Page:The Lusiad (Camões, tr. Mickle, 1791), Volume 1.djvu/312

 EorFor [sic] him no Muse shall leave her golden loom, No palm shall blossom, and no wreath shall bloom. Yet shall my labors and my cares be paid By fame immortal

In such an age, and among such a barbarous nobility, what but wretched neglect could be the fate of a Camoens! After all, however, if he was imprudent on his first appearance at the court of John III. if the honesty of his indignation led him into great imprudence, as certainly it did, when at Goa he satirised the viceroy and the first persons in power; yet let it also be remembered, that "The gifts of imagination bring the heaviest task upon the vigilance of reason; and to bear those faculties with unerring rectitude, or invariable propriety, requires a degree of firmness and of cool attention, which doth not always attend the higher gifts of the mind. Yet difficult as nature herself seems to have rendered the task of regularity to genius, it is the supreme consolation of dullness and of folly to point with Gothic triumph to those excesses which are the overflow- "ings