in this legendary figure, granted him two bushels of wheat in January 1583, and in July of the same year he died. He had long before left the Company of Jesus, either of his own free will or expelled, perhaps on suspicion of Jewish descent.[517] His name was erased from the Company’s records and letters. Of his twenty-one years of trader, envoy, pirate, and missionary in the far East he wrote for his children a narrative of breathless interest, and, speaking generally, it bears the stamp of truth. We gather that he was brave and adventurous, despite a natural timidity, of a consuming curiosity which often got the better of his fears, pious, temperate, apt to be carried away by fugitive enthusiasms, but persistent, gay, and optimistic in defeat and disappointment. He appears not to have been particularly vain. He does not disguise some of his less creditable actions, and he certainly does not exaggerate his services in Japan.[518] He may possibly have been one of the three Portuguese who discovered it in 1542: their names are given by Couto (V. viii. 12) as Mota, Zeimoto and Peixoto. Gifted with keen imagination, he could exaggerate[519] when expediency required, but he knew that in the account of his travels exaggeration was not expedient, and he was constantly on guard against the notorious scepticism of his fellow-countrymen.[520] He may have heightened the colour occasionally, but as a rule he writes with restraint, although with delight in a good story and skill in bringing out the dramatic side of events. It is one of the charms of his work that it is very definite in dates and figures, but this also, through inevitable errors and misprints, afforded a handle to the pedantry of critics. The fatal similarity of Mendez and mendacity gave rise to the play on his name: _Fernam, mentes? Minto_ (‘Fernam, do you lie?--I lie’), and Congreve, in _Love for Love_, by calling him ‘a liar of the first magnitude’ clinched the matter in England. But comparatively early a reaction set in,[521] and modern travellers have unequivocally confirmed the more favourable verdict and corroborated his detailed descriptions of Eastern countries. The mystery of the East, the heavy scent of its cities, its fervent rites and immemorial customs, as well as the magic of adventure, haunt his pages. A hundred pictures refuse to fade from the memory, whether they are of silk-laden Chinese junks or jars of gold dust, vivid descriptions of shipwreck (the hiss and swell of the waves are in his rich sea-Latin) or the awful pathos of the Queen of Martavão’s death, the sketch of a supercilious Chinese mandarin or of St. Francis Xavier tramping through Japan.