Page:The Lusiad (Camões, tr. Mickle, 1791), Volume 1.djvu/303

 into intimate friendship, and Camoens was happy till Count Redondo assumed the government. Those who had formerly procured the banishment of the satirist, were silent while Constantine was in power; but now they exerted all their arts against him. Redondo, when he entered on office, pretended to be the friend of Camoens; yet, with the most unfeeling indifference with which he planned his most horrible witticism on the Zamorim, he suffered the innocent man to be thrown into the common prison. After all the delay of bringing witnesses, Camoens, in a public trial, fully refuted every accusation of his conduct, while commissary at Macao, and his enemies were loaded with ignominy and reproach. But Camoens had some creditors; and these detained him in prison a considerable time, till the gentlemen of Goa began to be ashamed, that a man of his singular merit should experience such treatment among them. He was set at liberty; and again he assumed the profession of arms, and received the allowance of a gentleman volunteer, a character at that time common in Portuguese India. Soon after, Pedro Barreto, appointed governor of the fort of Sofala, by high promises, allured the poet to attend him thither. The governor of a distant fort, in a barbarous country, shares, in some measure, the fate of an exile. Yet, though the only motive of Barreto was, in this unpleasant situation, to retain the conversation of Camoens at his table, it was his least care to render the life of his guest agreeable. Chagrined with his