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 on either with his official superior, the British consul-general at Beyrout, or with the Turkish governor of Syria. Above all, his wife had mixed herself up with an unorthodox, if not semi-catholic, movement among the Muhammadans of Damascus. There may have been more behind to explain the abruptness of the dismissal. Burton claimed to have justified himself at the foreign office, but he received no official compensation. After about a year’s suspense, during which he made a trip to Iceland, he was appointed to the consulship of Trieste, vacant by the death of Charles Lever, where it was thought he could do no mischief. The Damascus period was not very fertile in literature. To the ‘Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society’ he contributed ‘Proverba Communia Syriaca’ (1871), and with C. F. Tyrwhitt Drake he wrote ‘Unexplored Syria’ (1872, 2 vols.) He left it to his wife to publish ‘Inner Life of Syria’ (1875, 2 vols.), which contains much of himself.

Trieste was Burton’s home from 1872 till his death, though it must be admitted that he was not always to be found at home. The foreign office was as generous to him in the matter of leave as the Indian government had formerly been. He began by exploring the Roman ruins and prehistoric castellieri of Istria. Then he went further afield to the Etruscan antiquities of Bologna. During the first four months of 1876 he took his wife to India, renewing his memories of Jeddah and Aden, of Sind and Goa. At Suez he fell in with one of his old fellow-pilgrims, who awakened in his mind dreams of gold in Midian. Thither he proceeded at the end of 1877, with official support from the Khedive of Egypt. For months he conducted geological surveys in territory hitherto unexplored and infested by wild Bedawin tribes. The results seemed to promise success, but changes in the government of Egypt frustrated Burton’s hopes. In the winter of 1881–2 he set out to the Gold Coast for gold in company with a younger African explorer. Captain [q. v. Suppl.] Gold they found in plenty, though they brought back none for themselves. Each of these expeditions has its record in a book. In 1876 appeared ‘Etruscan Bologna, a Study;’ in 1877 ‘Sind Revisited;’ in 1878 ‘The Gold Mines of Midian;’ in 1879 ‘The Land of Midian Revisited’ (3 vols. 8vo), and in 1883 ‘To the Gold Coast for Gold’ (2 vols. 8vo). His last undertaking of all was a commission from the foreign office to search for the murderers of his old friend Palmer [see ].

Burton now recognised that his day for exploration was over. Henceforth he devoted himself to literature, working up the materials which he had spent a lifetime in accumulating. This ripe fruit of his old age falls under three heads. The first to take shape was his work on Camoens, which was projected to fill no less than ten volumes. His English rendering of the ‘Lusiads’ appeared in two volumes in 1880, followed in the next year by a life and commentary in two volumes, and somewhat later (1884) by two more volumes of ‘Lyricks,’ &c. Burton was attracted to Camoens as the mouthpiece of the romantic period of discovery in the Indian Ocean. The voyages, the misfortunes, the chivalry, the patriotism of the poet were to him those of a brother adventurer. In his spirited sketch of the life and character of Camoens it is not presumptuous to read between the lines allusions to his own career. This sympathy breathes through his translation of the Portuguese epic, which, though not a popular success, won the enthusiastic approval of the few competent critics. It represents the result of long labour and revision, having been begun at Goa in 1847 and continued in Brazil. It is, no doubt, the work of a scholar rather than of a poet. Burton’s aim was to present to modern English readers as much as might be of the influence that Camoens has exercised for three centuries upon the Portuguese. With this object he set himself to the task of grappling with every difficulty and obscurity in the original. Not only the metre and the rhetorical style, but even the not infrequent archaisms and harshnesses have been preserved with marvellous fidelity. What to the unimaginative may seem nothing but a tour de force is in truth the highest manifestation of the translator’s art.

Burton’s second great work was to be ‘The Book of the Sword,’ giving a history of the weapon and its use in all countries from the earliest times. The arme blanche, as he liked to call it, had always had a fascination for him since his youthful days on the continent. He collected a great deal of the literature, and inspected the armouries of Europe and India. To his encyclopædic mind the subject began with the first weapon fashioned by the simian ancestors of man, started afresh with the invention of metallurgy (which he assigned to the Nile valley), henceforth coincided with the history of military prowess until the introduction of gunpowder, finally ending with the duello when the sword became a defensive weapon. All this and much more was