At a somewhat later period lived Estevam Rodriguez de Castro, a poet, and at the same time a learned physician, who was invited to Italy by the grand duke of Tuscany. He is the author of various sonnets, odes and eclogues.
Fernando Rodriguez Lobo de Soropita, the publisher of the miscellaneous poems of Camoens, likewise belongs to this age. Besides his juridical works, he was the author of various pieces of humour in verse.
The present opportunity may be taken to mention the latin verses, which were at this period still current in Portugal, and by the composition of which, men of education, and even men in office of the first rank, endeavoured to obtain a place near the ancient classics, without interfering with the poets who adhered to their vernacular tongue. The learned statesman Miguel de Cabedo de Vasconcellos, who resided for several years in France, was particularly distinguished as a writer of latin verse. Ancient literature seems, at this time, to have had a powerful influence on the education of the Portuguese nobility; and as, at this period, all the most celebrated Portuguese poets belonged to noble families, it cannot be doubted that, the invisible link between the Portuguese and latin poetry, was then much stronger than the visible one, which never can be mistaken in the works of these poets.
To enumerate the remaining names of the Portuguese poets of the age of Camoens, is a task which must be resigned to the writer, whose object it may be to pursue more minutely the details of this particular department of literature. Another Portuguese classic of the sixteenth century, must, however, be included among the number of those poets, who, in a general history of modern poetry and eloquence, are the more worthy to be placed in a conspicuous light, in proportion as they are little celebrated beyond the confines of their native land.
RODRIGUEZ LOBO.
That Portuguese writers, who, in other instances have shewn themselves so careful in the collection of biographic details, should be almost silent respecting the life of such a poet as Francisco Rodriguez Lobo, is a circumstance only to be explained by one of those sports of fortune, through which in literature, as in life, honour is often withheld from the most deserving, and lavished on the worthless. Rodriguez Lobo was also a poet of noble extraction; but nothing is known respecting the history of his life, except that he was born in the town of Leiria, in Portuguese Estremadura, about the middle of the sixteenth century; that by talent and industry he distinguished himself at the university, and afterwards spent the chief portion of his life in the country; and finally, that, in the passage of the Tagus, he perished in that river which in his poetry he had often celebrated in terms of romantic admiration. His remains were interred in the chapel of a convent not far distant from the spot, where the current of the stream cast his body on shore.[210]
To no other poet, after Saa de Miranda, Ferreira and Camoens, are the language and literature of Portugal so much indebted as to Rodriguez Lobo, with whom, indeed, the history of Portuguese eloquence may be said to commence. He so highly improved romantic prose in the Portuguese language, and laid so excellent a foundation for a pure prose style, that in endeavouring to attain classic perfection in that department of composition, later writers have merely followed in the same course. His verse is no way inferior to his prose; and with all his classical refinement he was not, like Ferreira, a poet of limited imagination. Of all the Portuguese poets, Rodriguez Lobo is, in every respect, entitled to the place next in rank to Saa de Miranda and Camoens. His great erudition did not prevent him from being completely imbued with poetic natural feeling, and in pictures drawn from the romantic arcadian world his fancy was inexhaustible. It is indeed only where his descriptions have a pastoral colouring that he is perfectly in his poetic sphere. But within that sphere he occasionally draws resources from practical good sense with a degree of adroitness which is displayed by no previous Portuguese poet.
The writings of Rodriguez Lobo are susceptible of three divisions which approximate to each other. To the first belongs his prose work:—“the Court in the Country,” in which no verses are introduced. Three connected pastoral romances form the second and most considerable portion; here the prose is merely a beautiful combining link by which the work is made a whole. The third comprises the author’s miscellaneous poems.
