horizons blew new pride into their hearts. A poet arose among them. Camoens wrote the 'Lusiad,' and filled it with the triumph of a young nation feeling its strength. He put into it every detail of past history which could add to the glory of the present. The new age set its feet reverently on the old, and gave all honour to the men who had fought for the making of Portugal, Alphonso, Pedro, and the rest of them. Ten stanzas in the poem are given to the story of Iñes, and at once and for ever they made an undisputed place in literature for her and her lover. 'It is a misfortune to write in an unknown tongue,' as a translator of the Lusiad' once remarked. It is especially true of Camoens' epic, which cannot be put very successfully into any other language. This is partly owing to its two-syllabled rhymes, which are a great beauty of Portuguese verse, but unreproducible in English. Outside its own country the 'Lusiad' has never enjoyed more than a 'succès d'estime,' but so much must be granted to it everywhere, and many passages deserve more; among them the verses about Pedro and Iñes. It is obvious at once what material lies at hand for the poet there; and Camoens did her memory the service of rescuing it from the dimness of a past which was divided already by a wide gap from the spirit of his own time. He tells the story simply and with dignity, and it gains by contrast with its context-the desperate struggles of long dead men, and Vasco da Gama's interminable exploits. 'Il y a peu d'endroits dans Virgile plus attendrissants et mieux écrits,' said Voltaire in an access of enthusiasm which is probably partly responsible for this passage being the best known and the most quoted in the 'Lusiad.' The legend thus became definitely national, and in process of time gathered a literature of its own. It was used again and again as the plot of tragedies, not by Portuguese writers only, but by Spanish, French and English as well. Its popularity endured through centuries. The traveller Murphy, who visited Lisbon in 1790, wrote as follows: 'There are two Theatres here for dramatic performances; on Sunday they are much crowded. The music was excellent, the dresses and scenery tolerable, the acting indifferent or rather bad. Of late years no females are allowed to perform on the stage, hence the men are obliged to assume the female garb. How provoking it was to see the tender, the beautiful Iñes de Castro represented by one of these brawny artificial wenches, especially in that affecting scene where she appears with her two infant children at the King's feet supplicating for mercy. Instead of the delicate faltering accents of the fair victim, he roared,' Murphy may possibly have seen Ferreira's play of Castro,' written in the later half of the 16th century. It is the best of the native dramas, praised greatly by critics for following the lines of Sophocles and Euripides, and thus marking an epoch in the art of the Portuguese theatre. The arrangement whereby every event happens behind the scenes is indeed perfectly Sophoclean; but the good points of the play may fairly be put down to Ferreira's own perceptions, and not to his imitation of the forms of greater men, which really only landed him in a hopeless dreariness of action. The real interest is in the characters, especially in Iñes, a most human woman, absorbed in a limitless passion. What misfortune is this that broods over me?' she asks the Chorus. 'Thy death,' they answer. Her thoughts fly instantly to Pedro. 'Death to my Lord? Death to my Infante?' she asks, in an agony of fright. This is one of the flashes of feeling which every now and then break Ferreira's rolling periods, and are the good points of his play. 6 A hundred and fifty years later, another tragedy appeared with Iñes for its heroine. Its author was La Motte, one of the founders of the school of the 18th century classical drama in France. His 'Iñes' had a great success. He throws some light himself on what was thought of it at the time in an immense Discours sur la Tragédie' prefaced to one of its later editions. 'Un Auteur,' says he, 'n'est il pas bien excusable de s'en flatter après un succes tel que celui d'Iñes; peut-être après celui du Cid n'y en a-t-il point eu de si grand au Theatre.' He was justified in his good conceit of himself. No tragedy except Voltaire's own was better liked. It contained a great innovation, matter for much selfcongratulation: 'Les enfants que j'ai hazardé sur la scène, et les circonstances ou je les fais paraître ont paru une nouveauté sur notre Théatre. Quelques spectateurs ont douté d'abord s'ils devaient rire ou s'attendrir; mais la doute n'a pas duré, et la nature a bientôt repris ses droits sur tous les cœurs. On a pleuré enfin.' A modern audience might have found another solution for the doubt, and been as much bored by the appearance of Iñes's children as by that of the lady herself. Like the other women