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yMILTON MAY WELL have known the Portuguese epic Os Lusiadas or Sir Richard Fanshawe's Englishing of it or both. Although this is a tentative declaration of faith that cannot at present be indisputably proved, the faith is not a blind one. Parallels between specific aspects of Luis de Camoens's and Milton's supernatural machinery as well as between the theoretical assumptions which seem to have motivated both poets' use of that machinery are, I think, more than coincidental. But before consideration of such parallels I wish to give, in anticipation, an answer to every man that asketh a reason of the faith that Milton knew Camoens's poem. There is a discouraging lack of external evidence. Neither those scholars who have argued for Camonian influence on Milton nor those who have dismissed apparent echoes as coincidental or as attributable to common sources have gone beyond evidence within the poetry.1
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