poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French contemporary Monluc. The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the pre-eminence which mediæval French had had among neighbouring peoples. Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian--even Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a world-wide reputation.” [SN: _The_ Lusiads.]