The intellectual life of Portugal seems to have ceased with Camoens.  It is rather pathetic the way in which the ordinary educated Portuguese refers back to the great poet and to the heroic period which he commemorated.  No conversation of any length can be carried on without a reference to Camoens and to Vasco da Gama.  All history and all progress appear to have culminated and stopped then.  Apparently nothing worthy of note has happened since.  Camoens returned to Lisbon in 1569, and his great epic poem saw the light in 1572.  He died in a public hospital in Lisbon in 1579 or 1580.  In the latter year began the “sixty years’ captivity,” when Portugal became merely a Spanish province; yet there is no recollection of this—­except the ingrained hatred of Spaniards and of everything Spanish—­or of the shaking off the yoke in 1640, and of the battle of Amexial in 1663, where the English contingent bore the brunt of the battle, and the “Portugueses,” as they are called by the author of An Account of the Court of Portugal, published in 1700, claimed the principal part of the honour.  The traces of the Peninsular War have faded away, and on the lines of Torres Vedras there is scarcely any tradition of the cause of their existence.  In Lisbon, indeed, there is one incident of later date than Camoens, which is considered worthy of remembrance,—­the great earthquake of 1755,—­but this can scarcely be looked upon as a national achievement, or a matter of intellectual development.

That Camoens is a fitting object for a nation’s veneration cannot for a moment be doubted.  The high encomium passed upon “the Student, the Soldier, the Traveller, the Patriot, the Poet, the mighty Man of Genius” by Burton, appears to be in no way exaggerated.  The healthful influence of his life and writings has done and is still doing good in his beloved country.  But though the man who in his lifetime was neglected, and who was allowed to die in the depths of poverty and misery, is now the most honoured of his countrymen, and his rank as one of the world’s great poets is universally acknowledged, his labours have been to a certain extent in vain.

Not only industry, but culture, literature, and art appear to be infested with the mildew of decay.  There is a good university at Coimbra, where alone, it is said, the language is spoken correctly.  There is an excellent system of elementary and secondary schools, but in practice it is incomplete and subject to many abuses, like most public institutions in the country.  The irregularities of the language, without authoritative spelling or pronunciation, and the best dictionary of which is Brazilian, have a bad effect upon the literature of the country.

The language, more purely Latin in its base than either of the other Latin tongues, with an admixture of Moorish, and strengthened by the admission of many words of foreign origin, introduced during the period of great commercial prosperity, possesses ample means for the expression of ideas and of shades of thought, and though it loses somewhat of the musical quality of the other languages in consequence of a rather large percentage of the nasal tones which are peculiar to it, yet it will hold its own well with the remaining members of the group.