Chapter D: JOANA DA GAMA (†1568), a nun of noble birth who directed a small (2)

A work which has nothing in common with these fervent love letters except an enigmatic origin is the _Arte de Furtar_, which in part at least probably belongs to the seventeenth century. It is a curious and amusing treatise on the noble art of thieving in all kinds, private and official, civil and military. Its anecdotes are racy if not original. Two of the happiest incidents (in caps. 6 and 41) are copied without acknowledgement from _Lazarillo de Tormes_.[620] The author seems to have had misgivings that he had presented his subject in too favourable a light, for he ends by assuring his reader thieves that many tons of worldly glory are not worth an ounce of eternal blessedness, and promises them before long another ‘more liberal treatise on the art of acquiring true glory’. These tardy qualms did not save his book from the Index. The first edition, purporting to be printed at Amsterdam, bears the date 1652[621] and attributes the work to Antonio Vieira. That attribution may be set aside. Were there no other reasons for its rejection it would suffice to read the book or even its title in order to be convinced that it is not from the _veneravel penna_ of that great statesman and preacher. He might dabble in Bandarra prophecies, but would scarcely have sunk to the picaresque familiarities of the _Arte de Furtar_ or occupy himself with the sad habits of innkeepers, the long stitches of tailors, or the price of straw. It has also been attributed, without adequate ground, to Thomé Pinheiro da Veiga (1570?-1656), the author of a lively account of the festivities at the Spanish Court and description of Valladolid in 1605, entitled _Fastigimia_ (it mentions Don Quixote and Sancho (p. 119) but says nothing of Cervantes), and to João Pinto Ribeiro (_c._ 1590-1649), the magistrate who played a notable part in the Restoration of 1640 and wrote various short treatises such as _Preferencia das Letras ás Armas_ (1645); and even less plausibly to DUARTE RIBEIRO DE MACEDO (1618?-80), statesman and diplomatist, an indifferent poet but an excellent writer of prose and a careful although not original historian. His halting verses and his treatises were collected in his _Obras_ (2 vols., 1743). Of the latter the _Summa Politica_ has been shown by Snr. Solidonio Leite[622] to be copied almost word for word from the work of identical title by D. SEBASTIÃO CESAR DE MENESES (†1672), Bishop of Oporto and Archbishop of Braga. Both author and book were too well known for Ribeiro de Macedo to claim it as his own. He seems merely to have translated it from the original Latin published at Amsterdam in 1650, a year after the first Portuguese edition. The work is remarkable for acute thought and clear and concise expression. A work of a similar character is the well-written _Arte de Reinar_ (1643) by P. ANTONIO CARVALHO DE PARADA (1595-1655). The _Tratado Analytico_ (1715), by MANUEL RODRIGUEZ LEITÃO (_c._ 1620-91), a controversial treatise written to prove the right of Portugal to appoint bishops, is also the work of a good stylist. Some would say the same of one of the best-known books of the seventeenth century, the _Vida de Dom João de Castro_ (1651), by JACINTO FREIRE DE ANDRADE (1597-1657). The author, born at Beja, was suspected at Madrid of nationalist inclinations, and retired to his cure in the diocese of Viseu; after the Restoration he refused the bishopric of Viseu. His book has often been regarded as a model of Portuguese prose. Pompous and emphatic,[623] it may be described as inflated Tacitus, or rather a mixture of Tacitean phrases, conceits, and rhetorical affectation. But if as a whole it is more akin to Castro’s garish triumph at Goa than to the scientific spirit of his letters, it scarcely deserves the severe strictures which followed excessive praise[624]: it might even become excellent if judiciously pruned of antitheses and artifice.[625] The second Conde da Ericeira, D. FERNANDO DE MENESES (1614-99), wrote a _Historia de Tangere_ (1732) and the _Vida e Acçoens d’El Rei D. João I_ (1677), which ends with an elaborate parallel between Julius Caesar and the Master of Avis. Equally clear but far more artificial is the style of the third Count, D. LUIS DE MENESES (1632-90), in the best-known historical work of the century in Portuguese: _Historia de Portugal Restaurado_ (2 pts., 1679, 98). Its author ended his life by leaping from an upper window into the garden of his palace on a May morning in a fit of melancholy.

