No More Learning

The same ignorance, the same
degenerate spirit, which suffered Camoens to depend on his share of the
alms begged in the streets by his old hoary servant--the same spirit
which caused this, sank the kingdom of Portugal into the most abject
vassalage ever experienced by a conquered nation. While the grandees of
Portugal were blind to the ruin which impended over them, Camoens beheld
it with a pungency of grief which hastened his end. In one of his
letters he has these remarkable words, "_Em fim accaberey a vida, e
verram todos que fuy afeicoada a minho patria_," etc. --"I am ending the
course of my life, the world will witness how I have loved my country. I
have returned, not only to die in her bosom, but to die with her. " In
another letter, written a little before his death, he thus, yet with
dignity, complains, "Who has seen on so small a theatre as my poor bed,
such a representation of the disappointments of Fortune. And I, as if
she could not herself subdue me, I have yielded and become of her party;
for it were wild audacity to hope to surmount such accumulated evils. "

In this unhappy situation, in 1579, in his sixty-second year, the year
after the fatal defeat of Don Sebastian, died Luis de Camoens, the
greatest literary genius ever produced by Portugal; in martial courage
and spirit of honour nothing inferior to her greatest heroes. And in a
manner suitable to the poverty in which he died was he buried. Soon
after, however, many epitaphs honoured his memory; the greatness of his
merit was universally confessed, and his Lusiad was translated into
various languages. [12] Nor ought it to be omitted, that the man so
miserably neglected by the weak king Henry, was earnestly enquired after
by Philip of Spain when he assumed the crown of Lisbon. When Philip
heard that Camoens was dead, both his words and his countenance
expressed his disappointment and grief.

From the whole tenor of his life, and from that spirit which glows
throughout the Lusiad, it evidently appears that the courage and manners
of Camoens flowed from true greatness and dignity of soul. Though his
polished conversation was often courted by the great, he appears so
distant from servility that his imprudence in this respect is by some
highly blamed. Yet the instances of it by no means deserve that severity
of censure with which some writers have condemned him.
Unconscious of
the feelings of a Camoens, they knew not that a carelessness in securing
the smiles of fortune, and an open honesty of indignation, are almost
inseparable from the enthusiasm of fine imagination. The truth is, the
man possessed of true genius feels his greatest happiness in the
pursuits and excursions of the mind, and therefore makes an estimate of
things very different from that of him whose unremitting attention is
devoted to his external interest. The profusion of Camoens is also
censured. Had he dissipated the wealth he acquired at Macao, his
profusion indeed had been criminal; but it does not appear that he ever
enjoyed any other opportunity of acquiring independence. But Camoens was
unfortunate, and the unfortunate man is viewed--

"Through the dim shade his fate casts o'er him:
A shade that spreads its evening darkness o'er
His brightest virtues, while it shows his foibles
Crowding and obvious as the midnight stars,
Which, in the sunshine of prosperity
Never had been descried. "

Yet, after the strictest discussion, when all the causes are weighed
together, the misfortunes of Camoens will appear the fault and disgrace
of his age and country, and not of the man. His talents would have
secured him an apartment in the palace of Augustus, but such talents are
a curse to their possessor in an illiterate nation. In a beautiful,
digressive exclamation at the end of the Lusiad, he affords us a
striking view of the neglect which he experienced. Having mentioned how
the greatest heroes of antiquity revered and cherished the muse, he thus
characterizes the nobility of his own age and country.

"Alas! on Tago's hapless shore alone
The muse is slighted, and her charms unknown;
For this, no Virgil here attunes the lyre,
No Homer here awakes the hero's fire;
Unheard, in vain their native poet sings,
And cold neglect weighs dawn the muse's wings. "

In such an age, and among such a barbarous nobility, what but wretched
neglect could be the fate of a Camoens! After all, however, if he was
imprudent on his first appearance at the court of John III. ; if the
honesty of his indignation led him into great imprudence, as certainly
it did, when at Goa he satirised the viceroy and the first persons in
power; yet let it also be remembered, that "The gifts of imagination
bring the heaviest task upon the vigilance of reason; and to bear those
faculties with unerring rectitude, or invariable propriety, requires a
degree of firmness and of cool attention, which doth not always attend
the higher gifts of the mind. Yet, difficult as nature herself seems to
have rendered the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme
consolation of dullness and of folly to point with Gothic triumph to
those excesses which are the overflowings of faculties they never
enjoyed. Perfectly unconscious that they are indebted to their stupidity
for the consistency of their conduct, they plume themselves on an
imaginary virtue which has its origin in what is really their
disgrace.