No More Learning

[434] Exod. xiv. 29.

[435] Noah.

[436] Venus.

[437] For the fable of Eolus see the tenth Odyssey.

[438]

_And vow, that henceforth her Armada's sails
Should gently swell with fair propitious gales. _

In innumerable instances Camoens discovers himself a judicious imitator
of the ancients. In the two great masters of the epic are several
prophecies oracular of the fate of different heroes, which give an air
of solemn importance to the poem. The fate of the Armada thus obscurely
anticipated, resembles in particular the prophecy of the safe return of
Ulysses to Ithaca, foretold by the shade of Tiresias, which was
afterwards fulfilled by the Phaeacians. It remains now to make some
observations on the machinery used by Camoens in this book. The
necessity of machinery in the epopea, and the, perhaps, insurmountable
difficulty of finding one unexceptionably adapted to a poem where the
heroes are Christians, or, in other words, to a poem whose subject is
modern, have already been observed in the preface. The machinery of
Camoens has also been proved, in every respect, to be less exceptionable
than that of Tasso in his Jerusalem, or that of Voltaire in his
Henriade. The descent of Bacchus to the palace of Neptune, in the depths
of the sea, and his address to the watery gods, are noble imitations of
Virgil's Juno in the first AEneid. The description of the storm is also
masterly.
In both instances the conduct of the AEneid is joined with the
descriptive exuberance of the Odyssey. The appearance of the star of
Venus through the storm is finely imagined; the influence of the nymphs
of that goddess over the winds, and their subsequent nuptials, are in
the spirit of the promise of Juno to Eolus:--

_Sunt mihi bis septum praestanti corpore nymphae:
Quarum, quae forma pulcherrima; Deiopeiam_
_Connubio jungam stabili, propriamque dicabo:
Omnes ut tecum meritis pro talibus annos
Exigat, et pulchra faciat te prole parentem. _--VIRGIL, AEn. bk. i.

And the fiction itself is an allegory, exactly in the manner of Homer.
Orithia, the daughter of Erecteus, and queen of the Amazons, was
ravished and carried away by Boreas.

[439] Vasco de Gama.

[440] This refers to the Catholic persecutions of Protestants whom they
had previously condemned at the Diet of Spires. War was declared against
the Protestants in 1546. It lasted for six years, when a treaty of peace
was signed at Passau on the Danube, in 1552. --_Ed. _

[441] _Some blindly wand'ring, holy faith disclaim. _--At the time when
Camoens wrote, the German empire was plunged into all the miseries of a
religious war, the Catholics using every endeavour to rivet the chains
of Popery, the adherents of Luther as strenuously endeavouring to shake
them off.

[442]

_High sound the titles of the English crown,
King of Jerusalem. --_

The title of "King of Jerusalem" was never assumed by the kings of
England.