The great prose-writer of the century, ANTONIO VIEIRA (1608-97), was born in the same year and city as D. Francisco Manuel de Mello and spent a life as unquiet. He was not literary in the same sense as Mello, but he has always been considered one of the great classics of the Portuguese language. He was the son of Cristovam Vieira Ravasco, _escrivão das devassas_ at Lisbon, but at the age of seven he accompanied his parents to Brazil (1615) and began his education in the Jesuit college at Bahia. In 1623, by his own ardent wish, long opposed by his parents, he became a Jesuit novice and professed in the following year. Before he was thirty he was Professor of Theology in the Bahia college and a celebrated preacher, the sermons in which he encouraged the citizens of Bahia in the war against the Dutch being especially eloquent. In 1641 he was chosen with Padre Simão de Vasconcellos to accompany D. Fernando de Mascarenhas, son of the viceroy, to Europe in order to congratulate King João IV on his accession. Vieira preached in the Royal Chapel on New Year’s Day, 1642. Both his sermons and his conversation greatly impressed the king, and from 1641 to the end of the reign (1656) his influence was great although not unchallenged. They were critical years in Portugal’s foreign policy, and Vieira, who refused a bishopric but was appointed Court preacher, was entrusted with several important missions--to Paris and The Hague (February-July 1646), London, Paris, and The Hague (1647-8), and Rome (1650). In 1652 he returned to Brazil as a missionary in Maranhão, and during two years roused the bitter hostility of the settlers by his protection of the slaves or rather by his opposition to slavery. In 1655 he again left Lisbon for Maranhão,[626] and during five arduous years showed unfailing courage and energy in dealing with natives and settlers. The latter in 1661 attacked the mission-house and arrested and expelled the Jesuits. At home King João, Vieira’s friend, was dead. Differences arose between the Queen Regent supported by Vieira, and her son, and one of the first acts of the latter on taking power into his own hands was to banish Vieira to Oporto and later to Coimbra. Here in the spring of 1665[627] he wrote that curious work _Historia do Futuro_ (1718), which was to interpret Portugal’s destiny by the light of old prophecies, but of which only the introduction (_livro anteprimeiro_) was printed. An even stranger book, in which he had paid serious attention politically to the prophecies of Bandarra, was denounced in 1663, and in October 1665 Vieira was consigned to the prison of the Inquisition at Coimbra. His sentence was not read till 1667 (December 24), and it condemned him to seclusion in a college or convent of his Order and to perpetual silence in matters of religion. The deposition of King Afonso VI (1667) and the accession of his brother Pedro II altered Vieira’s prospects, and his eloquent voice was again heard in the pulpit. After preaching before the Court in Lent 1669 he proceeded to Rome on business of the Company and spent six years there. He preached several times in Italian, and Queen Christina of Sweden, who had settled in Rome in 1655, offered him the post of preacher and confessor, which he refused. In August 1675 he returned to Lisbon, where he was coldly received by the Prince Regent, and in 1681 retired to Brazil. In the same year he was burnt in effigy by the mob at Coimbra. A special brief given to him by the Pope secured his person from the attacks of the Inquisition. But even at Bahia he was not free from troubles and intrigues. His activity continued to the end of his long life. In 1688 he preached in Bahia Cathedral, and was Visitor of the Province of Brazil from 1688 to 1691. Even in 1695 we find him, although feeble and broken, writing letters and eager to finish his _Clavis Prophetica_[628] (or _Prophetarum_), which now lies in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris and elsewhere. Seventy years earlier he had been entrusted by the Jesuits with the composition of the annual Latin letters of the Company. Vieira’s vein of caustic satire no doubt made him numerous enemies and increased the difficulties which his advocacy of the Jews and slaves and his fearless stand against injustice and oppression were certain to produce. Ambitious and fond of power, he could devote himself to causes which entailed a life of toil and poverty. An energetic if unsuccessful diplomatist, an ingenious thinker, a statesman of far-reaching views, he was also a fantastic dreamer, but his dreams and restlessness rarely affected the sanity of his judgement. The works of this great writer and extraordinary man are an inexhaustible mine of pure and vigorous prose, at its best in his numerous _Cartas_, written in _selecta et propria dictio, nusquam verbis indulgens sed rebus inhaerens_. A Portuguese critic, Dias Gomes, notes his ’sustained elegance’, and we may sometimes sigh for an interval of Mello’s familiarity or Frei Luis de Sousa’s charm. In his famous _Sermões_ he bowed intermittently to the taste of the time for conceit and artifice. He condemned the practice in a celebrated sermon, but indeed a certain humorous quaintness was not foreign to his temperament, and in the obscurity, at least, of the _cultos_ he never indulged. When inspired by patriotism or indignation his words soar beyond cold reason and colder conceits to a fiery eloquence. Among writers whom he influenced was the Benedictine FREI JOÃO DOS PRAZERES (1648-1709), of whose principal work, _O Principe dos Patriarchas S. Bento_, or _Empresas de S. Bento_, only the first two volumes were published. Closer imitators of Vieira were FREI FRANCISCO DE SANTA MARIA (1653-1713), author of _O Ceo Aberto na Terra_ (1697) and many sermons, and the Jesuit preacher ANTONIO DE SÁ (1620-78), whose _Sermões Varios_ appeared in 1750.

FOOTNOTES:

[581] Bernardo de Brito, no lover of Spain, bears witness to _o favor e benevolencia com que trata os homens doutos_.

[582] _De Crepusculis_, Preface. Martim Afonso de Miranda later (_Tempo de Agora_, _prologo_ to Pt. 2, 1624) writes of _a pouca curiosidade que hoje ha acerca da lição dos liuros, como tambem o risco a que se expõem os que escreuem_.

[583] Menéndez y Pelayo set Mello above all except his friend Quevedo.

[584] Mr. Edgar Prestage discovered his baptismal certificate and established the date (1608) beyond doubt, though it is still often given as 1611. On his mother’s side Mello was great-grandson of the historian Duarte Nunez de Leam.

[585] Prefatory letter to _Las tres Mvsas del Melodino_ (1649): _el lenguaje estrangero tan poco es favorable al que compone_.

[586] He was writing it in January 1650.

[587] _Historia de los movimientos y separacion de Cataluña y de la guerra_, &c. Lisboa, 1645.

[588] On his release after four months of imprisonment the Count-Duke Olivares said to him: _Ea, caballero, ha sido un erro, pero erro con causa._

[589] The first five years were, in his own words, rigorous. In 1650 he was removed from the _Torre Velha_ to the Lisbon _Castello_, and thenceforth enjoyed greater liberty. He had been transferred from the Torre de Belem to the _Torre Velha_ on the left bank of the Tagus in 1646.

[590] The document was discovered by Dr. Braga and published in his _Os Seiscentistas_ (1916), p. 339.

[591] _Approbatio of Cartas_, Roma, 1664.

[592] A copy of this rare and curious work exists in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional (_Res._ 264 v.). It contains 71 ff. divided into four parts. The author, in his apophthegms on the character of women, quotes the classics widely, and refers to the Uthopia [so] of Sir Thomas More and to _Celestina_.

[593] _Relaçam_, 1842 ed., p. 233.

[594] His digressions are methodical: _por este modo de historiar (que é aquelle que eu desejo ler) pretendo escrever sempre_ (_Epan._ ii). In _Epan._ i he says: _Refiro, pode ser com demasia, todos os accidentes deste negocio._

[595] He re-wrote this _Epanaphora_ twice, the first two versions having been lost.

