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Poet Bocage

the Portuguese city of Setúbal, in 1765, to José Luís Soares de
Barbosa and Mariana Joaquina Xavier l'Hedois Lustoff du Bocage, of
French family.

Mr. Bocage began to make verses in infancy, and being somewhat of
a prodigy grew up to be flattered, self-conscious and unstable. At the
age of fourteen, he suddenly left school and joined the 7th Infantry
Regiment; but tiring of garrison life at Setúbal after two years, he
decided to enter the Portuguese navy. He was posted in Goa, where
he used to write his poetry also. Once he compared the heroic
traditions of Portugal in Asia, which had induced him to leave home,
with the reality, and wrote his satirical sonnets on The Decadence of
the Portuguese Empire in Asia, and those addressed to Afonso de
Albuquerque and D. João de Castro. The irritation caused by these
satires, together with rivalries in love affairs, made it advisable for
him to leave Goa, and early in 1789 he obtained the post of
lieutenant of the infantry company at Damão, (DAMAN) India; In
1801 his poetical rivalry with Macedo became more acute and
personal, and ended by drawing from Bocage a stinging extempore
poem, Pena de Talião, which remains a monument to his powers of
invective. In 1804 the illness (syphilis) from which he suffered
increased, and the approach of death inspired some beautiful