From here, then, from this humble remote place, came the man, the poet, Jorge de Montemor—or Montemayor as he came to be called—who set all cultured Europe running again after the preposterous pastoral romances of lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, which had been forgotten since the eclogues and bucolics of classical Italy had been voted old-fashioned. From here came the inspiration that made Cervantes write the “Galatea,” Sidney write the “Arcadia,” and Spenser write the “Fairy Queen”: these sweet fertile hillsides and vales of southern Portugal were the scenes which the native poet peopled with the erotic swains of his Spanish pastoral, “Diana Enamorada.” It was a style utterly foreign to arid Spain, for there the flocks had to travel in vast multitudes from desert to desert in search of the scanty pasture; but it caught the fancy of a people sated with knights-errant, and the pastoral became the rage. That Spain itself should have given it new birth was incredible, though Jorge de Montemor wrote in Spanish. The neighbourhood of his birthplace gives us the key; for here in rich pastures and lush, half-tropical valleys flocks would need but little tending or travelling, and here beneath the sunny skies shepherds and their lasses might as easily as in Italy be imagined piping, singing, and telling their long-winded love stories to their hearts’ content. Lisbon was all smiles when I arrived; clear and crisp as if no rain-clouds and wreaths of wet mist had ever crept up the Tagus and put her out of temper. But the big steamer was lying in the harbour ready to sail for England, and though Lisbon tempted me, I could not choose but go. Forth from the splendid panorama we went, past the great white fortress high on the hill, the city piled up on its amphitheatre and set in verdant frames, the majestic square palace of Ajuda looking down upon Belem and its glorious church, and the sturdy old tower rising from the water dumbly protesting against its desecration by the gasworks that surround it. [Illustration: LISBON FROM THE NORTH.]