No. 60.— 1908.] 



LIFE OF COUTO. 



15 



Couto's Decades. The first five books of Decade XII. 

 (evidently all that Couto wrote of it) were published in 1645, 

 not in Portugal, but in Paris, from a mamiscript discovered 

 there by the Portuguese consul. The fate of Decade XI . is an 

 unsolved mystery. That Couto wrote it and sent it to Por- 

 tugal, we have already seen ; and that the manuscript was 

 extant for many years afterwards seems certain, since Faria 

 y Sousa claims to have used it in compiling the third volume of 

 his Asia Portuguese^ 1 ; but it had disappeared by the eighteenth 

 century, and no trace of it has been discovered since — a most 

 serious and irreparable loss. 



The Present Translation. 



In the following translation I have endeavoured to be as 

 literal as possible, and have not hesitated to employ a number 

 of words now obsolete in English, which are recorded in the 

 New English Dictionary. For convenience sake I have made 

 the translation from the standard edition of Barros-Couto of 

 1778-88, but have corrected it by the earliest printed editions 

 of the Decades, and in the case of Decades VIII, to X. by the 

 early manuscript in the British Museum Library referred to 

 in a footnote above. I have also restored the spelling of proper 

 names as given in the earliest versions : hence a sacrifice of 

 uniformity. The only liberty I have taken is with the punc- 

 tuation, which I have altered where necessary, in many cases 

 splitting up paragraphs and sentences, some of the latter, 

 especially in Couto, being terribly long. 



In the notes to each chapter I have given in as succinct a 

 form as possible such information from other sources as I 

 thought needful for the better understanding of the matters 

 dealt with. The gathering of this information has cost me 



1 See the Prologue and list of manuscripts in torn. I. And yet, if we 

 examine the history of the period covered by the lost Decade as narrated 

 by Faria y Sousa, we can find nothing (except, possibly, one short 

 passage) to lead us to suppose that he had made the slightest use of 

 Couto's work. 



