Portuguese literature
and Herodotus. These fifty-nine dialogues, arranged in alphabetical
order, pay more regard to facts than to style. They are full of varied
information and give us a most pleasant insight into the writer’s
character, strong, humorous, obstinate, and into his life at Goa. From
a scientific point of view they are of great importance: not only
did they provide the first description of cholera[526] and of many
unknown plants, but after three and a half centuries they retain their
scientific interest and value. Begun many years earlier in Latin,[527]
they were published in the author’s old age, with an introductory ode
by his friend, the poet Camões. Unhappily they became known to Europe
chiefly in a garbled Latin version by Charles de l’Écluse (Clusius)--a
fifth edition appeared in 1605--from which the Italian and French
translations were made. It was not until the nineteenth century that
the skilful and eager care of the Conde de Ficalho enabled a larger
number of those who read Portuguese to appreciate Orta at his true
worth.
Born at Alcacer do Sal, the celebrated scientist PEDRO NUNEZ
(1492?-1577?), whose name lives in the instrument of his invention, the
_nonius_,[528] was Cosmographer to Kings João III and Sebastian and
Professor of Mathematics at the University of Coimbra (1544-62). Prince
Luis and D. João de Castro were his pupils. He wrote indifferently
in Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, declared that as science treats
of concrete things it can be expressed in any language however
barbarous,[529] and, in order to secure for it a wider public,
translated into Portuguese the Latin treatise (_libellus_) _De Sphaera_
by John of Halifax (Joannes de Sacro Bosco): _Tratado da Sphera_
(1537),[530] and into Spanish his own _Libro de Algebra en arithmetica
& geometria_ (1567), originally written in Portuguese and addressed
to his pupil and friend the Cardinal-King Henrique. His other works,
including the _De Crepusculis_ (1542), were written in Latin.
The Homeric hero DUARTE PACHECO PEREIRA (1465?-1533?), about whose
life, apart from the hundred days at Cochin (1504) and a fight off
Finisterre (1509) with the French pirate Mondragon, singularly little
is known,[531] on his return from India in 1505 wrote a work entitled
_Esmeraldo de Situ Orbis_ [1505-6?]. This curious and important survey
of the coast of Africa, the work of one more accustomed to wield sword
than pen, but sometimes as picturesque and interesting as Duarte
Barbosa, was to have consisted of five books, but only three and a part
of the fourth were written. It remained in manuscript for nearly four
centuries.
The three _Roteiros_ (logs)[532] written by the famous Viceroy D. JOÃO
DE CASTRO (1500-48) on his voyages (1) from Lisbon to Goa in 1538,
(2) from Goa to Diu, 1538-9, (3) from Goa to the Red Sea in 1541, are
decked out with no literary graces. He wrote, he said, for seamen, not
for ladies and gallants. Yet the scientific curiosity and enthusiasm
of this keen-eyed, broad-minded observer give his descriptions force
and truth, the same practical lucidity that marks his letters, which
according to his friend Prince Luis contained _todas as cousas
necessarias e nenhũas superfluas_, and they were early prized in Spain
as _harto notables, muy curiosos_.[533] The third _Roteiro_ would seem
to have been originally written in Latin, and perhaps translated by
Castro at his beloved Sintra home. The manuscript was bought by Sir
Walter Raleigh, and it appeared in English in 1625, 208 years before it
was published in Portuguese.
Greater historical interest attaches to the letters of an earlier
Governor, AFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE (1461-1515). That grim conqueror of
the East might have smiled somewhat sardonically to be numbered among
Portugal’s writers. He merely said what he had to say, and there
was an end of it, would be his comment. But it is precisely this
directness--the powerful grasp of reality and the horror of useless
rhetoric--which gives excellence to the prose of his _Cartas_. These
incomparable reports, written to King Manuel in moments snatched from
his many occupations as Governor of India (1509-15), sometimes rise to
a biblical grandeur and eloquence, as in the splendid passage beginning
_Goa é vossa; Onor, o rei dele paga-vos pareas_. Perhaps, after all,
he was not wholly unconscious of his art, and certainly the source
of it is clear: as Osorio[534] notices, he was a devoted student of
the Bible. In more familiar mood he can give a vivid sketch in a few
emphatic words, as when he describes the judge, ‘a little man dressed
in a cloak of coarse cloth with a crooked stick under his arm’, or the
impostors who will practise ‘a thousand wiles and deceits for one ruby’.
To turn to lesser men, FERNAM RODRIGUEZ LOBO SOROPITA (born _c._ 1560),
a distinguished Lisbon advocate and the first editor of the _Rythmas_
(1595) of Camões, was a poet celebrated for his wit in his day. That
of his letters is perhaps a little forced, and the obscurity of the
allusions now interferes with our enjoyment. The interest of the
extracts from a manuscript in the British Museum written by FRANCISCO
RODRIGUEZ SILVEIRA (1558-_c._ 1635) in 1608, published under the title
_Memorias de um Soldado da India_ (1877), consists both in the record
of his thirteen years’ service in India (1585-98) and in the account
during the succeeding ten years of Portugal and especially Beira, the
condition of the roads, the land, the peasants, and the sway of the
local _caciques_--thief, Turk, Pasha, tyrant, he calls them--and his
indignation gives a pleasant vigour to his prose. The _Arte da Caça
da Altanaria_ (1616) of DIOGO FERNANDEZ FERREIRA (born _c._ 1550),
page of the Pretender D. Antonio, is a work of great interest. The
writer evidently delights in his theme and has a real love of birds,
the migratory habits of which he describes in Part 6; and he treats
‘of swallows and of the swallow-grass which restores sight’, of
the food made of sugar, saffron, and almonds for nightingales, and
other alluring topics. Among the rare and curious books of the time
we may notice that on the prerogatives of women, _Dos priuilegios &
prœrogatiuas q ho genero femenino tẽ por dereito comũ & ordenações do
Reyno mais que ho genero masculino_ (1557), by RUY GONÇALVEZ, Professor
of Law at Coimbra in 1539 and subsequently Court Advocate at Lisbon.
Two writers especially attract attention even in the feast of interest
which Portuguese prose in this century offers so abundantly. The son
of a distinguished Dutch illuminator and painter settled in Portugal,
Antonio de Hollanda, who painted Charles V at Toledo and may have
illuminated the Book of Hours of Queen Lianor, FRANCISCO DE HOLLANDA
(1518-84), born in Lisbon, painter, illuminator, and architect, in his
short treatises _Da fabrica que fallece á cidade de Lisboa_ and _Da
sciencia do desenho_, showed an enthusiasm for his subject almost
out of place in the Portugal of the second half of the sixteenth
century. Indeed, he nearly ran into trouble with the Inquisition by
seeming to make painting ‘divine’, but prudently altered the passage.
His curious and celebrated treatise _Da Pintvra Antigva_ (1548) is
written in a style which may be rather rejoiced in than imitated,
for, as he tells us, he was more at home with the brush than with
the pen, but it is full of ingenious and original remarks. The first
part deals in forty-four brief chapters with painting generally, and
opens with a fine passage describing the work of God as the greatest
of all painters. The second part contains the _Quatro dialogos_, in
the first three of which he records the conversations of Vittoria
Colonna, Michelangelo, Lattanzio Tolomei, and himself in the church of
St. Sylvester or in a garden overlooking Rome; conversations which,
despite their Portuguese dress, bear the stamp of truth and will retain
their fascination so long as interest in art endures. Francisco worked
first in the household of the Infante Fernando and then in that of the
Archbishop of Evora. In 1537 he set out on a journey to Rome by land
(Valladolid, Barcelona, Provence), and in Italy remained from 1538 to
1547. His friendship with Michelangelo continued after his return to
Portugal, as a letter from Hollanda to Michelangelo in 1553 proves. The
last part of his life he spent in the country between Lisbon and Sintra
among the Portuguese whom he had called _desmusicos_, and despite his
comfortable circumstances--he received a pension of 100,000 _réis_ from
Philip II--he must often have looked back with regret to the fullness
of those nine years in Italy. But his countrymen, thanks largely to
the scholarly researches and studies of Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos,
are now fully alive to his merits. And, indeed, even in the sixteenth
century a passage in Frei Heitor Pinto’s _Imagem da Vida Christam_
sets him side by side with the great Italian.[535] PHILIPE NUNEZ,
who professed as a Dominican in 1591, wrote on painting in the next
century: _Arte poetica e da pintura e symmetria_ (1615). A work on
music by ANTONIO FERNANDEZ of about the same date, _Arte de Mvsica de
canto dorgam e canto cham_ (1626), consists of three treatises which
do not profess to be original. MANUEL NUNEZ DA SILVA wrote on the same
subject in his _Arte Minima_ (1685).
In the preface (1570) to his _Regra Geral_, written in 1565, GONÇALO
FERNANDEZ TRANCOSO[536] (_c._ 1515-_c._ 1590) professed not to have
sufficient literary skill even for this simple calendar of movable
feasts. Yet in the previous year (1569), in which at Lisbon he lost
both wife and children in the great plague (a beloved daughter of
twenty-four, a student son, and a choir-boy grandson), in order to
distract his mind from these sorrows,[537] he wrote a remarkable work,
unique of its kind in Portuguese literature; or at least he wrote
then the first two books, which appeared under the title _Contos
e historias de proveito e exemplo_ (1575).[538] A third part was
published posthumously in 1596. The number and kind of the editions in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries testify to its popularity, but
since the eighteenth century no new edition has been printed and the
book has fallen into a strange neglect.[539] Trancoso did not claim
originality: he merely collected stories from what he had heard or
read.[540] The stories, only thirty-eight in number, are very various.
The subjects of many of them resemble those of Franco Sacchetti’s
_Novelle_ or Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s _Le xiii Piacevoli Notti_,
and some are directly imitated from Boccaccio’s _Il Decamerone_ or
Giovanni Battista Giraldi’s _Gli Ecatommiti_ or from Matteo Bandello
(†1565).[541] But often they are traditions so widespread that they
occur in many authors and languages, as that (ii. 7) which corresponds
to Straparola’s third _Notte_ and of which Dr. F. A. Coelho recorded
twenty-one other foreign versions, besides four popular variants
in Portuguese; or i. 17, in which the cunning answers to difficult
questions are similar to those in Sacchetti, No. 4 (_Mestre Bernabò
signor di Milano_), and Dr. Braga’s _Contos tradicionaes do povo
portuguez_, No. 71 (_Frei Joam Sem Cuidados_). Others are apparently
of oriental origin, as the judge’s verdict, worthy of Sancho Panza
(i. 15), or the king and the barber (iii. 3). But the subject and
place (Lisbon, Oporto, Evora, Coimbra, &c.) of most, although not of
the longest, of these tales are Portuguese.[542] Some are trifling
anecdotes which acquire a charm and vividness through their popular
character and the author’s simple details of description, as the
picture of the peasant family near Oporto sitting round the fire after
their supper of maize-bread and chestnuts (i. 10). The author is not
content that we should draw our own moral, but this scarcely spoils the