[Illustration: INES DE CASTRO.] The later years of the reign of Affonso IV. were marked by a fearful pestilence and a sad tragedy. In 1348 the plague, or, as it was more commonly called, the Black Death, reached Portugal, after traversing Europe, and more than decimated the inhabitants of Lisbon. On January 7, 1355, Donna Ines de Castro was murdered in the streets of Coimbra. The history of the various dynasties of Portugal is full of romantic stories, some with ludicrous, and others with tragical, endings, which illustrate, not only the characters of the respective monarchs, but the tendencies of their different epochs. The story of Donna Branca, the princess who loved a carpenter, has been told, with the comment that her son became Grand Master of the wealthy Order of Calatrava; the romance of Dom Pedro’s life ended more tragically. Dom Pedro was the only son of Affonso IV. and Beatrice of Castile who had survived his first year. He was born in 1320, and had married in 1336, in order to cement his father’s alliance with Castile, the Donna Constance Manuel, daughter of the Duke of Penafiel. In her suite as lady-in-waiting came the Donna Ines de Castro, daughter of Pedro Fernandez de Castro, Mordomo Mor of Castile, and hero of the battle of the Salado, and sister of Alvaro Peres de Castro, first Constable of Portugal. Dom Pedro fell in love with the beautiful Castilian lady, and though, during his wife’s lifetime, he always treated his wife with the utmost consideration, and was the father by her of Dom Ferdinand, afterwards King of Portugal, and of Donna Maria, afterwards Queen of Aragon, it was well known at the Portuguese Court that the love of Dom Pedro’s heart was centred on Donna Ines. In that dissolute Court little attention was paid to the conduct of the prince; princes were in those days privileged persons, and he was known besides to have another lady-love, the Donna Theresa Lourenço, who was the mother of João, afterwards King of Portugal. It was not until after the death of his wife that it was perceived that Dom Pedro’s love for the Donna Ines was more than the ordinary fancy of a prince, and was an absorbing passion. For love of her, he refused to marry any of the foreign princesses proposed to him by his father, and it is probable that he went through a form of marriage with her after his first wife’s death. However that may be, King Affonso determined to put an end to his son’s infatuation by murdering the object of it, and by his directions Donna Ines was murdered in the streets of Coimbra by three courtiers, Alvaro Gonçalves, the “Meirinho Mor” or Lord Chamberlain, Pedro Coelho, and Diogo Lopes Pacheco. This is the tragedy which Camoens has celebrated in an immortal passage,[7] and which has since become a common theme for the playwrights of the world, good, bad, and indifferent; and it may be said, that it is not so much in the murder itself, as in the events which followed it, that the most romantic part