Once only in the four hours’ journey through the night to Barreiro and Lisbon was I aroused from the series of reveries into which the impressions of these scenes had cast me. It was at a station by the way, dimly lit with smoky oil lamps. Some bundles of rags topped by nightcaps lounged about in the gloom of the platform, and across the way a few white cottages stood out from a background of trees and the hills beyond, whilst overhead, through the high branches of the eucalyptus, the stars shone brilliantly. There was nothing special in all this, for the same picture is presented by most Portuguese and Spanish railway stations by night during the interminable waits inherent to travelling by a train whose first interest is the conveyance of merchandise; but what did strike me as I looked was the name of the place: MONTEMOR.
From here, then, from this humble remote place, came the man, the poet, Jorge de Montemor—or Montemayor as he came to be called—who set all cultured Europe running again after the preposterous pastoral romances of lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, which had been forgotten since the eclogues and bucolics of classical Italy had been voted old-fashioned. From here came the inspiration that made Cervantes write the “Galatea,” Sidney write the “Arcadia,” and Spenser write the “Fairy Queen”: these sweet fertile hillsides and vales of southern Portugal were the scenes which the native poet peopled with the erotic swains of his Spanish pastoral, “Diana Enamorada.” It was a style utterly foreign to arid Spain, for there the flocks had to travel in vast multitudes from desert to desert in search of the scanty pasture; but it caught the fancy of a people sated with knights-errant, and the pastoral became the rage. That Spain itself should have given it new birth was incredible, though Jorge de Montemor wrote in Spanish. The neighbourhood of his birthplace gives us the key; for here in rich pastures and lush, half-tropical valleys flocks would need but little tending or travelling, and here beneath the sunny skies shepherds and their lasses might as easily as in Italy be imagined piping, singing, and telling their long-winded love stories to their hearts’ content.