The news of the terrible disaster of Alcacer Quibir was brought to Lisbon by the Admiral Dom Diogo de Sousa, and occasioned the most passionate lamentation. There was not a noble family which had not lost more than one of its representatives, not a patriot who failed to see that ruin was staring his country in the face. Deprived of soldiers, resources, and reputation at one fell blow, the Portuguese nation seemed stunned at the extent of its calamity. Even in India the same alarm was felt, and it is said that the brave Viceroy, Dom Luis de Athaide, died of a broken heart at the news. The Cardinal Henry was solemnly crowned king, but he was a feeble old man of sixty-six, who had to be fed like a baby, and he was quite incapable of facing the situation. He utterly refused to acknowledge any successor, or to express any opinion on the subject, and when he died on January 31, 1580, the Cortes which had been summoned to decide this important question was still sitting at Lisbon. With him ended for a time the separate existence of the Portuguese nation, and it is significant and interesting to observe that Camoens, the great national poet of Portugal, the poet who had immortalized its heroic epoch, died in a hospital of semi-starvation a few months before or after the Cardinal-king. It was well he did not live longer, for Portugal was to enter on the period of its “Sixty-Years’ Captivity,” and her proud sons, who had the patriotism of a Camoens in their hearts, would not have been able to bear the burden of subjection to a foreign king.
XII.
PORTUGUESE LITERATURE—CAMOENS.
IT has always been the case in the history of a nation which can boast of a golden age, that the epoch of its greatest glory is that in which its literature chiefly flourished. The energies of a nation at its zenith cannot be bounded by the vastest schemes of conquest, but develop in other directions as well. It was so with Portugal. The age which witnessed the careers of its famous captains and conquerors was also the age of its greatest poets and prose writers. The establishment of the Inquisition soon checked the progress of Portuguese literature, but before its fatal power had time to thoroughly stifle free thought, and before the disaster of Alcacer Quibir, and the annexation of the country by Philip II. of Spain, Portugal had been able to produce many great writers, and one of the most supremely-gifted poets the world has ever seen, Luis de Camoens.
The affection which the first princes of the house of Aviz had felt for literature, and especially for purely national literature, has been alluded to, and the natural result is to be seen in the works of the early poets, and of the eloquent chroniclers of the fifteenth century. The honour given by these princes to literary endeavour heightened its importance in the eyes of the people, and raised the whole standard of education. The Portuguese were therefore prepared to take advantage of the stores of knowledge revealed by the revival of classical learning, and to profit greatly by it. Ayres Barbosa, a native of Aveiro, was the first to introduce the study of ancient Greek into the peninsula; he had listened to the lectures of Politian and his contemporaries at Florence, and after teaching “the humanities” at the University of Salamanca for about twenty years from 1495, he returned to Portugal as tutor to the younger sons of King Emmanuel. His most distinguished Portuguese pupil was, however, Andrea de Resende, the antiquary, who was one of the professors at the University of Coimbra, during the epoch of its greatest reputation, and is well known as the friend and correspondent of Erasmus.