I read the Lusiad, and am now reading it a second time.

I own that I am disappointed in Camoens; but I have so often found my first impressions wrong on such subjects that I still hope to be able to join my voice to that of the great body of critics.

I never read any famous foreign book, which did not, in the first perusal, fall short of my expectations; except Dante's poem, and Don Quixote, which were prodigiously superior to what I had imagined.

Yet in these cases I had not pitched my expectations low." He had not much time for his Portuguese studies.

The run was unusually fast, and the ship only spent a week in the Bay of Bengal, and forty-eight hours in the Hooghly.