Don Sebastian

The name of Don Sebastian immediately recals to every historical reader, a character, which youth, faults, virtues, and misfortunes, have rendered highly interesting: I selected such a one for my Hero, from the wish of shewing how “sweet are the uses of adversity.”

If I may be so fortunate as to instruct and to amuse at the same time, the utmost of my literary ambition will be gratified.

It has been my aim to keep as close to historical records, as was consistent with a work wherein imagination is allowed to make up for the deficiencies of actual tradition. In some places I have been obliged to antedate an event, and to mix other motives of action with such as were avowed by the persons then acting on the great theatre of Europe; but I have scrupulously avoided slandering the illustrious dead, and am not conscious of having materially altered any well-known portrait.

Some readers may be offended or wearied with the frequent use which I have made of religious tenets; to them I can only offer one apology;--I had no other way of reconciling the conduct of Catholic powers, with what I have been obliged to suppose, their conviction of Don Sebastian’s identity when he re-appeared at Venice; and as his chief calamity was the product of a bigotted attachment to the doctrines of Rome, I could scarcely make that calamity effect the necessary revolution in his general character, without changing also the nature of his religious opinions.

In my delineation of countries, manners, &c. I have endeavoured to give as faithful a picture as was possible to one who describes after the accounts of others; I consulted the voyages and tours of those days; so that the modern traveller, in journeying with me over Barbary, Persia, and Brazil, must recollect that he is beholding those countries as they appeared in the sixteenth century.

By accident, I met with an ancient work upon South America, in which was the following sentence: “twelve leagues southward from St. Salvador, appears the village of Cachoeira, formerly belonging to an unknown Portuguese, who took great pains in reforming the savage people Guaymures to a civil life.” This hint suggested to me the idea of making the Portuguese, and my principal character, the same person.

I am told that there has been a novel written in French on the same story, which forms the ground work of mine, but I have not seen it. The materials with which I have worked, have been drawn from general history, accounts of particular periods, the Harleian Miscellany, and a curious old tract published in 1602, containing the letters of Texere, De Castro, and others, with minute details of the conduct and sufferings of the mysterious personage concerning whom it treats.

I trust the candid reader will excuse many defects in this romance, when he considers how long was the space of time to be filled up with events solely imaginary, and which it was indispensable so to occupy, as to unite facts and to give the whole the semblance of probability: he will reflect also how difficult it was for me to find any historical action of sufficient weight and brilliancy, with which I might have earlier concluded the adventures of Sebastian.

If my unpresuming work should disappoint the reader, he must suffer me to assure him that neither diligence in obtaining information, and selecting circumstances, nor industry in using them, has been spared. I may fail from want of ability, but not from want of application.

August, 1809.

INTRODUCTION.

Never has the pen of history had to record a more affecting event, than that which bore the house of Braganza to another hemisphere: animated by a noble disdain of submitting to foreign despotism, and bravely placing his country, not in the land of Portugal, but in the hearts of her people, the Prince Regent conquered in adversity, and triumphed even at the moment of despair.