Mr. Marques Garden

At Macao there is a garden belonging to a Mr Marques that is beautiful and well situated on the termination of the ridge of hills that across the peninsula from east to west. This garden is of itself quite to attract the admiration of strangers, who are, with great liberality freely into it. But besides its natural advantages there is a halo of poetic association connected with it it is classic ground for it contains the spot in Portugal's epic poet during his exile composed a great part of his Lusiad.

Although the retreat in which Camoens sat is usually called the Cave Camoens, yet it is not a cave in the strict acceptation of the word, for it is not hollowed out of a rock, but is formed on the gently sloping side of a hill, by two upright masses of rock a few feet apart from each other, and covered by an immense block resting on them.

Such is the place itself; but the reader must not expect that every thing is now the same as when the poet sat and wrote in the shade of these rocks. No! There has been many so called improvements and prettinesses added - crutches to help on the halting imagination but they sadly trip up the vigourous and healthy one.

The entrance to the cave is nicely railed in, and instead of being able to sit where the exile sat we peep between the rails as through front of a wild beast's cage, at an elegant pedestal surmounted by a bust, whose nose is unfortunately broken off and recalls to the mind an Italian image boy; perhaps but most certainly not Camoens.

Excerto de uma descrição publicada em 1844 em vários jornais e revistas: The New Monthly Magazine and Humorist e o The Anglo American, por exemplo. As ilustrações não são dos títulos referidos títulos mas são da época de 1830/50.

Nota: O autor do texto passou por Macau antes de 1840 já que nesse ano foi colocado pelo Comendador Lourenço Marques (o tal Mr. Marques referido no artigo) na gruta, um busto em barro ou greda bronzeada, da autoria de artistas chineses, substituindo outro que tinha sido mutilado por vandalismo (daí o autor do texto referir o nariz partido). Este busto seria substituído em 1886 pelo que ainda hoje lá está, em bronze, da autoria de Manuel Maria Bordalo Pinheiro.