PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS
By the same Author
THE MAGIC OF SPAIN, 1912.
IN PORTUGAL, 1912.
POEMS FROM THE PORTUGUESE, 1913.
STUDIES IN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE, 1914.
LYRICS OF GIL VICENTE, 1914.
PORTUGAL OF THE PORTUGUESE, 1915.
New York Agents
LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
FOURTH AVENUE AND 30TH STREET
NUN’ ALVAREZ.
From the earliest (1526) edition of the Cronica.
[Frontispiece.
PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS
BY
AUBREY F. G. BELL
A notavel fama dos excelentes barões e muito antiguos antecessores dina de perpetua lembrança
Duarte Pacheco Pereira, Esmeraldo
Oxford
B. H. BLACKWELL, BROAD STREET
MCMXVII
TO
THE COUNTLESS FORGOTTEN HEROES
OF PORTUGAL
In burning sands or Ocean’s blinding silt,
In Africa, Asia, and the icy North,
They lie: yet came they home who thus went forth,
Since of their bones is all their country built.
[Pg v]
Preface
Not seven, nor seventy, names exhaust the tale of Portugal’s greatmen. The reader need but turn to the fascinating pages of Portuguesehistory. There he will find a plentiful feast set out before him—theepic strife between Portuguese and Moor, Portuguese and Spaniard,and deeds of high emprise in the foam of perilous seas and theever-mysterious lands of the East. His delight will be impaired unlesshe can follow the events in detail in the chronicles and histories ofthe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and for this a knowledge ofPortuguese is requisite, since there are few satisfactory translations.But it is as easy to acquire a sufficient knowledge of Portuguese toread it with[Pg vi] pleasure as it is difficult to write or speak it.
There is a whole literature, often not less attractive in style than insubject, of histories, memoirs, travels, accounts of wrecks and sieges,recording the deeds of the Portuguese on and beyond the seas. Of thebattle of Ourique (1139) Portuguese historians have loved to tell howthe Moors numbered 600,000 (since to say 900,000 were an exaggeration)and how, heavy rain having fallen after the battle, the streams thatflowed into the far-distant Guadiana ran red with blood. But there werescrupulous and moderate chroniclers like Fernam Lopez and Azurara, andmany of the historians of India were sober writers whose narratives(those, for instance, of Fernam Lopez de Castanheda, Diogo do Couto,and Gaspar Correa) bear the stamp of truth while they delight thereader by their wealth of detail and personal anecdote.
They may be pardoned for declaring that their heroes’ achievementsoutshone...