POETXIGUESE LANGUAGE. 292 POBTXJGUESE LITERATURE. Dictionary of the Portuguese and English Lan- yuagcs (Leipzig, 1893) ; id., yeues Worterbuch tier portugiesischen vnd deutschen Hprache (ib., 1887-89) ; Baibosa Rodrigues, Vocubulario indi- geno camparaJo para mostrar a adulterncao da lingua, complomcnto do Poranduha amazonense (Rio tie .Janeiro, 1892): Dozj' and Englemann, Olossaire des mots espagnols ct portugais dfrivis de Varahc (2d ed., Leyden, 1869). PORTUGUESE LITERATURE. The lit- erature of the most westerly of the Roraanee lands, Portugal, was one of the latest to arrive at a consciousness of national unity and in- dependence, and therefore one of the latest to begin to achieve a literary history. Further- more, as a result of the somewhat sluggish and unassertive temperament of the people as a whole, Portuguese literature has been less inde- pendent than that of the sister tongues, and has been onl.y too ready to limit itself to imitation of what had arisen within the bounds of Northern France. Provence, Italy, and esjiecially of the near neighbor Spain. To the lack of any long- continued originality in the domain of Portu- guese letters there has also contributed to a large degree the excess of sentimentality and the consequent elegiac effusiveness that mark the national character and life. So it is that the lyric spirit, with decided tendencies toward the idyllic and the bucolic, has ever predominated in Portugal. It was so at the very outset, for Avhereas lyric verse followed in the wake of epic verse in Spain and in France, it appeared at the very beginning of literary activity in Portugal, and the epic appeared there only three centuries and a half later, and then as the result of a con- •sciously artistic development. And the love lyric, from which we date the rise of Portuguese litera- ture, was not of spontaneous growth or native to the soil ; on the contrary, it was an exotic that had thriven in France before it was transplanted to the more westerly land. According to the scheme adopted by Theophilo Braga and by C. M. de Vasconcellos, six main periods may be distinguished in the course of Portuguese literary history. (1) In the first period (1200 to 1385) the impulse to literary production came from France. The first Portuguese dynasty was founded by Burgundian nobles, in whose train there entered into the land, with their French habits and predilections, soldiers and colonists •who settled on the territory regained from the Arabs during the age of the reconquest. More- over, the constant pilgrimages to the shrine of Saint James at Compostella. ecclesiastical rela- tions of various kinds, and royal and noble intermarriages, made the relations between France and Portugal exceedingly close. The more important literary influence at this early stage was that which entered from Southern France. The troubadours early penetrated into the western territory and met with particular favor in Galicia. a district linguistically con- nected with Portugal. Their strains were soon taken and reechoed by native poets, who imi- tated as well as they might the love lyric, the panegyric, the satire, the debate, and the other conventional poetical forms of Provence. The high-water mark of composition in Provencal measures and according to Provencal ideals was reached in the reign of the King Dom Diniz (1279-1325), the greatest of all the native trou- badours, whose poetical gifts were inherited by his natural sons, Atl'onso Sanches and Pedro, Count of Barcellos. Of these poets and some two hundred others of this period there are preserved about 2000 [(oems, nearly 140 of which are from the pen of the monarch himself, and not a few of them are due to courtiers such as the Chancel- lor Estevam da Guarda and the Admiral Gomes Charinho. We find the great l)ody of this verse in certain Cancioneiros or song books, one set of which contains the Galieian lyrics of the Castil- ian monarch Alfonso the Wise ; three of them — the Cancioneiro da Ajuda and the Cancioneiro do Vaticano, so named from the libraries in which they are deposited, and the Cancioneiro Colocci- Brancuti, bearing the name of its present and former owners — have the poems of native Portu- guese authors. Although the prevailing tone in the Galician-Portuguese literature of this age is that of the artificial Provencal lyric, there is a noticeable tendency to take up and adapt popular forms of a kind that still live on in the oral tradition of Portugal and Northern and Western Spain. Prose composition at this time consists chiefly of translations from Latin — lives of saints, vis- ions of the other world, etc. — and of translations and imitations of material borrowed from North- ern France and already well loiown in Spain, such as the Charlemagne and the Arthurian stories (cf. the Cavallciros da Mesa Redonda, one of the few of them that have thus far been published) and those dealing with the quest of the Holy Grail. It has been asserted that origi- nal composition of chivalrous romances began in Portugal as early as the fourteenth century; for some think that the Amadis dc Gaula. of which the earliest form preserved is a Spanish version, was written originally in Portuguese at this time and was taken thence by Spanish translators and elaborators. (See Spanish Liter.ture. ) His- torical writing is represented by the appearance of chronicles dealing with religious matters or with military undertakings (Chronica da con- qnista do Algarre) and things of political import, and by the appearance also of genealogies like the Nobifiario ascribed to the Count of Barcellos. (2) The second period continues from 1385 to 1521. The time is really one of transition and evidences by the increased interest taken in tha works of classic antiquity the influence of the all-pervading Renaissance movement. The best spirits begin to turn away from Proencal ideals, and, in imitation of the course pursued by the chief Spanish writers, adopt not infrequently a more serious didactic tone, which is borne out by use of the Dantesque allegory. The bulk of the poetry of the age was produced by the poctas palncianos of the courts of .To."io II. ("1481-95) and Emanuel the Great (1495-1521). Ciarcia de Resende. one of these poets, played a part similar to that performed by Baena at the Court of Castile, by collecting and publishing at Lisbon in 1516 the verse of the numerous portns palacianos. Four of the authors represented in this Cancioneiro Geral of Garcia de Resende merit particular mention. They are Ciil Vicente, who is more remarkable, however, for the development which he gave to the drama; Christovam Falcao, whose idyll Ciisfal — the first composition of this favorite kind in Portuguese — records his own love experiences ; Bernardim Ribeiro, the author
