nvention: Portuguese literature is completely classic in spirit,
avoiding all exaggeration, all offences against taste, and confining
itself to classic forms, such as the pastoral, the epic and the sonnet.
Many Moorish customs survive in Portugal to this day, but they have not
become so closely assimilated there as in Spain to the character of the
people. The cruelty which has always marked the Spanish race is no part
of the Portuguese national character, which is conspicuous rather for
the "gentler-sexed humanity." True, the bull-fight, that barbarous
legacy of the Moors, still lingers among the Portuguese, but the sport
is pursued with no such wanton intoxication of cruelty as in the country
with which its name is now associated. On the other hand, the Roman
tradition has been preserved in Portugal more perfectly than in Italy
itself: in the "fairest of Roman colonies," as it was once called, there
will be found manners and customs which bring up more vividly the life
portrayed by the classic poets than any existing among the peasants of
modern Italy.

[Illustration: ANCIENT HOUSE IN OPORTO.]

Both Rome and Arabia stood sponsors for the land they thus endowed. The
name _Portugal_ is compounded of the Latin _portus_, a "port," and the
Arabic _calaeh_, a "castle" or "fortress." The first of these names was
originally given to the town which still retains it--Oporto--one of the
oldest of Portugal, and at one time its capital.

The history of Portugal, when it separates from that of Spain, is the
history of a single stupendous achievement. A small nation raising
itself in a short time to the power of a great empire, reaching a height
which to gain was incredible, to keep impossible, and at the first
relaxation of effort suddenly falling with a disastrous crash,--that is
the drama of Portugal's greatness. There was no gradual rise or decline:
it mounted and fell. There is a tradition that the first king of
Portugal, Affonso Henriquez, was crowned on the battlefield with a burst
of enthusiasm on the part of the soldiers whom he was leading against
the Saracens, and that on the same day he opened his reign by the
glorious victory of Ourique. Less than half a century previously the
country had been given as a fief to a young knight, Count Henry of
Burgundy, on his marriage with a daughter of the king of Castile. The
Moors were overrunning it on the one hand, Castile was eying it
jealously on the other, yet Affonso Henriquez