It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges have felt for the _Lusiads_.[23] The pathetic circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580), are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the _Lusiads_ is supplied by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope; but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which has been claimed for the _Lusiads_ is not great in a writer who had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied--and no one need wish to deny--that Camoens wrote his own language with great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the _Lusiads_ suffer from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us endure its essential absurdity. The _Lusiads_ has, in fact, the defect of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula--that it is very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]