No More Learning

[623] _No hope, bold Mascarene. _--The commander of Diu, or Dio, during
this siege, one of the most memorable in the Portuguese history.

[624] _Fierce Hydal-Kan. _--The title of the lords or princes of Decan,
who in their wars with the Portuguese have sometimes brought 400,000 men
into the field. The prince here mentioned, after many revolts, was at
last finally subdued by Don John de Castro, the fourth viceroy of India,
with whose reign our poet judiciously ends the prophetic song.
Albuquerque laid the plan, and Castro completed the system of the
Portuguese empire in the East. It is with propriety, therefore, that the
prophecy given to GAMA is here summed up. Nor is the discretion of
Camoens in this instance inferior to his judgment. He is now within a
few years of his own times, when he himself was upon the scene in India.
But whatever he had said of his contemporaries would have been liable to
misconstruction, and every sentence would have been branded with the
epithets of flattery or malice. A little poet would have been happy in
such an opportunity to resent his wrongs. But the silent contempt of
Camoens does him true honour.

In this historical song, as already hinted, the translator has been
attentive, as much as he could, to throw it into these universal
languages, the picturesque and characteristic. To convey the sublimest
instruction to princes, is, according to Aristotle, the peculiar
province of the epic muse. The striking points of view in which the
different characters of the governors of India are here placed, are in
the most happy conformity to this ingenious canon of the Stagyrite.
[625]

_In whirling circles now they fell, now rose,
Yet never rose nor fell. --_

The motions of the heavenly bodies, in every system, bear at all times
the same uniform relation to each other; these expressions, therefore,
are strictly just. The first relates to the appearance, the second to
the reality. Thus, while to us the sun appears to go down, to more
western inhabitants of the globe he appears to rise, and while he rises
to us, he is going down to the more eastern; the difference being
entirely relative to the various parts of the earth. And in this the
expressions of our poet are equally applicable to the Ptolemaic and
Copernican systems. The ancient hypothesis which made our earth the
centre of the universe, is the system adopted by Camoens, a happiness,
in the opinion of the translator, to the English Lusiad. The new system
is so well known, that a poetical description of it would have been no
novelty to the English reader. The other has not only that advantage in
its favour: but this description is perhaps the finest and fullest that
ever was given of it in poetry, that of Lucretius, l. v. being chiefly
argumentative, and therefore less picturesque.

Our author studied at the university of Coimbra, where the ancient
system and other doctrines of the Aristotelians then, and long
afterward, prevailed.

[626] _He holds His loftiest state. _--Called by the old philosophers and
school divines the sensorium of the Deity.

[627] _These spheres behold. _--According to the Peripatetics, the
universe consisted of eleven spheres inclosed within each other; as
Fanshaw has familiarly expressed it by a simile which he has lent our
author. The first of these spheres, he says--

"Doth (_as in a nest
Of boxes_) all the other orbs comprise.