[596] Cf. _Visita das Fontes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 3), 1900 ed., p. 89: _cada qual desde o logar em que está acha uma linha muito junto de si que é o caminho por onde pode ir a Deus_.

[597] Cf. _Hospital das Lettras_ (_Ap. Dial._ 4), 1900 ed., p. 114: _por falta de cuidar cada um em se aproveitar deste mundo o que delle lhe toca, o lançam todos a perder todos juntos do modo que vemos_.

[598] _Relogios Fallantes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 1).

[599] _Escriptorio Avarento_ (_Ap. Dial._ 2).

[600] _Visita das Fontes_ (_Ap. Dial._ 3).

[601] Cf. the backwoodsman described by Couto as _algum fidalgo criado lá na Beira que nunca vio o Rei_ (_Dialogo do Sold. Prat._, p. 31).

[602] Cf. _Aulegrafia_ (1619), f. 85 v.: _emendar a Natureza_.

[603] Edgar Prestage, _Esboço_, pp. 128-9.

[604] Like another equally brilliant soldier historian, Napier, he rarely spells a foreign word aright. Cf. _Epanaphoras_, p. 204: _A este nome_ Milord _corresponde no estado feminil o nome_ Léde. Falmouth, where he had actually been, becomes Valmud, the Isle of Wight Huyt, Whitehall Huythal, the Earl of Northumberland Notaborlan (Brito has Northũbria).

[605] A more personal and picaresque satirist was D. THOMAS DE NORONHA (†1651), whose works were collected by Dr. Mendes dos Remedios in his _Subsidios_, vol. ii: _Poesias Ineditas de D. Thomás de Noronha_ (Coimbra, 1899). The satiric poem _Os Ratos da Inquisição_ by ANTONIO SERRÃO DE CASTRO (1610-85) was first published by Castello Branco in 1883.

[606] Vol. iii contains a poem by Jacinto Freire de Andrade with the same title.

[607] _Fenix Ren._ ii. 406; iii. 225; v. 376.

[608] Hers is the deplorable pun of a superior superior:

Que se Prior sois agora
Sempre fostes suprior.

[609] The real title of the first (1623) edition is _Dos Novissimos de Dom Francisco Rolim de Moura_. Adam is conducted by his son Abel through Hell and comforted by a vision of Paradise. As he is the first man and only Abel has died, he must forgo Dante’s pleasure in meeting his personal enemies there, but there is something perhaps even more awful in the thought of the emptiness of these _infinitos logares_ (iii. 48). Virgil’s _Facilis descensus_, &c., is translated in two lines of great badness: _Onde descer he cousa tão factivel Quanto tornar atraz tem de impossivel_ (iii. 36).

[610] _Nihil tamen eo vivente excussum nisi Solitudines (hoc est Saudades)_, says the _Theatrum_.

[611] e.g. (x. 126):

Hũa montanha e serra inhabitada
Se erguia ao ar, em cuja corpulenta
Espalda....

[612] ii. 30-49:

Do undoso leito, donde repousava
O mar, &c.

[613] xii. 79: _Sou fragil lenho._

[614] In the storm in canto 2 (_Eis que o ceo de improuiso se escurece_) he seems to have realized that Camões’ description could not be improved upon.

[615] Numerous other academies of the same kind came into being in this and the first half of the next century. Most of their members now belong to the (Brazilian) _Academia dos Esquecidos_--the Forgotten.

[616] The slip in the second letter by which in the French version not the Beja Mertola Gate but Mertola itself is seen from the convent, does not favour this theory, which recently has been sustained by the Conde de Sabugosa. This passage is held to be a convincing proof, were such proof needed, of the genuineness of the letters. It is rather a proof of the reality of the love intrigue than of the nun’s authorship. If Chamilly, for the edification of his vanity, were fabricating such a letter, what more likely than that he should wish to add his note of local colour and remembered vaguely the word Mertola in connexion with the view from the convent terrace? What he could scarcely have invented or expressed is the real depth of feeling.

[617] Seven spurious letters, and subsequently others, were added in many of the editions. Filinto Elysio translated the twelve.

[618] _Je parierais tout au monde que les Lettres portugaises ont été écrites par un homme._

[619] e.g. ‘You told me frankly that you were in love with a lady in your own country’ (letter 2). ‘Were you not ever the first to leave for the front, the last to return?’ (5). ‘My passion increases every instant’ (4). ‘I do not repent having adored you. I am glad that you betrayed me’ (3).

[620] Ed. H. Butler Clarke (1897), pp. 17-18 and 65-7.

[621] The 1652 edition speaks of _coroneis_ (p. 277) who, it has been argued, were called _mestres de campo_ till 1708 (Goes, however, in his _Cron. de D. Manuel_, 1619 ed., f. 213, has _os fez todos quatro coroneis de mil homens_; cf. Gil Vicente, i. 234: _Corregedor, coronel_); it refers (p. 393) to João IV as still alive (†1656): _Que Deos guarde e prospere_. It would appear to have been written at two periods, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, unless the passages implying the earlier date are as deliberately misleading as the 1652 title-page.

[622] _Classicos Esquecidos_ (Rio de Janeiro, 1915). Duarte de Macedo in his dedicatory letter says: ‘I have taken this _Summa Politica_ from the Latin and Italian languages.’ ‘I do not offer it as my own, because I restore it to your Highness as yours’, so that he had armed himself against such charges of plagiarism.

[623] It loses nothing in Sir Peter Wyche’s translation. Cf. the account of Castro’s first arrival at Goa: ‘When the entry was to be, the two Governours were in a Faluque with gilded Oars, and an awning of divers-coloured silks; the Castles and Ships entertain’d ’em with the horrour of reiterated shootings, the Vivas and expectation of the common people did without any cunning flatter the new Government, &c.’

