Louis, the most illustrious of the Portuguese poets, was born at Lisbon in 1517. His family was of considerable note, and originally Spanish. In 1370 Vasco Perez de Camoens, disgusted at the court of Castile, fled to that of Lisbon, where King Ferdinand immediately admitted him into his council, and gave him the lordships of Sardoal, Punhete, Marano, Amendoe, and other lands of considerable extent, a certain proof of the eminence of his rank and abilities. In the war of the succession, which broke out on the death of Ferdinand, Camoens sided with the king of Castile, and was killed in the battle of Aljubarota. But though John I. the victor, seized a great part of his estate, his widow, the daughter of Gonzalo Tereyro, grand master of the order of Christ, and general of the Portuguese army, was not reduced beneath her rank. She had three sons who took the name of Camoens. The family of the eldest intermarried with the first nobility of Portugal, and even, according to Cassena, with the blood royal; but the family of the second brother, whose fortune was slender, had the superior honour of producing the author of the Lusid.

The misfortunes of our poet commenced early in life. In his infancy, Simon Vaz de Camoens, his father, commander of a vessel, was shipwrecked at Goa, where he perished, together with the greater part of his fortune. His mother, however, Anne de Macedo de Santarem, provided for the education of her son Louis at the university of Coimbra, where he acquired an intimacy with the classics, equal to that of a Scaliger, but directed by the taste of a Milton or a Pope. When he left the university he appeared at court. He was handsome, with expressive eyes and a fine complexion; and as he was a polished scholar, this, added to the natural ardour and vivacity of his disposition, rendered him an accomplished gentleman. Courts are the usual scenes of intrigue; and intrigue was then fashionable at Lisbon. But the particulars of the amours of Camoens remain unknown. It only appears that he had aspired above his rank, and was in consequence banished from the court; and in several of his sonnets he ascribes his misfortunes to love.

He now retired to his mother's friends at Santarem, where he renewed his studies, and began his poem on the discovery of India. But as John III. was at this time preparing an armament against Africa, Camoens, tired of an inactive and obscure life, went to Ceuta with the expedition, and greatly distinguished himself by his valour in several encounters. In a naval engagement with the Moors in the Straits of Gibraltar, he was among the foremost to board, and lost his right eye in the conflict. Yet neither the hurry of actual service, nor the dissipation of a camp, could stifle his genius. He continued his Lusid, and several of his most beautiful sonnets were written in Africa, while, as he expressed it, "one hand the pen, and one the sword employed." The fame of his valour had now reached the court, and he obtained permission to return to Lisbon. But whilst he solicited an establishment which he had merited in the ranks of battle, the malignity of evil tongues, as he expresses it in one of his letters, was poured out upon him. Though the bloom of his early youth was effaced by several years' residence under the scorching sun of Africa, and though altered by the loss of an eye, his presence gave uneasiness to the gentlemen of some families of the first rank where he had formerly visited; and Camoens now found it prudent to banish himself from his native country. Accordingly, in 1553, he sailed for India, with a resolution never to return. As the ship left the Tagus, he exclaimed, in the words of the sepulchral monument of Scipio Africanus, Ingurat patria, non possidebis ase mea; "ungrateful country, thou shalt not possess my bones." But he knew not what evils in the East would awaken the remembrance of his native land.

When Camoens arrived in India, an expedition was ready to sail, to avenge the king of Cochin on the king of Pimenta. Without allowing himself any rest on shore after his long voyage, he joined this armament, and in the conquest of the Alagada islands displayed his usual bravery. In the following year Camoens attended Manuel de Vaconcello in an expedition to the Red Sea, where, as he had no use for his sword, he employed his pen, and also visited Mount Felix and the adjacent part of Africa, which he so strongly pictures in the Lusid, and in one of his little pieces where he laments the absence of his mistress. When he returned to Goa he enjoyed a tranquillity which enabled him to bestow attention on his epic; but this serenity was interrupted by his own imprudence; for he wrote some satires which gave offence, and, by order of the viceroy, Francisco Barreto, he was banished to China.

But the accomplishments and manners of Camoens soon found him friends, though under the disgrace of banishment. He was appointed commissary in the island of Macao, a Portuguese settlement in the bay of Canton, where he continued his Lusid; and, after five years residence, he acquired a fortune, though small, yet equal to his wishes. Dom Constantine de Braganza was now viceroy of India; and Camoens, desirous to return to Goa, resigned his charge, and set sail in a ship freighted by himself; but he was shipwrecked in the gulf near the mouth of the river Mecon, on the coast of China, and all he had acquired perished in the waves. His poems, which he held in one hand, while he swam with the other, were all he found himself possessed of when he stood friendless on an unknown shore.

