Francisco Manoel de Nascimento - Return To Portugal

Return To Portugal

He retained to the end an intense love of country, which made him wish to die in Portugal, and in 1796 a royal decree permitting his return there and ordering the restoration of his goods was issued, but delays occurred in its execution, and the transfer of the court to the Portuguese colony of Brazil as a result of the French invasion finally dashed his hopes. Before this the Count of Barca had obtained him a commission from the Portuguese government to translate the De Rebus Emanuelis of Jerónimo Osório; the assistance of some fellow-countrymen in Paris carried him through his last years, which were cheered by the friendship of his biographer and translator Alexandre Sane and of the Lusophil Ferdinand Dénis. Lamartine addressed an ode to him; he enjoyed the esteem of Chateaubriand; and his admirers at home, who imitated him extensively, were called after him Os Filintistas. Exile and suffering had enlarged his ideas and given him a sense of reality, making his best poems those he wrote between the ages of seventy and eighty-five, and when he died, it was recognized that Portugal had lost her foremost contemporary poet.