almost
completed, before his nation, and to cover with honor his injured
name.

He accepted a passage to Sofala offered him by Pedro Barreto, who had
become viceroy of Mozambique in that year. Unable to refund the amount
of the passage, he was once more held for debt and spent two years of
misery and distress in Mozambique, completing and polishing during
this time his great epic song and preparing the collection of his
lyrics, his 'Parnasso.' In 1559 he was released by the historian Diogo
do Couto and other friends of his, visiting Sofala with the expedition
of Noronha, and embarked on the Santa Clara for Lisbon.

On the 7th of April, 1570, Camoens once more set foot on his native
soil, only to find the city for which he had yearned, sadly changed.
The government was in the hands of a brave but harebrained and fanatic
young monarch, ruled by the Jesuits; the capital had been ravaged by a
terrible plague which had carried off fifty thousand souls; and its
society had no room for a man who brought with him from the Indies,
whence so many returned with great riches, nothing but a manuscript,
though in it was sung in classic verse the glory of his people. Still,
through the kind offices of his warm friend Dom Manoel de Portugal,
Camoens obtained, on the 25th of September, 1571, the royal permission
to print his epic. It was published in the spring of the following
year (March, 1572). Great as was the success of the work, which marked
a new epoch in Portuguese history, the reward which the poet received
for it was meagre. King Sebastian granted him an annual pension of
fifteen thousand reis (fifteen dollars, which then had the purchasing
value of about sixty dollars in our money), which, after the poet's
death, was ordered by Philip II. to be paid to his aged mother.
Destitute and broken in spirit, Camoens lived for the last eight years
of his life with his mother in a humble house near the convent of
Santa Ana, "in the knowledge of many and in the society of few." Dom
Sebastian's departure early in 1578 for the conquest in Africa once
more kindled patriotic hopes in his breast; but the terrible defeat at
Alcazarquivir (August 4th of the same year), in which Portugal lost
her king and her army, broke his heart. He died on the 10th of June,
1580, at which time the army of Philip II., under the command of the
Duke of Alva, was marching upon Lisbon. He was thus spared the cruel
blow of seeing, though not of foreseeing, the n