peculiar faculty for getting into debt and making enemies; and he now devoted himself to the final recension of his “Lusiads.” The first edition of the great poem was published in 1572, but the fame it at once acquired did little good to the author, who was only granted a pension of £3 8s. 0d. a year, equivalent perhaps to £20 in modern money. The later years of Camoens were utterly miserable; poor and neglected, the arch-poet of Portugal had to subsist upon what his Javan slave could beg for him at night in the streets of Lisbon. He lived long enough to hear of the disaster of Alcacer Quibir, and of the death of Dom Sebastian, but he was spared the pain of seeing the Spaniards ruling over the fatherland whose glories he had sung, for he died in a common hospital at Lisbon in June, 1579, or June, 1580. These are the chief incidents in the life of one of the world’s greatest poets, and they tell their own tragic story without need of a commentary. It serves no good purpose to speculate why Camoens was ever in debt and making enemies, or why he was neglected and left to die in poverty; other poets and men of letters have shared the same lot. It remains rather to examine the causes which make his epic take rank among the works which the unanimous opinion of posterity has decreed to be immortal. Of his sonnets, eclogues, and smaller poems, beautiful as many of them are, there is no need to speak, for it is on his “Lusiads” that the fame of Camoens must ever rest. The subject of the epic is Vasco da Gama’s first voyage to India and his return, an achievement of such surpassing difficulty, and of such importance alike to Portugal and to Europe, that Camoens perceived its fitness for poetical treatment. But the poem is not confined to the narration of the perils of the voyage only: it abounds in long episodes, in one of which Vasco da Gama relates the history of the Portuguese people to the king of Melinda, while in another a nymph gives a prophetic history to the great admiral of the achievements of his country-men in the land he had just visited. Sir Robert Walpole is said to have declared that he derived his knowledge of English history from Shakespeare’s historical plays, and it might be affirmed in the same sense that many, if not most, educated people have learned what they know of Portuguese history from the “Lusiads.” Such a knowledge is not to be despised. For, if the poet makes the mistakes of his era, and, for instance, identifies the modern Portuguese with the ancient Lusitanians, he manages in a few stanzas apiece to sum up with dramatic genius all the famous tales of Portuguese history, such as the voluntary surrender of Egas Moniz, the pathetic story of Ines de Castro, and the glories of the victory of Aljubarrota. This power of historical description is of itself enough to make Camoens the national poet of Portugal; every old Portuguese family finds its name enshrined in some