[624] _Cada clausula he filha da eloquencia mats sublime_, &c. (Barbosa Machado).

[625] e.g. 1759 ed., p. 342: _cujas ruinas serião de sua fama os elogios maiores_ would be straightened out from Latin into Portuguese: _serião os maiores elogios de sua fama_.

[626] On his homeward voyage in 1654 he had suffered from a violent storm, and was only saved by a Dutch pirate who landed the passengers of the Portuguese ship at the Ilha Graciosa without their belongings.

[627] _Historia do Futuro_ (1718), p. 93.

[628] See letters from Bahia, July 22, 1695.

V

1706-1816

_The Eighteenth Century_

The eighteenth century did not kill literature in Portugal any more than in other countries, but poetry had lost its lyrism, and under the influence of French and English writers assumed a scientific, philosophical, or utilitarian character. No mighty genius arose in Portuguese literature at the bidding of João V (1706-50), but the king’s lavish patronage gave an impulse, and he founded the _Academia Real de Historia_ in 1720. A crop of scholars and poets followed in the second half of the century, so that it was not without some unfairness that Giuseppe Baretti wrote of the Portuguese in 1760 that _di letteratura non hanno punto fama d’essere soverchio ghiotti ... quel poco que scrivono, sia in prosa sia in verso, è tutto panciuto e pettoruto_.[629] It was the age of Arcadias: the famous _Arcadia Ulyssiponense_[630] (1756-74) and the _Nova Arcadia_ founded in 1790 (i. e. precisely a century after the Italian _Arcadia_). All the poets of the century belonged to one or other of these societies or made their mark as _dissidentes_ from them. One of the founders of the _Nova Arcadia_, FRANCISCO JOAQUIM BINGRE (1763-1856), lived on into the middle of the nineteenth century, and a few of his poems were collected under the title _O Moribundo Cysne do Vouga_ (1850). A typical eighteenth-century poet is D. FRANCISCO XAVIER DE MENESES (1673-1743), fourth Conde da Ericeira, who in turning to literature was but following the traditions of his family. A staunch defender of pure Portuguese against those who, he said, disfigure and corrupt the language by the introduction of foreign words and phrases, he wrote a large number of works in prose and in verse. The best known of them is his _Henriqueida_ (1741), a heroic poem on the conquest of Portugal by Count Henry in twelve long cantos of prosaic _oitavas_. It may contain lines more inspiring than these:

E a contramina fabricou Roberto,
Da mina conhecendo o lugar certo,

but they do not really differ greatly from the rest of the poem. The large quantity of poetry still written at the beginning of the century had met with severe criticism in Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina’s _Seram Politico_. He slyly calls the _egloga campestre_ ‘_poesia ervada_’. The objects of the _Arcadia_ of 1756 were to free Portuguese literature from foreign influences and restore the purity of the language. If to some extent it merely substituted French or Italian influence for Spanish, its cry was also back to the classics and to the Portuguese _quinhentistas_. As to the language its services were invaluable, for at a time when French influence was great in Portugal and in the rest of Europe it checked the use of gallicisms; as to literature the attempt to write poetry on an ordered plan was perhaps foredoomed to failure: it plodded along in an artificial atmosphere of Roman gods and antiquities, and became hidebound in imitation of the Horatian ode.

PEDRO ANTONIO CORRÊA GARÇÃO (1724-72), one of the first members and most prominent poets of the _Arcadia_, did good service in his determined efforts to deliver his country’s literature from foreign imitations and the false affectation of the time, and to revert to the classics, Greek, Roman, and Portuguese. He even prophesied that Gil Vicente’s day would come. His master was Horace, _grande Horacio_, and his Horatian odes, if they show no remarkable lyrical gift, have a dry native flavour in the purity of their language. He was also successful in reviving the cultivation of blank verse. There is a fine sound in some of the sonnets in which he sings Marilia, Lydia, Belisa, Maria, Nise, writes to a friend to ask for a doubloon or for Spanish tobacco, sends birthday congratulations or laughs at a bald priest: the themes are mostly of this level. His satirical vein is marked in his two short comedies in blank verse, _Theatro Novo_, a skit on the drama then in vogue, and _Assemblêa ou Partida_, in which certain Lisbon types are ridiculed and which contains the famous and much overpraised _Cantata de Dido_. Corrêa Garção’s days ended tragically in prison. The motive of his arrest is not clear. Tradition wavers between a love intrigue and political reasons,[631] and declares that the Marques de Pombal, whom he had offended, signed the order for his release on the very day of the poet’s death after eighteen months of imprisonment.

Pombal was effusively praised by DOMINGOS DOS REIS QUITA (1728-70), a Lisbon hairdresser who wrote bucolic poetry melodiously, but with perhaps even less originality than we have learnt to expect in that kind since the time when Virgil mistranslated Theocritus. The influence of Bernardez and Camões is clear,[632] in many passages too clear, and he had undoubtedly caught something of their skill and harmony in technique. But his poems leave the impression that he had no real feeling for the rustic life which they describe; no doubt he was more at home with the scissors than with the faithful Melampus or the nymphs and shepherd’s pipe. When he is relating an event, such as the earthquake of 1755, which touched him nearly, his ready flow of verse deserts him, in spite of his skill in improvisation,[633] although the sonnet written on the same occasion, _Por castigar, Senhor_, stands out with a certain majesty from most of his other sonnets, which are mere slices of eclogue. If his mellifluous idylls show no individuality, his return to the classic poets of Portugal was, as with other Arcadian poets, a welcome change from the Spanish influence, the _mao uso_, as he calls it, of ‘rude strangers from the Manzanares’ (Eclogue 6). His tragedies and pastoral drama _Licore_ are not more original. One of his tragedies, _Inés de Castro_, suggested that of João Baptista Gomes (†1813), _Nova Castro_, which had a great vogue in its day but is now scarcely more remembered than _Osmia_ (1788), a tragedy of which the blank verse has vigour, although it is often scarcely distinguishable from prose. This play, published anonymously, was long attributed to Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo (1754-1817), but its real author was D. Theresa de Mello Breyner, Condessa de Vimieiro, who married her cousin, the fourth Count, in 1767.

