Page:The Lusiad (Camões, tr. Mickle, 1791), Volume 1.djvu/307

grateful Indian, a native of Java, who, according to some writers, 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 have a tendency to erect the spirit of a downward age. To the eye of a careful observer, the fate of Camoens throws great light on that of his country, and will appear strictly connected with it. The same ignorance, the same degenerated spirit, which suffered Camoens to depend on his share of the alms begged in the streets by his old hoary servant, the same spirit which caused this, sunk the kingdom of Portugal into the most abject vassalage ever experienced by a conquered nation. While the grandees of Portugal were blind to the ruin which impended over them, Camoens beheld it with a pungency of grief which hastened his exit. In one of his letters he has these remarkable words, "Em fim accaberey à vida, e verràm todós que fuy afeiçoada a minho patria, &c. "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 another letter, written a little before his death, he thus, yet with dignity, complains, "Who has seen, on so small a theatre as my poor bed, such a representation of the disappointments of fortune? And I, as if she could not herself subdue me, I have yielded and become of her party; for it were wild audacity to hope to surmount such accumulated evils."

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