versation[1] was often courted by the great, he appears so distant from servility, that his imprudence in this respect is by some highly blamed. Yet the instances of it by no means deserve that severity of censure with which some writers have condemned him. Unconscious of the feelings of a Camoens, they knew not that a carelessness in securing the smiles of fortune, and an open honesty of indignation, are almost inseparable from the enthusiasm of fine imagination. The truth is, the man possessed of true genius feels his greatest happiness in the pursuits and excursions of the mind, and therefore makes an estimate of things very different from that of him whose unremitting attention is devoted to his external interest. The profusion of Camoens is also censured. Had he dissipated the wealth he acquired at Macao, his profusion indeed had been criminal; but it does not appear that he ever enjoyed any other opportunity of acquiring independence. But Ca-
- ↑ Camoens has not escaped the fate of other eminent wits. Their ignorant admirers contrive anecdotes of their humour, which in reality disgrace them. Camoens, it is said, one day heard a potter singing some of his verses in a miserable mangled manner, and by way of retaliation, broke a parcel of his earthen ware. "Friend, said he, you destroy my verses, and I destroy your goods." The same foolish story is told of Ariosto; nay, we are even informed, that Rinaldo's speech to his horse, in the first book,
Ferma Baiardo mio, &c.
was the passage mistuned; the injured poet replied, "I have only broken a few base pots of thine, not worth a groat; but thou hast murdered a fine stanza of mine, worth a mark of gold." But both these silly tales are borrowed from Plutarch's life of Arcesilaus, where the same dull humour is told of Philoxenus. "He heard some brickmakers mistune one of his songs, "and in return he destroyed a number of their bricks."