It was a cruel kindness to edit the works of ANTONIO DINIZ DA CRUZ E SILVA (1731-99) in six volumes, for, despite the fame of his high-flown Pindaric odes, his three centuries of sonnets and his other lyrics are not of conspicuous merit and are often imitative. Having nothing to say, _Elpino Nonacriense_, like too many of the Arcadian poets, said it at inordinate length. _Que enorme confusão!_ he exclaims in an elegy on the Lisbon earthquake, and most of his poems are on a like plane of thought and expression. The son of a _Sargento Môr_,[634] he was born at Lisbon, and after studying law at Coimbra was appointed a judge at Castello de Vide. With Manuel Nicolau Esteves Negrão (†1824) and Theotonio Gomes de Carvalho (†1800) he founded the _Arcadia Ulyssiponense_, of which he drew up the statutes in September 1756. The first aim of these early Arcadians was, as we have noticed, to break the shackles of Spanish influence and _gongorismo_, which was, indeed, on the wane in the land of its birth. Diniz da Cruz’ own poems were written in good idiomatic Portuguese. In _O Hyssope_ he satirizes with telling vigour the use of gallicisms, and his comedy _O Falso Heroismo_ is thoroughly Portuguese in subject and treatment. From 1764 to 1774 he was stationed at Elvas, and here a quarrel between the bishop, D. Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean, D. José Carlos de Lara, furnished him with the subject of his celebrated mock-heroic poem _O Hyssope_. The legend runs that he was summoned to read his satire to the all-powerful Pombal in the presence of the infuriated bishop, and that the poem proved too much for the gravity of the minister, who appointed him a judge at Rio de Janeiro (1776). Thence he was transferred to Oporto (1787), but in 1790 was again appointed to Rio de Janeiro, and showed himself merciless in sentencing the Brazilian poets Claudio Manuel da Costa, Gonzaga, and Ignacio José de Alvarengo Peixoto (1748-93), accused of conspiring to secure the independence of their country. _O Hyssope_ was first published in 1802, three years after the author’s death. The idea of the poem was derived from Boileau’s _Le Lutrin_. Boileau would have been horrified by its eight cantos of slovenly and monotonous blank verse, which often scarcely rises above prose; but as a satire on the times and in its grotesque portraiture of prelate and lawyer and notary it is sometimes irresistibly comic. The mock-heroic _Benteida_, written by ALEXANDRE ANTONIO DE LIMA of Lisbon (1699-_c._ 1760?) and published fifty years before _O Hyssope_, consisted of three cantos of _oitavas_. Two editions appeared in 1752, published at ‘Constantinople’ as written by ‘Andronio Meliante Laxaed’. Pedro de Azevedo Tojal (†1742) had used the same metre for his _Foguetario_ (1729). The burlesque poem _O Reino da Estupidez_ (1819), written in four cantos of easily-flowing blank verse by the Brazilians Francisco de Mello Franco (1757-1823) and José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva (1763-1838), is professedly an imitation of _aquelle activo e discreto Diniz na Hyssopaïda_, only the butt here is not the Chapter of Elvas but the professors of Coimbra University.

Like the less celebrated poet son of an Alentejan painter, JOSÉ ANASTASIO DA CUNHA (1744-87), artillery officer, mathematician, Professor of Geometry at Coimbra, who translated Pope and Voltaire and had milk in his tea and buttered toast on a fast-day, FRANCISCO MANUEL DO NASCIMENTO (1734-1819), better known as _Filinto Elysio_,[635] was denounced to the Inquisition. His thrilling escape in the year of Cunha’s condemnation for apostasy and heresy (1778) brought him almost as much fame as his poems. The son of a Lisbon lighterman and a humble _varina_,[636] he was accused of not believing in the Flood and of throwing ridicule on the doctrine of original sin, and by another witness of being simply an atheist. He succeeded in locking up in his own rooms the official sent to arrest him early on the 4th of July, hid for eleven days in Lisbon, and then, disguised as a poor man carrying a load of oranges, escaped on a boat bound for Havre. Had this persecution come earlier, the disquieting atmosphere of Paris, into which he was now transplanted and where, except for a few years at The Hague, he lived for the rest of his life, might have given some originality to his talent. But his mind and poetic style were already fixed, and through every political disturbance he continued his steady flow of Horatian odes and similar artificial verse. He wrote for seventy years (Lamartine notes the _précoces faveurs_ of his muse), and at the age of sixty-four calculated that he had already composed 730,000 lines, probably too modest an estimate. He received by royal decree an amnesty and the restoration of his property, but never returned to Portugal. His influence on younger Portuguese poets was nevertheless great. Bocage, when his verses were praised by the older poet, exclaimed:

Filinto, o gran cantor, prezou meus versos
... Posteridade, és minha!

His influence was bad and good. It encouraged a dry and artificial classicism, but also careful versification in pure Portuguese. Although the poems of Lamartine’s _divin Manuel_ are no longer even by his countrymen held to be divine, they may be read with satisfaction by virtue of their indigenous expressions and a hundred and one allusions to popular traditions. It was by these characteristics that he expressed his revolt from the _Arcadia_. Half a long life spent in Paris was unable to imbue Filinto with the _mimo de fallar luso-gallico_, against which he vigorously protested to the end. This purity of style gives excellence to the many translations which he was obliged to write for a bare livelihood, and his native land is present even in his closest imitations of Horace (Falernian becomes _louro Carcavellos_). Unfortunately his contemporaries and successors were not always so discreet.

