No. 56—1905.] PORTUGUESE INSCRIPTIONS,, 
365 
churches and Christians, and built Saint L:i v/rence and this house with the 
help of the faithful Christians and his own. 
'Awaiting" the pfreat judg-ment, 
I lie here in this abode, 
From toilsome life 
Resting.' 
and from the great labours (or troubles) and dishonours of Ceylon, 
in the year 1536.' " 
" Regarding Luiz (?) Monteiro, I have failed to obtain any information 
beside what is told us in his epitaph. The church of Sao Lourengo, or 
Saint Lawrence, was the oldest in Colombo, and stood near where the root 
of the breakwater now is, and where the Battenberg bastion used to be ; 
in fact, where the stone was discovered. It and the "house" connected 
with it are shown, T think, in Ressende's plan of Colombo. The church 
gave its name to the older of the two parishes into which the Portuguese 
city was divided (Ribeiro, I., xii.). It will be noticed that in the epitaph 
occur four lines of verse, rhyming 1221, and here comes in a very curious 
fact, to which Mr. David Lopes of Lisbon drew my attention some years 
ago. It is that on the tombstone of the great Portuguese poet Gil Vicente 
the very same lines (with a slight difference) are found. According to 
Mr. Lopes the poet died in the same year as the vicar of Colombo, 1536 ; 
and that is the date that has until recently been given by the poet's 
biographers. But the Viscount de Sanches de Baena, in his Gil Vicente^ 
states that the death of his wife in Evora in 1532-1533 was so much felt 
by the poet that in 1536 he retired to his country seat of Mosteiro in the 
co7icelho of Torres Vedras, where he died at the end of 1540. By his wish 
his body was laid beside that of his wife, over whose tomb, after her death, 
he had had a stone placed, on which were engraved the following lines : — 
' Aqui jaz a mui prudente 
Senhora Branca Becerra 
Mulher de Gil Vicente 
Feita terra.' 
(' Here lies the very prudent lady Branca Becerra, wife of Gil Vicente, 
turned to earth.') After his own death there was engraved on the stone 
the following inscription, which, says the Viscount de Sanches de Baena, 
the poet had previously ' traced ' (tra^add) 
' 0 grao juizo esperando 
Jazo aqui n'esta morada 
Desta vida tao cancada 
Descangando.' 
" The lines as here given (with the spelling unfortunately modernized) 
are copied from a paper entitled " Epitaphios Antigos," by J. H. da Cunha 
Rivara, published in the fourth volume of the Panorama in 1860, in which 
the writer says that he came across the two epitaphs in the monastery of 
S. Francisco at Evora. In the version of the second, which was printed at 
the end of the poet's works, published by his son in 1562, the penultimate 
line reads : — • 
' Tambem da vida cancada." 
" This does not scan well, and is evidently incorrect. Curiously enough, 
