PORTUGUESE PORTRAITS - f.
MR. AUBREY BELL, who has written so name and so well about Portuguese literature, has now produced a set of miniatures of heroes of our old Ally's golden age. The other day, when the German hordes broke into the Portuguese lines before the Lys and swamped the defenders by sheer weight of numbers, some of the • Ths Coraditutional and Parliamentary llietory of Ireland till the Union. By .7. 0. Swift McNeill, M.P. Dublin: The Talbot Press. London : T. Fisher L'nwIn. 110s. 6d. net.] t Portuguese Portraits. By Aubrey F. G. Bell, Oxford : B. B. Blackwell, net.1 Portuguese units fought to the last. One little group near La Couture sent back for more ammunition, with the message that they would die at their post, and no more was heard of them. That des- perate gallantry, which we all like to think is a British trait but which our Allies share, is the note of Mr. Bell's little biographies of famous warriors like Nun' Alvarez, who, with five thousand men and a few hundred English archers, defeated thirty-five thousand Spaniards at Aljubarrota in 1385 and saved his country ; or like Duarte Pacheco Pereira, who with only ninety men subdued the King of Calicut's hosts in a most romantic campaign in 1504; or like the superb Affonso de Albuquerque, who captured Ormuz and Goa and Malacca with a mere handful of troops in half-a-dozen ill- found ships. The poet-King Dials, whose Queen Isabel is the heroine of a charming legend, and Prince Henry the Navigator, and Vasco da Game are among the other figures in this little collection. Portugal had a very small population in those days, but she pro- duced many great men, of whom it is good to read in this attractive little book.
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