The genial satirist NICOLAU TOLENTINO (1741-1811), son of a Lisbon advocate, after studying law at Coimbra spent some years teaching rhetoric to the raw youth (_bisonhos rapazes_) of Lisbon. He was perpetually discontented with his lot or ready to profess himself so. ‘Long years have I already spent in begging,’ he says candidly, ‘and shall perhaps pass my whole life in the same way.’ He harps on his poverty; the kitchen, he complains, is the coolest room in his house. In 1781 he obtained a comfortable post in the civil service, his poems were printed for him in two volumes twenty years later, he would receive a pheasant from one friend, a Sunday dinner of turkey from another, he acknowledges a thousand benefits, and still begs on. Before he had had time to grow rich the habit had become incurable. His was no lyrical gift, but he imitated with success the _quintilhas_ of Sá de Miranda,[637] in which much of his work is composed (_O Bilhar_ is in _oitavas_). He writes naturally; his style is thoroughly Portuguese, often prosaic. His satire, repressed for personal reasons rather than from any failure of wit or talent, reducible to silence by the gift of a pheasant, lacks independence and thought, but sheds a gentle light on the manners of the time--on the travelled coxcomb who returns to Portugal affecting almost to have forgotten Portuguese, or the rich nun who knows by heart whole volumes of the _Fenix Renascida_--and one or two of his entertaining sonnets are likely to endure. The _Obras Poeticas_ of the MARQUESA DE ALORNA (1750-1839), in Arcadia _Alcippe_, are now more often praised than read, but her poetry is scarcely inferior to that of many even more celebrated writers of the time. As a child she defied the anger of the Marques de Pombal. She was detained with her sister Maria and her mother D. Leonor de Almeida in the convent of Chellas from the age of eight till the death of King José (1777). Two years later she married the Count of Oeynhausen, who became minister at Vienna in 1780. After his death in 1793 she lived partly in England, but spent the last twenty-five years of her life in the neighbourhood of Lisbon, and exercised considerable influence on young writers--not Garrett but Bocage, and especially Herculano--and thus with Macedo formed a link between the poets of the _Arcadia_ and the nineteenth century. Her works contain over 2,000 pages of verse. There are sonnets and odes, eclogues, elegies, epistles, translations or paraphrases of Homer, Horace, Claudian (_De raptu Proserpinae_), Pope (_Essay on Criticism_), Wieland, Thomson’s _Seasons_, Goldsmith, Gray, Lamartine, and the Psalms. There is a long poem on botany which notices more than a hundred kinds of scented geranium, and indeed the range of her subjects is very wide, from May fireflies to the ‘barbarous climate’ of England, from Leibniz to the ascent of Robertson in a balloon. Classical allusions are everywhere; she even drags in Cocytus in a sonnet on the death of her infant son. At the same time we have a constant sense of high ideals and love of liberty.

The compositions of the ‘pale, limber, odd-looking young man’, which ‘thrilled and agitated’ William Beckford in 1787, now scarcely move us, vanished the fire and glow which BOCAGE (1765-1805) brought to his improvisations. For the reader they are for the most part _carboni spenti_. His parents were a Portuguese judge and the daughter of a French vice-admiral in the Portuguese Navy, and he enlisted in an infantry regiment in the town of his birth, Setubal, in 1779. Ten years later he deserted at Damão, and after wandering in China reached Macao and thence Goa, which he still found a stepmother to poets, and Lisbon. Here he continued to live a dissipated life, till in 1797 his revolutionary opinions and his poem _A Pavorosa Illusão da Eternidade_ brought him first to the Limoeiro and then for a few months to the prison of the Inquisition. His unstable romantic spirit was influenced as much by the French Revolution during the latter years of his life as by the wish in his youth to become a second Camões, but he wrote an elegy on the execution of Queen Marie Antoinette, which he described as ‘a crime from Hell’. He supported life during his last years principally by translation. He was himself his chief enemy, and he was also the victim of the critics who applauded his improvisations until he no longer distinguished between poetry and prose, sense and absurdity. No better Portuguese pendant to the celebrated line of blank verse ‘A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman’ will be found than that in one of Bocage’s elegies: _Carpido objecto meu, carpido objecto_. The undoubted talent of _Elmano Sadino_, as he was in Arcadia, was thus frittered away in occasional verse in which his fecund gift of satire found expression, and a great poet was lost to Portuguese literature. His impromptu sallies against rival poets, such as Macedo, brought him contemporary fame, but in some of his poems, especially the sonnets, we have proof of a possibility of greater things. No doubt his work is disfigured by pompous phrases[638] and hollow classical allusions. He did not always rise above the bad taste of the period; he was unable to concentrate his talent or separate prosaic from poetical subjects. Thus he sang of an ascent in a _balão aerostatico_ in 1794, and saw in the _vil mosquito_ a proof of the existence of God. But his was nevertheless a very real and above all a very Portuguese inspiration,[639] and some of his sonnets have force and grandeur and hover on the fringes of beauty, especially when they voice his unaffected enthusiasm for Portugal’s past greatness and heroes.

