SOURCE: A review of Os Lusíadas, in Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. 29, No. 23, June 8, 1946, pp. 42-3.

In the following review of The Lusiads, Bacon surveys Camões's life and highlights those elements of the poem that will appeal to modern tastes.

This noble edition of the noble Portuguese epic [Os Lusíadas] in the original is the crowning work of one of the greatest of Romance language scholars. Professor [J. D. M.] Ford, who has already edited Sir Richard Fanshawe's fine seventeenth-century translation of the poem, must feel that he has done good service to literature and to mankind. And what more can a learned man desire? No doubt there will be the usual jeering from the testy race of critics. Slips are inevitable and will be pointed out with pleasure by persons who do not expose themselves by undertaking the enormously difficult. Judgments and testes differ...