his exile
should ever be remembered.[8]

The accomplishments and manners of Camoens soon found him friends,
though under the disgrace of banishment. He was appointed Commissary of
the estates of deceased persons, in the island of Macao, a Portuguese
settlement on the coast of China. Here he continued his Lusiad; and
here, also, after five years residence, he acquired a fortune, though
small, yet equal to his wishes. Don Constantine de Braganza was now
Viceroy of India; and Camoens, desirous to return to Goa, resigned his
charge. In a ship, freighted by himself, he set sail, but was
shipwrecked in the gulf near the mouth of the river Meekhaun, in Cochin
China. All he had acquired was lost in the waves: his poems, which he
held in one hand, while he swam with the other, were all he found
himself possessed of when he stood friendless on the unknown shore. But
the natives gave him a most humane reception; this he has immortalized
in the prophetic song in the tenth Lusiad;[9] and in the seventh he
tells us that here he lost the wealth which satisfied his wishes.

_Agora da esperanca ja adquirida, etc._

"Now blest with all the wealth fond hope could crave,
Soon I beheld that wealth beneath the wave
For ever lost;----
My life like Judah's Heaven-doom'd king of yore
By miracle prolong'd."

On the banks of the Meekhaun, he wrote his beautiful paraphrase of the
137th Psalm, where the Jews, in the finest strain of poetry, are
represented as hanging their harps on the willows by the rivers of
Babylon, and weeping their exile from their native country. Here Camoens
continued some time, till an opportunity offered to carry him to Goa.
When he arrived at that city, Don Constantine de Braganza, the viceroy,
whose characteristic was politeness, admitted him into intimate
friendship, and Camoens was happy till Count Redondo assumed the
government. Those who had formerly procured the banishment of the
satirist were silent while Constantine was in power. But now they
exerted all their arts against him. Redondo, when he entered on office,
pretended to be the friend of Camoens; yet, with the most unfeeling
indifference, he suffered the innocent man to be thrown into the common
prison. After all the delay of bringing witnesses, Camoens, in a public
trial, fully refuted every accusation against his conduct while
commissary at Macao, and his enemies were loaded with ignominy and
reproach. But Camoens had som