No--’tis that gentleness of mind, that love So kindly answering my desire; That grace with which you look, and speak, and move, That thus has set my soul on fire.”
In 1870, Charles Dickens was summoned by Queen Victoria to Buckingham Palace in order that she might thank him for the loan of some photographs of scenes in the American Civil War, and on his departure she handed him a copy of her “Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands” with the autograph inscription, “From the humblest of writers to one of the greatest.” In 1883, her Majesty prepared for publication another selection from her Journal, which she dedicated “To my loyal Highlanders, and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend, John Brown.” She took a very modest view of her literary work, for, on sending a copy to Tennyson, she described herself as “a very humble and unpretending author, the only merit of whose writing was its simplicity and truth.”
Leaving our own country, it may be noted that Portugal has some claim to be proud of her royal authors, for Diniz was a poet of exquisite taste, “and in the number, beauty, and variety of his songs he proved himself the greatest poet of his Court,” having inherited, it is said, the poetic feeling and power of expression from his father, Alfonso III., who was no mean poet. Indeed, the effects of the influence of Diniz “pervade the whole of Portuguese poetry; for not only was he in his ‘pastorellas’ the forerunner of the greatest pastoral school, but, by sanctifying to literary use the national storehouse of song, he perpetuated among his people, even to the present day, lyric forms of greatest beauty.”[154] It is also said that immense service was rendered by Diniz and his poetic courtiers in developing the Portuguese dialect into a beautiful and flexible literary language; and with the Courts of Love which he introduced into Portugal came the substitution of the Limousin decasyllabic for the national octosyllabic metre.[155]
John I., surnamed “the Great,” encouraged literature, and the “Book of the Chase,” one of the best specimens of early Portuguese prose, was written for him under his own superintendence. Of his sons, Dom Pedro wrote poems, and Dom Edward was the author of two capital prose works entitled “Instructions in Horsemanship” and the “Faithful Councillor.”