Japan and the Japanese

FERNAM MENDEZ PINTO. 563
ernor of the navy. There is small hope of mercy, said they, we are so
famous and well known to many other kings in the way, which favor the
Portugals, and lay wait to take us. In which their talk I perceived how
fearful a thing is a guilty conscience, and called to remembrance the saying
of the poet :
' Slulta male tlmeo, qui feci multa proterve. 1
That is, 'I fear much evil because I have done much evil.' For they had
not only made many such pieces of artillery for the infidels, to the great dam-
age of Christians, and contempt of the holy name of Christ and his religion,
but had also taught the idolaters both the making and use of them ; and at
my being there I saw them give a model or mould to certain idolaters, whereby
they might make brazen pieces, of such bigness that one of them may
receive the charge of a hundred and five tankards (cantoros) of powder. At
the same time, also, there was a Jew, which had made a very fair brigantine,
and four great pieces of artillery of iron. But God shortly afterwards
gave him his due reward ; for, when he went to wash him in the river, he
was drowned."
Nor did the two Christians escape much better. The Portuguese commander
agreed to pardon them ; but, in attempting to escape to him, they were
killed. Maffei, in his Indian History, refers to the aid which the native
princes derived from these and other Christian renegadoes.
NOTE D.
FERNAM MEXDEZ PINTO.
The ill fortune of which Pinto complained as having pursued him through
life, did not spare him even after he was laid in the grave, the narrative
of his adventures which he left behind him having been assailed by the wits
and critics with hardly less ferocity than poor Pinto himself was while alive
by the corsairs, infidels and barbarians, with whom he came in contact.
He is indeed chiefly known to English readers by an ill-natured fling of Con
greve, who, in h;s " Love for Love," makes one of his characters address
another in those oft-quoted words " : Ferdinand Mendez Pinto was but a
type of thee, thou liar of " the first !
magnitude It is said also that Cervantes,
three or four years before whose death Pinto's book was published, speaks of
him somewhere as the " prince of liars." I have not been able to find the
but likely enough Cervantes might have been a little vexed to find
passage ;
his Persiles and Siyismunda, a romance, under the guise of a book of trav-
els, first published about the time with Pinto's book, so much outdone by
what claimed to be a true narrative of real adventures.
As Pinto, however, in spite of all his ill luck, found, in writing his me
moirs, some topics of consolation, so also his character & an author and %