One of the foremost poets of the _Nova Arcadia_ was BELCHIOR MANUEL CURVO SEMEDO (1766-1838), two volumes of whose _Composições Poeticas_ appeared in 1803. A crowd of secondary lights revolved round the great planets of the two _Arcadias_. The poems of _Alfeno Cynthio_, DOMINGOS MAXIMIANO TORRES (1748-1810), are not without vigour (_Versos_, 1791). Their unfortunate author died a political prisoner at Trafaria. The gay and lively Abbade of Jazente, PAULINO ANTONIO CABRAL[640] (1719-89), was the son of an Oporto doctor, and was parish priest at Jazente (near Amarante) from 1753 to 1784. His poems are still read for their pleasant satire, but he was careless of literary fame. Some of the sonnets of both these writers deserve not to be forgotten. JOÃO XAVIER DE MATTOS (†1789), a fourth edition of whose _Rimas_ appeared in the year after his death, is now remembered chiefly for some of his sonnets, as that beginning _Poz-se o sol_, with its melancholy charm. He was a true but not a great or original poet. Born at Oporto, the son of a Brazilian father and a Portuguese mother, THOMAS ANTONIO GONZAGA (1744-1807?) was a judge at Bahia when he was accused of taking part in the Republican conspiracy of Minas Geraes (1789), and after three years’ imprisonment was deported (1792) to Mozambique, where he died several years after his sentence had expired. Some of his Horatian and Anacreontic _lyras_ in many metres, addressed to Marilia and collected under the title _A Marilia de Dirceo_ (_Dirceo_ being his Arcadian name), are graceful lyrics of an idyllic character. Of the other poets implicated in the conspiracy, CLAUDIO MANUEL DA COSTA (1729-69), who was found dead in his prison cell, was an Arcadian poet of the Italian school, and shows a gentle love of Nature in his sonnets. Of the hundred sonnets printed in his _Obras_ (1768) some are in Italian. The eclogues number twenty. In Brazil at this time, as earlier in Portugal, patriotism if not poetry suggested epics. JOSÉ BASILIO DA GAMA (1740-95), who spent the greater part of his life in Portugal and died at Lisbon, wrote _O Uraguay_ (1769) in five cantos of prosaic blank verse--an account of the struggle between Portuguese and Indians. JOSÉ DE SANTA RITA DURÃO (_c._ 1720-84), Doctor in Theology (Coimbra), composed an epic entitled _Caramurú_ (1781) on the discovery of Bahia in the sixteenth century by Diogo Alvarez Corrêa. This poem in ten cantos of _oitavas_ is inferior to _O Uraguay_, but it contains some interesting notes on the country and the customs of Brazil.[641]

If a great poet lurked in Bocage, he had certainly never existed in Bocage’s contemporary and rival in Arcadia, JOSÉ AGOSTINHO DE MACEDO (1761-1831), who lived to be confronted by an even more formidable adversary in his old age, Almeida Garrett. (In one of his fierce political letters he prays that either he or Garrett may be sent to the galleys.) Born at Beja, he took the vows as an Augustinian monk at Lisbon in 1778. The future champion of law and order provoked the displeasure of his superiors at Lisbon, Evora, Coimbra, Braga, Torres Vedras, by his pranks and mutinies, his boisterous and dissipated life. Methodical theft of books was one of his minor failings. At last after fourteen years, his Order, tired of transferring and imprisoning, formally expelled the delinquent in 1792. He, however, obtained recognition as a secular priest, won fame as a preacher, and for the next forty years wrote in verse and prose with an amazing copiousness.[642] He is said to have composed a hundred Anacreontic odes in three days: _Lyra Anacreontica_ (1819). During the last three years of his life, after he had, as he said, capitulated to the doctors, he continued to write, although in great pain. His financial circumstances did not require this effort. His works had brought him considerable sums, he had become Court preacher and chronicler, and had many friends in high places, including Dom Miguel himself. His vanity was soothed, the unfrocked Augustinian had won the regard of princes. But to this learned[643] and splenetic priest virulent denunciation of his literary and political opponents had become a necessity, and he was at work on the twenty-seventh number of his periodical _O Desengano_ a fortnight before his death. He was spared the mortification of seeing his enemies triumph in 1832. His character was not amiable, and a large part of his life was unedifying, but there is something fine in his unfailing energy, for by sheer energy he imposed himself, and his self-conceit was so colossal as to be virtually innocuous, while his real horror of revolution, a horror based on experience, was expressed with persistency and courage. He seems to have been quite honest in the belief that the poems of Homer, which he could not read in the original, were worthless,[644] and that his own _O Oriente_ was a great epic. His utilitarian conception of literature was inevitably fatal to his verse. He wished to extend the boundaries of poetry.[645] He wrote a long poem--four cantos of blank verse--on _Newton_ (1813), recast and increased to 3,560 lines under the title _Viagem Extatica ao Templo da Sabedoria_ (1830), because Newton had conferred greater benefits on humanity than many a great conqueror (yet so may a dentist). He composed a long poem, _Gama_ (1811), re-written as _O Oriente_ (1814),[646] to show how Camões should have written _Os Lusiadas_. His poem is no doubt more correct; it observes all the rules, but unfortunately it lacks genius and is as dull and turgid as Macedo’s other verse. A good word for the sea in Portuguese is _mar_; the poets often call it _oceano_, Camões had ventured to name it _o falso argento_, _o liquido estanho_, _o fundo aquoso_, _o humido elemento_; with Macedo it becomes _o tumido elemento_ (or perhaps he adopted the phrase from _Caramurú_, in which it occurs). We can scarcely blame Bocage for labelling him _tumido versista_.[647] Among his other philosophical poems are _Contemplação da Natureza_ (1801), _A Meditação_ (1813), _A Natureza_ (1846), and _A Creação_ (1865), now not more often read than his many odes and other verse. The most scandalous of his satires is _Os Burros_ (1827), in blank verse, in which he lavishly and outrageously insults nearly all the writers of the time, and which may have been suggested by Juan Pablo Forner’s _El Asno Erudito_ (1782). Like his poems, his dramatic works usually have some ulterior object; their purpose is not less practical than his pamphlets against _Os Sebastianistas_ (1810) or _Os Jesuitas_ (1830): behind Ezelino and Beatriz in his tragedy _Branca de Rossi_ (1819) loom Napoleon and Joséphine, and the prose comedy _A Impostura Castigada_ (1822) is an attack upon the doctors. The fact is that Macedo was essentially not a poet or a dramatist or a philosopher, but a forcible and eloquent pamphleteer. His philosophical letters and treatises, _A Verdade_ (1814), _O Homem_ (1815), _Demonstração da Existencia de Deos_ (1816), _Cartas filosoficas a Attico_ (1815), are at their best not when he is developing a train of scientific thought but when he is arguing _ad hominem_; and his literary criticism in _Motim Literario_ (1811) is primarily personal. As a critic militant he has his merits, and he is pleasantly patriotic in denouncing the glamour of _missangas estranjeiras_. But it is in his political periodicals, pamphlets, and letters, _Cartas_ (1821), _Cartas_ (1827), _Tripa virada_ (1823), _Tripa por uma vez_ (1823), _A Besta Esfolhada_ (1828-31), _O Desengano_ (September 1830-September 1831), that he puts forth all his spice and venom. Ponderous and angry like a lesser Samuel Johnson, he bullies and crushes his opponents in the raciest vernacular. He may be unscrupulous in argument, but his idiomatic and vigorous prose will always be read with pleasure.