The Corte na Aldea, e Noites de Inverno, (the Court in the Country, and Winter Nights,) is the title of a book, by which Rodriguez Lobo endeavoured to introduce a kind of Ciceronean style into Portuguese prose, and at the same time to furnish a useful guide to the formation of character for public life. The antiquated style of the title is in a certain degree at variance with the classic elegance of the book itself. It is probable that no more in this, than in his other works, would Rodriguez Lobo have avoided the gothic ornaments of which the romantic prose of the Spaniards and Portuguese was never entirely divested, had he not, as a prose writer, been here guided by his favourite Cicero, in whose footsteps he trod. Perhaps he was also acquainted with some Italian works of a similar kind; for at this period the Italian prose writers imitated Cicero; and Il Cortegiano of Castiglione, bears in its subject at least a resemblance to Lobo’s “Court in the Country.” But the direct imitation of Cicero’s style is unquestionably an essential feature in this work. Precisely with the same forms of friendly courtesy, as those which characterize Cicero’s Tusculan and Academic discourses, but with some romantic modifications, Rodriguez Lobo collects around him a party of friends in the country. These friends discourse together concerning the proper education of an elegant man of the world. As conversation occupies the chief portion of the work, the whole is not inappropriately divided into dialogues. Each dialogue has, however, an historical frame work. But even though copying after Cicero’s models, it appears, that Rodriguez Lobo could not, without difficulty, find the path of pure prose composition. The first dialogue opens precisely in the style of an old romance.[211] Nevertheless the long sentence with which it commences, bespeaks, by its facility and rhetorical harmony a cultivation of style, which is not discoverable in the works of any earlier Portuguese prose writer. At the same time the reader is still farther charmed by the delicate and sharp outline which is given of the characteristic features of the assembled interlocutors.[212] The conversation does not take the turn which might be expected; but the natural colouring of the representation is thus augmented. The degree of cultivation by which these gentlemen are distinguished from the ordinary portion of society, leads them, in the first place, to discourse of literature. One of the party very properly observes, that, the country library of a man of their class, should consist chiefly of works on history, poetry, and practical philosophy. This gives rise to an encomium on the Portuguese language, which at that period had to contend with enemies in its native land, and which was still more vehemently attacked by the Spaniards. Cultivation of language again becomes the subject of discussion in these dialogues; and the epistolary style being considered more important than any other to a gentleman who is to figure in the world, Rodriguez Lobo, through the medium of one of the party, gives a full, and for the age in which it was written, a new treatise of the art of correct letter-writing. Even the external elegance of the letter comes under consideration. The interlocutors then discuss appointments, messages and visits; ornamental hyperboles (encarecimentos); the difference between love and desire; selfishness; social decorum in manners and discourse; social eloquence generally; the art of social anecdote in particular; witty conversation in society; true gallantry (cortesia); education at court, in the army and in the schools. The reader who forms his judgment of this ingenious work, apart from the age in which, and for which, it was written, will probably depreciate its intrinsic merits. Now that the first principles of modern cultivation have become common, the precepts of Rodriguez Lobo will be scorned as trivial by the merest noviciates in politeness; and our students of psychology will feel more inclined to receive instructions from a French observer of mankind of the eighteenth century, than from this Portuguese writer. But in the sixteenth century such a work as the Corte na Aldea could only have been written by a man initiated in the refined manners of his age, and combining a delicate spirit of observation with an extraordinary store of literary knowledge. In Portuguese eloquence it had no prototype. In the descriptive passages only is the style somewhat overcharged with antiquated and pompous phrases. The turns of the dialogue are, like the similar passages in the writings of Cicero, natural and pleasing, though they do not possess the poignant spirit of more recent productions of this kind.[213] Where the exposition of the ideas assumes a totally didactic character, the expression is clear, decided and unostentatiously harmonious.[214] Upon the whole the prose of Rodriguez Lobo has more of an oratorical character than the modern style of conversation admits; but the romantic tone of chivalrous gallantry in the sixteenth century, produced, even in the conversational style, a certain formality and rounding of long periods, by an influence similar to that which the oratorical prose of the forum exercised at Rome in Cicero’s time, over every species of prosaic composition.
But Rodriguez Lobo’s Corte na Aldea is entitled to honourable distinction, for even something more than its general merits, as the first book in classical prose produced in Portugal. By the anecdotes and tales which are interwoven with the dialogue and didactic passages, it furnished the Portuguese with the first model of light narrative style in their native tongue.[215] The letters from the Ciceronean collections, and other ancient and modern works, which Rodriguez Lobo has translated, and introduced as illustrations of his theory of the epistolary style, are likewise very judiciously chosen. Finally, this copious theory of epistolary composition is the first successful attempt at any thing beyond a mere scholastic guide to eloquence in Portuguese literature. Previously to the production of this work, no rhetorical models were known in Portugal, save those of Aristotle, which were transmitted through the second and third hand in so barbarous a form, that a writer found it necessary to forget them in order to learn to express himself without pedantry.