Portuguese literatureBell, Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald)
History
Portuguese literature
Bell, Aubrey F. G. (Aubrey Fitz Gerald)
Portuguese literature -- History and criticism
expulsion and the cruel treatment of the Jews, or the massacre of new
Christians, or the account of Ethiopia, he broadens out into moving
and detailed description. The result is that this long Chronicle of
King Manuel is a number of excellent separate treatises rather than
a history with unity and a sense of proportion. It is the work of a
scholar who likes to describe directly, from his own experience. The
_Cronica do Principe_ was written some months before that of King
Manuel. The latter was a difficult undertaking,[498] for many persons
concerned were still alive, and subjects such as the expulsion of the
Jews needed delicate handling. For thirty-one years it had hung fire
in the hands of previous chroniclers when in 1558 Cardinal Henrique
entrusted it to Damião de Goes. After eight years the four parts were
ready for press,[499] but the difficulties were not yet over, for
certain chapters met with strong disapproval at Court[500] and had to
be altered, so that two editions of the first part appeared in 1566
(the first being apparently submitted as a proof and not for sale), but
the publication of the work as a whole was not completed before 1567.
Scarcely less celebrated than Goes, the archaeologist LUCIO ANDRÉ DE
RESENDE (1493?-1573),[501] friend of Goes, Clenardus, and Erasmus, left
the Dominican convent of Bemfica, in which he was a novice, in order
to study abroad, at Salamanca, Paris, and Louvain. ‘Tall, with very
large eyes, curling hair, rather dark complexion but of a cheerful,
open countenance’, living in his house (_as casas de Resende_) at
Evora among his books and coins, statues and inscriptions--his small
garden hedged with _marmores antigos_ as, according to Brito, too
often were peasants’ vine-yards--he exercised a considerable influence
on the writers of his time[502] and was held in high esteem by the
Emperor Charles V and by King João III. The principal of his own works
were written in Latin, but besides his _De Antiquitatibus Lusitaniae_
(1593), which was edited by Mendez de Vasconcellos with the addition of
a fifth book from notes left by the author, he composed in Portuguese
a ‘brief but learned’ _Historia da Antiguidade da Cidade de Evora_
(1553). In his _Vida do Infante Dom Duarte_ (1789)[503] he did not
write the ‘very copious history’ which Paiva de Andrade[504] said the
subject required. He did better, for this sketch of a few pages is a
little masterpiece in which the vignettes, for instance, of the boatman
and his figs, or the meal in the mill, must ever retain their vividness
and charm. Resende had been the prince’s tutor and writes of what he
saw; he shows that he could decipher a person’s character as keenly as
a Latin inscription. Resende’s legitimate successor in archaeology,
MANUEL SEVERIM DE FARIA (1583-1655), scarcely belongs to the sixteenth
century although he wrote verses in 1598 and 1599. He succeeded his
uncle as Canon (1608) and Precentor (1609) of Evora Cathedral and
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