Portuguese portraits

By the same Author
THE MAGIC OF SPAIN, 1912. IN PORTUGAL, 1912. POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE, 1913. STUDIES IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE, 1914. LYRICS OF GIL VICENTE, 1914. PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1915.
New York Agents LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS
AUBREY F. G. BELL
A notavel fama dos excelentes barões e muito antiguos antecessores dina de perpetua lembrança
Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo
Oxford B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET MCMXVII
TO THE COUNTLESS FORGOTTEN HEROES OF PORTUGAL
In burning sands or Ocean’s blinding silt, In Africa, Asia, and the icy North, They lie: yet came they home who thus went forth, Since of their bones is all their country built.
Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s great men. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguese history. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him—the epic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard, and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and the ever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unless he can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge of Portuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations. But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese to read it with pleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it.
There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than in subject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges, recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of the battle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell how the Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration) and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams that flowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there were scrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, and many of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives (those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto, and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight the reader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote.