Eor him no Muse shall leave her golden loom,
No palm shall blossom, and no wreath shall bloom.
Yet shall my labors and my cares be paid
By fame immortal
In such an age, and among such a barbarous nobility, what but wretched neglect could be the fate of a Camoens! After all, however, if he was imprudent on his first appearance at the court of John III. if the honesty of his indignation led him into great imprudence, as certainly it did, when at Goa he satirised the viceroy and the first persons in power; yet let it also be remembered, that "The gifts of imagination bring the heaviest task upon the vigilance of reason; and to bear those faculties with unerring rectitude, or invariable propriety, requires a degree of firmness and of cool attention, which doth not always attend the higher gifts of the mind. Yet difficult as nature herself seems to have rendered the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme consolation of dullness and of folly to point with Gothic triumph to those excesses which are the overflow-
when he went on board the ship appointed to carry him, was a figure hanging by the neck at the yard arm, exactly like himself in feature and habit. He asked what it meant; and was resolutely answered, It represents You, and these are the men who hung it up. Nor must another insult be omitted. After being a few days at sea, he was necessitated to return to the port from whence he had sailed, for fresh provisions, for all his live-stock, it was found, was poisoned. After his return to Europe, he used all his interest to be reinstated in India, which, in his old days, after twenty years solicitation at the court of Madrid, he at last obtained. His second government, is wrapped in much obscurity, and is distinguished by no important action or event.
