[645] Colecçaõ de Livros Ineditos de Hist. Port., Lisboa, folio, Tom. I., 1790, pp. 290-294; an excellent work, published by the Portuguese Academy, and edited by the learned Correa de Serra, formerly Minister of Portugal to the United States. The story of Don Ferdinand is also told in Mariana, Historia (Tom. II. p. 345). But the principal resource of Calderon was, no doubt, a life of the Infante, by his faithful friend and follower, Joam Alvares, first printed in 1527, of which an abstract, with long passages from the original, may be found in the “Leben des standhaften Prinzen,” Berlin, 1827, 8vo. To these may be added, for the illustration of the Príncipe Constante, a tract by J. Schulze, entitled “Ueber den standhaften Prinzen,” printed at Weimar, 1811, 12mo, at a time when Schlegel’s translation of that drama, brought out under the auspices of Goethe, was in the midst of its success on the Weimar stage; the part of Don Ferdinand being acted with great power by Wolf. Schulze is quite extravagant in his estimate of the poetical worth of the Príncipe Constante, placing it by the side of the “Divina Commedia”; but he discusses skilfully its merits as an acting drama, and explains, in part, its historical elements.
No prosigas;—cessa,
Cessa, Enrique, porque son
Palabras indignas essas,
No de un Portugués Infante,
De un Maestre, que professa
De Christo la Religion,
Pero aun de un hombre lo fueran
Vil, de un barbaro sin luz