ountry are enormous,
and it is really sad to contemplate the little use that is made of the
one or of the other unless developed by alien energy and worked by alien
capital. As regards this latter important factor, the administrative
corruption and the unsound state of the national finances render it
difficult to find foreign capitalists who are able and willing to embark
in the industrial enterprises, the successful issue of which affords the
only chance for this most interesting nation to recover something of its
ancient prosperity and to once more take a position in the world worthy
of the land of the hardy sailors and valiant captains who have left so
imperishable a record over the earth's surface.

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.