he first who wooed the modern Epic Muse, and she
gave him the wreath of a first lover; a sort of epic poetry unheard of
before; or, as Voltaire calls it, _une nouvelle espece d'epopee_; and
the grandest subject it is (of profane history) which the world has ever
beheld.[14] A voyage esteemed too great for man to dare; the adventures
of this voyage through unknown oceans deemed unnavigable; the eastern
world happily discovered, and for ever indissolubly joined and given to
the western; the grand Portuguese empire in the East founded; the
humanization of mankind, and universal commerce the consequence! What
are the adventures of an old, fabulous hero's arrival in Britain, what
are Greece and Latium in arms for a woman compared to this! Troy is in
ashes, and even the Roman empire is no more. But the effects of the
voyage, adventures, and bravery of the hero of the Lusiad will be felt
and beheld, and perhaps increase in importance, while the world shall
remain.

Happy in his choice, happy also was the genius of Camoens in the method
of pursuing his subject. He has not, like Tasso, given it a total
appearance of fiction; nor has he, like Lucan, excluded allegory and
poetical machinery. Whether he intended it or not (for his genius was
sufficient to suggest its propriety), the judicious precept of
Petronius[15] is the model of the Lusiad. That elegant writer proposes a
poem on the civil war, and no poem, ancient or modern, merits the
character there sketched out in any degree comparative to the Lusiad. A
truth of history is preserved; yet, what is improper for the historian,
the ministry of Heaven is employed, and the free spirit of poetry throws
itself into fictions which makes the whole appear as an effusion of
prophetic fury, and not like a rigid detail of facts, given under the
sanction of witnesses. Contrary to Lucan, who, in the above rules, drawn
from the nature of poetry, is severely condemned by Petronius, Camoens
conducts his poem _per ambages Deorumque ministeria_. The apparition,
which in the night hovers athwart the fleet near the Cape of Good Hope,
is the grandest fiction in human composition; the invention his own! In
the Island of Venus, the use of which fiction in an epic poem is also
his own, he has given the completest assemblage of all the flowers which
have ever adorned the bowers of love. And, never was the _furentis animi
vaticinatio_ more conspicuously displayed than in the prophetic song,
the view of