On the banks of the Mecon he wrote his beautiful paraphrase of the psalm, Super flumina Babylonis, where the Jews, in the finest strain of poetry, are represented as hanging their harps on the willows, by the rivers of Babylon, and lamenting their exile from their native land. Here Camoens continued some time, till an opportunity offered of a passage to Goa. When he arrived at that city, Dom Constantine de Braganza, the viceroy, admitted him to his friendship, and Camoens continued happy till Count Redondo assumed the government. While Constantine continued in power, those who had formerly procured the banishment of the satirist were silent; but now they exerted all their arts against him. Redondo, when he entered upon office, however, pretended to be the friend of Camões; yet, with unfeeling indifference, he suffered the innocent man to be thrown into the common prison. But after much delay in bringing forward witnesses, Camões, in a public trial, fully refuted every accusation directed against his conduct while commissary at Macao, and his enemies were loaded with ignominy and reproach. Camões, however, had some creditors, and they detained him in prison a considerable time, till the gentlemen of Goa becoming ashamed that a man of his singular merit should experience such treatment among them, he was set at liberty, again assumed the profession of arms, and received the allowance of a gentleman volunteer, a character at this time common in Portuguese India. Soon afterwards, Pedro Barreto, appointed governor of the fort at Sofala, allured the poet by high promises to attend him thither. The governor of a distant fort, in a barbarous country, shares in some measure the fate of an exile; yet, though the only motive of Barreto was to enjoy the conversation of Camões at his table, he took no care to render the life of his guest agreeable. Chagrined with his treatment, and weary of a state of dependence, Camões resolved to return to his native country. A ship, on the homeward voyage, at this time touched at Sofala, and several gentlemen on board were desirous that Camões should accompany them; but this the governor ungently endeavoured to prevent, and charged him with a debt for board. Anthony de Cabra, however, and Hector de Syveira, paid the demand; and Camões and the honour of Barreto were discharged together.

After an absence of sixteen years, Camões in 1569 returned to Lisbon, unhappy even in his restoration to his native country, for the pestilence then raged in the capital, and prevented his publication for three years. At last, in 1572, he printed his Lusiad, which, in the opening of the first book, he addressed to King Sebastian, then in his eighteenth year, who was so pleased with its merit, that he gave the author a pension of four thousand reals, on condition that he should reside at court; but this salary seems to have been withdrawn by Cardinal Henry, who succeeded to the crown of Portugal, which Sebastian lost at the battle of Alcançar in Africa.

Henry, though the patron of one species of literature, utterly neglected the author of the Lusiad; and under his inglorious reign Camões died in all the misery of poverty, and, according to some, in an alms-house. It appears, however, that he had not even that certainty of subsistence which such houses usually provide. He had a black servant, who had grown old with him, and had long experienced his master's humanity. This grateful Indian, a native of Java, who, according to some, had saved his master's life in the unhappy shipwreck where he lost his effects, begged in the streets of Lisbon for the only man in Portugal on whom God had bestowed those talents which had a tendency to elevate the spirit of a declining age. To the eye of a faithful observer, the fate of Camões throws great light on that of his country, and will appear strictly connected with it. The same ignorance, and the same degenerate spirit, which suffered Camões to depend on his share of the alms begged in the streets by his aged servant, sunk the kingdom of Portugal into the most abject vassalage ever experienced by a conquered nation. But while the grandees of Portugal were blind to the ruin which impended over them, Camões beheld it with a pungency of grief which hastened his end. In one of his letters he has these remarkable words: "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 this unhappy situation died, at the age of sixty-two, the year after the fatal defeat of Dom Sebastian, Louis de Camões, the greatest genius Portugal ever produced; in martial courage and Camonian spirit nothing inferior to her most honoured heroes.

Fifteen years after his death, a monument was erected in honour of Camões. Death had allayed all jealousies; and the homage due to him, as the national poet of Portugal, was now enthusiastically paid. The genius of Camões was inspired by the history of his country and the manners of his age; his lyric poems, in particular, like the works of Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Vasso, belong to romantic and chivalrous rather than to purely classical literature; and hence the partizans of the latter, which were very numerous in his time, were far from greeting with applause the first steps of his career. Of the Lusiad it would be superfluous to offer any criticism in this place. Suffice it to say, that with many faults, both of design and execution, it possesses perfect unity of interest, arising from the patriotic sentiments with which it is animated throughout, and charms alike by the stateliness and grace of its versification, which foreigners as well as native Portuguese can relish and appreciate. The most esteemed edition of the works of Camões appeared at Lisbon in 1779-1780, under the title of Obras de Luís de Camões principé dos poetas de Hespanha, 4 tom, 12mo. A second edition also appeared in 1782-1783, the first volume of which contains the life of the author and the Lusiad, and the last the dramatic and other pieces ascribed to Camões.