the labour of his heroes,
rendered accessible to the former. The purpose of his poem is also
strictly kept in view. The west and the east he considers as two great
empires; the one of the true religion, the other of a false. The
professors of the true, disunited and destroying one another; the
professors of the false one, all combined to extirpate the other. He
upbraids the professors of the true religion for their vices,
particularly for their disunion, and for deserting the interests of holy
faith. His countrymen, however, he boasts, have been its defenders and
planters, and, without the assistance of their brother powers, will
plant it in Asia.

"The Crusaders," according to Voltaire, "were a band of vagabond
thieves, who had agreed to ramble from the heart of Europe in order to
desolate a country they had no right to, and massacre, in cold blood, a
venerable prince, more than fourscore years old, and his whole people,
against whom they had no pretence of complaint."

To prove that the Crusades were neither so unjustifiable, so impolitic,
nor so unhappy in their consequences as superficial readers of history
are accustomed to regard them, would not be difficult.

Upon the whole, it will be found that the Portuguese poet talks of the
political reasons of a Crusade with an accuracy in the philosophy of
history as superior to that of Voltaire, as the poetical merit of the
Lusiad surpasses that of the Henriade. And the critic in poetry must
allow, that, to suppose the discovery of GAMA the completion of all the
endeavours to overthrow the great enemies of the true religion, gives a
dignity to the poem, and an importance to the hero, similar to that
which Voltaire, on the same supposition, allows to the subject of the
Jerusalem of Tasso.

[458] Calicut is the name of a famous sea-port town in the province of
Malabar.

[459]

_The herald hears
Castilia's manly tongue salute his ears.--_

This in according to the truth of history. While the messenger sent
ashore by GAMA was borne here and there, and carried off his feet by the
throng, who understood not a word of his language, he was accosted in
Spanish by a Moorish merchant, a native of Tunis, who, according to
Osorius, had been the chief person with whom King Ferdinand had formerly
contracted for military stores. He proved himself an honest agent, and
of infinite service to GAMA; he returned to Portugal, where, according
to Faria, he died in the C