LUIS DE, 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 fled in disgust from the court of Castile to that of Lisbon, where King Ferdinand immediately admitted him into his council, and gave him the lordships of Sardoal, Pombete, 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, Vasco 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 Tereyo 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 Casterra, 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 Lusitad.

The misfortunes of the 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 of Santarem, provided for the education of her son Luis at the university of Coimbra, where he acquired an extensive knowledge of the classics. 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. Having become deeply enamoured of Donna Catharina d'Ayala, one of the queen's ladies, who, it appears, returned his passion, Camoens was in consequence banished from court.

He now retired to his mother's friends at Santarem, where he renewed his studies, and began his poem on the discovery of India. At this time John III. was preparing an armament against Africa; and Camoens, tired of an obscure and inactive 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 Lusitad, 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 having reached the court, he obtained permission to return to Lisbon, where he found that his beloved Catharina was dead. He solicited an establishment which he had merited in the ranks of battle; but the malignity of evil tongues, as he expresses it in one of his letters, was poured out upon him. Stung by such ungrateful treatment, Camoens resolved to bid his country a final farewell; and accordingly, in 1553, he sailed for India. As the ship left the Tagus he exclaimed, in the words of the sepulchral monument of Scipio Africanus, Inguratia patria, non possidelis ossa 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 he attended Manuel de Vasconcello 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 Lusitad, and in one of his sonnets, in which he bewails the loss of his Catharina. 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 procured him friends. He was appointed commissary in the island of Macao, a Portuguese settlement in the bay of Canton, where he continued his Lusitad; and, after five years' residence, he acquired a fortune, small indeed, yet equal to his wishes. A new viceroy, Dom Constantine de Braganza, having been appointed, Camoens obtained his permission to return to Goa, and set sail in a ship freighted by himself; but he was shipwrecked in the passage on the coast of Cambodia, 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 Camoens; yet with unfeeling indifference he suffered the innocent man to be thrown into the common prison. After much delay, Camoens in a public trial fully refuted every accusation. directed against his conduct while commissary at Macao, and his enemies were loaded with ignominy. Camoëns, however, had contracted certain necessary debts, and his creditors detained him in prison till some spirited townsmen of Goa, ashamed that a man of his singular merit should experience such treatment among them, procured his release. Once more he 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 Camoëns at his table, he took no care to render the life of his guest agreeable. Chagrined at his treatment and weary of a state of dependence, Camoëns resolved to return to his native country. A ship on the homeward voyage at this time touched at Sofala, and several of the passengers were desirous that Camoëns should accompany them; but this the governor ungenerously endeavoured to prevent, and charged him with a debt for board. Anthony de Cabra, however, and Hector de Sylveira paid the demand; and Camoëns and the honour of Barreto were discharged together.

After an absence of sixteen years, Camoëns in 1569 returned to Lisbon, unhappy even in his restoration to his native country, for the pestilence then raged in the capital. At last, in 1572, he printed his *Lusíada*, which, in the opening of the first book, he addressed to the youthful king Sebastian, 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 on the death of his patron, who fell in the battle of Alcazar in 1578, this pension was withdrawn by Cardinal Henry, who succeeded to the throne. Under his glorious reign Camoëns died in all the misery of poverty. He was even indebted for the means of sustenance to an old Javanese servant, named Antonio, who 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 Camoëns throws great light on that of his country. The same ignorance and the same degenerate spirit which suffered Camoëns 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, Camoëns beheld it with a poignancy 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 an alms-house at Lisbon, in 1579, died, at the age of sixty-two, Luís de Camoëns, the greatest genius Portugal ever produced; in martial courage and spirit nothing inferior to her most honoured heroes.

Fifteen years after his death, a monument was erected to his memory. Death had allayed all jealousies; and the homage due to him, as the national poet of Portugal, was now enthusiastically paid. The genius of Camoëns 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, who were very numerous in his time, were far from greeting with applause the first steps of his career. Of the *Lusíada* 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 sentiment with which it is animated throughout, and charms alike by the stateliness and the grace of its versification, which foreigners as well as native Portuguese can relish and appreciate. The most esteemed edition of the works of Camoëns appeared at Lisbon in 1779-1780, under the title of *Obras de Luís de Camoëns princípio dos poetas de Espanha*, 4 tom., 12mo. A second edition also appeared in 1782-1783, the first volume of which contains the life of the author and the *Lusíada*, and the last his dramatic and other pieces. A splendid and correct, but very scarce edition of the *Lusíada* was published, with fine engravings, by Firmin Didot, Paris, 1817, 4to. It has been translated into several languages, and twice into English, by Fanshawe and Mickle.