PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The Portuguese. like every other branch of the Romance family of languages, has grown out of a local form of the Lingua Domana Rustica, which in course of time had ingrafted upon it many elements of Ara bic from the Saracen invaders of the country, and numerous verbal and idiomatic char acteristics of the Frankish and Celtic dialects, which were introduced with the Burguudiau founders of the Portuguese monarchy. The earlier forms of Portuguese bore close affinity with the Galician, and although, an course of time. it presented strong resemblance to its sister language, the Castilian, in as far as both possessed numerous words of identical origin, it differed so widely from the latter in regard to grammatical structure, as almost to merit the designation of an original tongue. The antipathy existing between the Portuguese and Spaniards, and the cousquent strenuous efforts of their best writers to keep their language distinct, and to resist the introduction of fur ther Castilian elements. had the erect ofmaking Portuguese still more dissimilar from the sister tongues of the peninsula, and the result is the production of a language differ ing from pure Spanish in having an excess of nasal sounds, and fewer gutturals, with a softening or lisping of the consonants, and a deepening of the vowels, which renders it the softest, but least harmonious, and the feeblest. of all the Romance tongues. The earliest specimens of genuine Portuguese belong to the beginning of the 13th c., and consist for the most part of collections, or books of songs (Cancioneiros), which, both in regard to form and rhythm, resembled the troubadour or minne songs of the same period. Of these, the oldest is the Cancioneiro al Rei Dom Diniz, or Book of Songs, by king Diniz, who had long been regarded by the Portuguese as their earliest poet, but whose poems were supposed to be lost, till they were discovered about 40 years since, in MS. in the library of the Vatican, and published at Paris and Lisbon in 1847. In the 14th and 15th c., the court continued to be the center of poetry and art, as it had been under Diniz; but Castilian was in greater vogue than Portuguese, which was despised by the numerous royal poets, who emulated the example of Diniz, and composed love-songs and moral or didactic poems. Under the culture of these noble bands, the poetry of
Portugal remained weak and effeminate, without acquiring even the tenderness and pathos which characterized the Spanish romances of that age. The poetry and litera ture of Portugal acquired new vigor with the growth of her maritime and commercial glory, and the Cancioneiro Geral (Lisb. 1516) of the poet Garcia de Recende, which gives a general summary and extracts of all the Portuguese poets of the latter half of the 15th, and beginning of the 16th c., affords evidence of this improvement, which is most strongly exemplified in the sentimental pastorals or romances, and the national eclogues of Bernardino Bibeiro and Sti, de Miranda, whose eclogues and prose dramatic imitations of Plautus and Terence, mark the transition period between the ntediaval lyrical and the later classical style. These first attempts at the drama were followed by Antonio Ferreira, whose Ines de Castro is the oldest Portuguese tragedy. But the classical school, whose chief cultivators were the courtiers of Lisbon and the professors of Coimbra, found little favor among the -people at large, for the discoveries and conquests of the nation in Asia, Africa, and America excited an enthusiasm and self-consciousness in the people, which led them to crave for something more practical and natural than the stilted style of the classicists. At this crisis, when Portugal was at the zenith of her material prosperity, appeared her greatest poet, Camoens, who, in his immortal epic, Os Lusiadas, which appeared in 1572, struck out a new path in the domain of epic poetry; while his numerous sonnets, 300 in number, his Calicoes or songs, ills Redon dillas, dramas, and other poetic productions, exhibit a versatility of genius and graceful tenderness which place him in the foremost rank of European poets.