[LUIS DE CAMOENS]. The glory of Portuguese literature, author of the Portuguese epic Os Lusiadas. Like so many of his countrymen, he wrote verse in Spanish as well as in his own language. Cf. his Obras, Lisbon, 1860-69; and see Ticknor, III, 77, note, and 58 (with a verse translation of the Letrilla).
[Page 81].—l. 30. vo, i.e., voy.
[Page 82].—l. 26. fora, i.e., fuera.
[SANTA TERESA DE JESÚS] (Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada). A Carmelite nun already in 1536, she devoted the rest of her laborious life to founding convents and thoroughly reforming her Order and to the composition of her devotional and mystical works (El Camino de la perfección—El castillo interior, etc.). She is one of the greatest of the Spanish mystics, and is in every way an attractive figure. Cf. Biblioteca de autores españoles, vols. 53 and 55, for her works; and see an account of her life by Mrs. Cunninghame Graham (1894).
[Page 85].—l. 21. This Letrilla has been translated by Longfellow (Riverside ed., 1886, VI, 216).
[FERNANDO DE HERRERA]. An ecclesiastic, and head of the so-called Seville school of lyric poetry in the sixteenth century. Not much is known of his life. Eminently a poet, and as such called the Divine by his countrymen, he wrote with exceeding purity of style and greatly enriched Spanish poetic diction. His masterpiece is the ode: Por la vitoria de Lepanto. The influence of Petrarch is clear in his sonnets. See Biblioteca de autores españoles, vol. 32, for his poems; and cf. Ticknor, III, 7 ff. and E. Bourciez in the Annales de la Faculté des lettres de Bordeaux (1891).
[Page 86].—l. 1. This sonnet has been Englished by Archdeacon Churton (in his translations from Gongora, etc., London, 1862, vol. I, p. 223). The naval battle of Lepanto (near Corinth) took place on October 7, 1571, between the Turks on one side, and on the other the combined squadrons of Spain, Venice and Pope Pius V, under the command of Don John of Austria, a natural brother of Philip II. The Christians triumphed and Mohammedan inroads into the Occident were checked. Cervantes was crippled in this battle.—Ponto, ocean, sea.
l. 14. El joven de Austria, i.e., Don John.
l. 15. Cf. the Cantiga of Villasandino, [p. 24].