplate a quieter sequel to his first adventures; of Camões, ‘not only the greatest lyric poet of his country, but one of the greatest lyric poets of all time’[22]; with Fernam Mendez Pinto’s travels, ‘as diverting a book of the kind as ever I read’[23]; or Corrêa’s _Lendas_, Frei Thomé de Jesus’ _Trabalhos_, or the incomparable prose of Manuel Bernardes--know that, extraordinary as were Portugal’s achievements in discovery and conquest, her literature is not unworthy of those achievements. Unhappily the Portuguese, with a notorious carelessness,[24] have in the past set the example of neglecting their literature, and even to-day scarcely seem to realize their great possessions and still greater possibilities in the realm of prose.[25] The excessive number of writers, the excessive production of each individual writer, and the _desleixo_ by which innumerable books and manuscripts of exceptional interest have perished, are all traceable to the same source: the lack of criticism. A nation of poets, essentially lyrical,[26] with no dramatic genius but capable of writing charmingly and naturally without apparent effort, needed and needs a severely classical education and stern critics, to remind them that an epic is not rhymed history nor blank verse mangled prose, that in bucolic poetry the half is greater than the whole, and to bid them abandon abstractions for the concrete and particular and crystallize the vague flow of their talent. But in Portugal, outside the circle of writers themselves, a reading public has hitherto hardly existed, and in the close atmosphere resulting the sense of proportion was inevitably lost, even as a stone and a feather will fall with equal speed in a vacuum. The criticism has been mainly personal,[27] contesting the originality or truthfulness of a writer, without considering the literary merits of his work. To deprecate such criticism became a commonplace of the preface, while numerous passages in writers of the sixteenth century show that they feared their countrymen’s scepticism, expressed in the proverb _De longas vias mui longas mentiras_, which occurs as early as the thirteenth century.[28] The fear of slovenly or prolix composition was not present in the same degree. But these are defects that may be remedied partly by individual critics, partly by the increasing number of readers. Meanwhile this little book may perhaps serve to corroborate the poet Falcão de Resende’s words: Engenhos nascem bons na Lusitania E ha copia delles.[29] FOOTNOTES: