following the frontiers of this little kingdom were never known, at least in Europe, to have been encroached upon or thrown back. Heroic battles against the Moors acquired for them a country which they contended for, inch by inch. In many of their chivalric expeditions, they even volunteered their aid to their powerful neighbours the Castilians; and the Christian monarchs of Spain never offered battle to the Moors, in any of those signal exploits which illustrate the period, without the assistance of the Portuguese, who always occupied an honourable station. The same chivalric spirit, early in the fifteenth century, led them beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and they undertook to found a new Christian empire on the very frontiers of Fez and of Morocco. A more enlarged ambition, and views still more extensive, flattered the heroes who reigned over Portugal during the middle of the same century. The Infant Don Henry, third son of John I., Alfonso V., and John II., were the first to divine the real peninsular form of Africa, and the vast ocean which embraces the world. Various hardy navigators traversed the torrid zone, then supposed uninhabitable, passed the line, and, launching into an unknown sea, steered their course by the aid of constellations in a heaven which was equally unknown to them. It was then that they first doubled the appalling Cape of storms, called by King John II. with happy foresight, the Cape of Good Hope. They pointed out to Europe an unknown track to India; and the conquest of its richest kingdoms, equalling in extent and resources the modern possessions of the English, was the work of a little band of adventurers. Their dominion there is, indeed, now no more; but the Portuguese language still remains, as a monument of their past greatness, the medium of the commercial transactions of India and Africa; and is made use of in all kind of communications, like the Frank language in the Levant. The poetry of Portugal dates its origin as early as the monarchy itself, if, indeed, we are not to refer it to a still remoter period, in the time of the Moçarabians, or Christian Moors. Manuel de Faria y Sousa has preserved some specimens of ballads ascribed to Gonzalo Hermigues, and Egaz Moniz, two knights who flourished under Alfonso I., the last of whom is represented by Camoens as a perfect model of heroism. We are assured that he really died of E grief, on learning the infidelity of the beautiful Violante, the lady to whom his love-songs were addressed. What I have seen, however, of his poetry, appears to me nearly unintelligible.* As the productions of these two heroes constitute the monuments of the language and poetry of the twelfth century, so several obscure and half-barbarous fragments still remain, which are ascribed to the two succeeding ages. The enquiries of the antiquary have been more particularly directed to the recovery of the verses written by King Dionysius, the legislator, who reigned between the years 1279 and 1325, and who was one of the greatest characters Portugal ever produced. Those, likewise, attributed to his son Alfonso IV. who succeeded him, and those of his natural son, Alfonso Sanchez, were eagerly sought after. Belonging to the same remote period, we meet with a few sonnets written in Italian metre, evidently modelled on those of Petrarch, from which we gather that the extensive commerce of Lisbon soon introduced the great Italian poets of the fourteenth century to the notice of the Portuguese, and that the latter availed themselves of these master-pieces of song, which were not imitated until a much later period in Spain. But such vestiges of the early poetry of Portugal, during three centuries, between the years 1100 and 1400, may be said to belong rather to antiquarian than to literary research; and serve to mark the progressive changes of the language much more than the degrees of intellectual cultivation and the developement of character. In fact, it is not until the fifteenth century that we begin to perceive the rise of Portuguese literature; a period ennobled, likewise, by the most striking manifestations of national character. Having been in possession for more than one hundred and fifty years of the same boundaries which they at present retain, the Portuguese under Alfonso III., as early as 1251, made themselves masters of the kingdom of the Algarves. They were surrounded on all sides by the people of Castile, and no longer bordered upon the confines of the Moors; and the sanguinary wars of the fourteenth century, in which they engaged, had failed to enlarge the limits of the monarchy. In the early part of the fifteenth century, the spirit of chivalry seemed to acquire fresh energy, and to *Manuel de Faria, who cites them in his Europa Portuguesa, confesses that he himself can comprehend only a few of the words, without, however, being able to collect their meaning.-Europa Portuguesa; vol. iii. p. iv. c. ix. page 379, &c. spread through all ranks of the people. King John I. led an army of adventurers into Africa, and was the first to dis-. play the banner of the five escutcheons on the walls of the powerful city of Ceuta, which was considered as the key of the kingdom of Fez; a place which his son prince Fernando, the Inflexible Prince of Calderon, refused to yield up, even to preserve his own life and liberty. In the succeeding reigns of his sons, and of his grandson Alfonso, called the African, many other cities were captured from the Moors, on the coasts of Fez and Morocco. It is not unlikely that the Portuguese would have taken the same advantage of the weakness of these barbaric powers, as their ancestors had done of that of the Moors of Spain, had not the discovery of the coasts of Senegal and the Sea of Guinea at the same epoch, divided their efforts, and withdrawn their attention from that object. But the astonishing activity displayed by the Portuguese, at this period, was far from subduing their natural ardour for the more tender and enthusiastic passions, which they arrayed in all those touching and imaginative charms on which they so much delighted to dwell. Their existence seemed to be divided between war and love, and their enthusiasm for poetry and glory soon arrived at its highest pitch. The adjacent people of Galicia, whose language very nearly resembled the Portuguese, were, above all, remarkable, even in that romantic age, for their warmth and vivacity of feeling, and for the profuseness of poetic imagery with which they embellished the passion of love. Among such a people romantic poetry seemed to have taken up its seat, extending its influence, by degrees, over the poets of Castile and of Portugal. From the time of the Marquis de Santillana, the Castilians almost invariably selected the Galician language to embody their feelings of love, while the effusions of the poets of Portugal were, at the same time, received in Castile under the title of Galician poems. The master-spirit of this agreeable school of warm and poetical lovers, was Macias, justly entitled L'Enamorado. He may be said to belong equally to the literature of both people, and is thus considered as the common boast of all the Spains. Macias was likewise distinguished as a hero in the wars against the Moors of Grenada. He attached himself to the celebrated Marquis of Villena, the governor both of Castile and Aragon, and the domineering favourite and minister of his own kings. Villena set a just value on the talents and ability of Macias, but was seriously displeased when he found him inclined to mix his poetical loves and reveries with the more weighty affairs of state. He even expressly forbade our poet to continue an intrigue into which he had entered with a young lady, brought up in Villena's own house, and already married to a gentleman of the name of Porcuña. Macias, believing that it behoved him, as a true knight, to proceed with the adventure at all risks, soon incurred the jealousy of the husband, as well as the anger of his master, who threw him into a prison belonging to the order of Calatrava, at Jaen, of which Villena himself was the grand master. There the lover poured forth the chief portion of those songs, in which he seems to have dismissed all idea of the hardships of captivity, in order that he might more largely indulge in descriptions of the severer pangs of absence. Porcuña having intercepted one of these poetical appeals to the lady's tenderness, in a fit of jealousy, immediately set out for Jaen, where, recognising Macias through the bars of his prison, he took deadly aim at him with his javelin, and killed him on the spot. The instrument of his death was suspended over his tomb in the church of St. Catherine, with the following simple notice: A qui yace Macias el Enamorado; which may be said to have consecrated the appellation. Nearly all the productions of this unfortunate poet, once admired and imitated throughout Portugal and Spain, are now lost. Sanchez, however, has preserved for us the very stanzas which were the cause of his untimely end. They every where breathe that deep melancholy of passion for which the poets of Portugal were so early distinguished, presenting us with a very striking contrast to their heroic exploits, to their obstinate preserverance, and, not unfrequently, to their cruelty. In the following stanzas are embodied the most striking sentiments of this effusion, so intimately connected with the untimely fate of the author : Though captive, it is not my chains That strike each pitying heart with fear; All ask what more than mortal pains Speak in each throb, each bitter tear. I aim'd at fortune proud and high To reach a blessing still more dear; Wherefore it is I lowly lie, No friend to soothe my latest hour, Or say she heeds the tears I pour. What should I say? Now do I learn Sanchez, t. i. p. 138, § 212 to 221 We are assured on the authority of Portuguese antiquaries, that the poetical followers of Macias were extremely numerous, and that the fifteenth century was adorned with poets of a romantic character, who vied with each other in the degree of tender enthusiasm and reflective melancholy which they breathed into their effusions, superior to any of the same kind which the Castilians had to boast. But their works, though collected in the form of Cancioneri, under the reign of John II., are no longer to be met with in other parts of Europe. The indefatigable exertions of Boutterwek have been in vain directed to the different libraries throughout Germany in pursuit of them, while my own researches into those of Italy and Paris have only had a similar result; insomuch that this very brilliant period, which is said to have decorated the literary annals of Portugal, escapes altogether from our observation.* The real epoch of Portuguese glory was at length arrived. At the time when Ferdinand and Isabella were still engaged in their wars with the Moors, Portugal was rapidly extending her conquests in Africa and the Indies, while the very heroism of chivalry seemed united in her people with all the persevering activity peculiar to a commercial state. The Infant Don Henry had now directed the energies of the nation for a period of forty-three years (1420 to 1463); the western coast of Africa appeared covered with Portuguése factories; that of St. George de la Mine had already become a colony; and the whole kingdom of Benin and of Congo, embracing the Christian faith, recognized the sovereignty of the crown of Portugal. Vasco de Gama at length appeared, and doubling the Cape of Good Hope, already discovered by Bartolomeo Diaz, was the first to unfurl a sail in the immense seas which led him to the Indian shores. A rapid succession of heroes, whose valour has never been surpassed, conferred lustre on this unknown world. In the year 1507, Alfonso d'Albuquerque possessed himself of the kingdom of Ormuz, *A member of the Academy of Lisbon, Joaquim José Fereira Gordo, was commissioned by the academy in the year 1790, to examine the Portuguese books preserved in the Spanish libraries at Madrid. He there discovered a Portuguese Cancioneiro, written in the fifteenth century, and containing the verses of one hundred and fifty-five poets, whose names he records. All these poems are in the burlesque style, but no specimens of them are given.-Memorias de Letteratura Potugueza, iii. 60. This Cancioneiro, the first of its kind, is of extreme rarity. A copy is preserved in the College of the Nobles at Lisbon. Another is in the possession of Sir Charles Stuart, the English ambassador at the Court of France. No other copy is known. The Cancioneiro of Reysende, which was published at a subsequent period, is more frequently met with. an |