in the play, she is. modelled upon a conventional Roman matron, When she is alone with Pedro, which happens rarely, she addresses him in such words as these: 'De vos seuls intèrêts je me fis la victime. Cent fois, dans vos transports et le fer à la main, Small wonder that he leaves her saying: 'Quoi! barbare, osez-vous refuser mon secours?' The Queen, Pedro's mother, finally puts her to death with poison. La Motte was not troubled with historical scruples-indeed no playwright could afford them who was bound to seek the strict dramatic unities in the dark confusions of Iñes de Castro's story-but this particular departure from accuracy was no doubt made to keep the character of King Alphonso free from all dishonour. He is the real hero of the play, possessing every quality of stern monarch and loving father, suffering terrible conflicts between duty and affection when he determines to punish Pedro for rebelling against his wishes. The fact is that the subject was quite unsuited to an 18th century French writer. Romantic from beginning to end, it was impossible to dish it up to suit the taste of a public which insisted upon feeling being subordinated to form, without robbing it of everything which makes it worth keeping. Velez de Guevara, the great Spanish dramatist of the 16th century, is undoubtedly the writer who has made the most of Pedro and Iñes. His play 'Reinar despues Vol. 224.-No. 445. 2 c de morir' has been acted in quite modern days, and is a very fine tragedy. But its very title ('Reigning after Death') touches its weak point at once. Guevara evidently feels that what happened (or is said to have happened) to Iñes after her death, is more dramatic than her fate while she lived; but, like all his fellow playwrights, he found he could not embody that conviction in his play. In fact, though as a whole it is far the most beautiful work of imagination which has been written on this subject, the ending of it is perhaps the weakest of all the dramatic expedients that have ever been tried. Better La Motte and the Queen's poison, infinitely better Ferreira and death duly announced by messenger, than Guevara's horrible picture of Pedro bending over the murdered corpse and demanding a crown, which is promptly brought from behind the scene and placed by him upon the lady's head. The truth is that the story as the Chronicler left it is still the best to read. The lives of Pedro and Iñes cannot be confined within the rules of any stage or cramped to suit the taste of any literary period. They are essentially mediæval, essentially of their own race and country, but they belong to all ages and to all nations, because they sounded the depths of life which lie below the tides of time. B. E. C. DUGDALE. Art. 5.-FRENCH IDEALISM AND THE WAR. 1. La Crise Française. Faits, Causes, Solutions. By André Chéradame. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1912. 2. Cardinal Manning; The Decay of Idealism in France; The Institute of France. By John Edward Courtenay Bodley. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912. 3. The New France. By William Samuel Lilly. London: Chapman & Hall, 1913. 4. Histoire de Deux Peuples: La France et l'Empire Allemand. By Jacques Bainville. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1915. 'FRENCH hearts were then as vagabond as were the regiments; Les coeurs furent alors nomades comme les régiments.' It is thus that Balzac, in a brilliant formula, depicts the soul of Frenchmen during the Napoleonic épopée. The Republican armies were careering over the toppling thrones of Europe, planting, to the music of the Marseillaise, their banner inscribed with the mystic words: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. It was a romantic, almost Walkyrie dash; and, as the great adventure developed, they who shared the intoxication of its glory found themselves drifting from their moral moorings, and making light of the most consecrated values. To those who know the France of 1914 and 1915 the state of mind of the France of Napoleon I will seem almost prehistoric. In 1914 and in 1915 the peoples of the planet have been watching with wondering admiration the grandiose spectacle of a nation in which hearts are as disciplined as an army corps. Heirs of a very peculiar civilisation and of a very special tradition, inhabitants of a territory where the ideas of family and of society, and the conception of civic duty, have assumed special forms, the French are fighting for the defence of their homes and of the fairest realm beneath the sky; but they are fighting, above all, for the cause of the human race, because it is their everlasting glory frequently to be allowed to labour disinterestedly for humanity. To be doing this wittingly is in itself a distinction of noble birth. After the present War, in which the French will surely be the victors, the nations should erect a Pantheon of a new sort, a Pantheon of |