Macedo’s dramatic works were neither better nor worse than those of other playwrights of the time. It was the professed object of MANUEL DE FIGUEIREDO (1725-1801) to ‘write plays morally and dramatically correct’. The effect of this didacticism in the fourteen volumes of his _Theatro_ (1804-15) is disastrous. He wrote in prose and verse, but the plays in ordinary prose are to be preferred, since in the others, like M. Jourdain, he made _de la prose sans le savoir_. He wrote comedies, and tragedies in which he is involuntarily comic. Even in _Ignez_ he keeps the even tenor of his dullness, and he warns the reader in a preface that his Inés is not to be considered beautiful since she was probably over thirty, and that her and Pedro’s passion had had time to cool.[648] There is more life in the plays written in a medley of prose and verse by ANTONIO JOSÉ DA SILVA (1705-39), whom Southey considered ‘the best of their dramatic writers’, but it is doubtful whether they would have received any attention in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had it not been for the tragedy of their author’s life. He was born at Rio de Janeiro, the son of Portuguese Jews, his mother had been arrested by order of the Inquisition as early as 1712, and the whole family came to Lisbon, where the father practised successfully as a lawyer. In 1726 his mother was re-arrested, and this time Antonio José with her. He was released after suffering torture and publicly abjuring Jewish doctrines in an _auto da fé_. Eleven years later, after studying at Coimbra and following his father’s profession in Lisbon, he was again arrested, with his wife--he had married his cousin despite the dangerous fact that her mother had been burnt and she herself imprisoned by the Inquisition--and on October 18, 1739, he was first strangled and then burnt in an _auto da fé_ at Lisbon. For some years (1733-8) before his death the people of Lisbon had admired the plays of ‘the Jew’, as they called him, at the _Theatro do Bairro Alto_. Of the eight plays that have survived in print it must be said that they are for the most part very purposeless and ineffective. He attracted his audience sometimes by wit, more often by sheer farcical absurdity; the constant plays on words, the meaningless snatches of verse interpolated, do not increase the interest, which flags on every page because the author has not the slightest power of concentration. The action at least is quick and varied; it shows Silva’s inventive talent and explains the popularity of his _galhofeiras comedias_,[649] however much it may weary the reader. His plays with classical subjects are especially cold and dull, _A Ninfa Syringa ou Amores de Pan e Syringa_,[650] _Os Encantos de Medea_,[651] _Esopaida_,[651] _Amphitrião_,[651] _As Variedades de Proteo_,[652] _Laberinto de Creta_.[652] His best play, _Guerras do Alecrim e Mangerona_ (1737), contains some elements of character-drawing and describes the devices of the starving gentlemen D. Gilvaz and D. Fuas to obtain rich wives at the expense of miserly father and country cousin. The action consists in a bewildering succession of disguises, the scene (Pt. ii, Sc. 5) in which Gilvaz and Fuas doctor their stolid rival and ridicule the medical profession has humour but shows the usual inability to end before the reader’s patience has been long exhausted. In the _Vida do Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha_ (1733) Silva made bold to dramatize _Don Quixote_ in a series of scenes not over-skilfully connected. Of his own invention there is a comical scene (Pt. i, Sc. 8), in which Don Quixote is harassed by doubts as to whether the enchanters have not transformed Dulcinea into Sancho Panza: he begins to see a certain likeness; but most of the scenes are directly copied and here become signally insipid, as that of Sancho’s judgements (ii. 4), or that of the lion (i. 5), which is as far removed from Cervantes as the sorry lions of the Alhambra at Granada from those in Trafalgar Square. The drama of NICOLAU LUIS, whose life is obscure but whose name was possibly Nicolau Luis da Silva, belongs to the _literatura de cordel_, popular plays imitated and often directly translated from the Spanish and Italian and acted with great applause in the eighteenth century at Lisbon. Most of them were published without the author’s name, and although it is believed that he wrote over one-third of the numerous _comedias de cordel_ of the century[653] only a few, as _O Capitão Belisario_ (1781) and _O Conde Alarcos_ (1788), can be definitely assigned to him, a fact which incidentally bears witness to his lack of individuality. His best-known tragedy is _D. Ignez de Castro_ (1772), an imitation of _Reinar después de morir_ by Luis Velez de Guevara (1579-1644).

In prose it was not an age of great writers, but of research and learning. The Lisbon _Academia Real das Sciencias_,[654] founded by the Duque de Lafões, met for the first time in 1780, and was not slow in inaugurating the work which has won for it the gratitude of all who care for the language or literature of Portugal. D. ANTONIO CAETANO DE SOUSA (1674-1759) had published his valuable _Provas da Historia Genealogica_ (1739-48) in seven volumes, and the learned _curé_ of Santo Adrião de Sever, DIOGO BARBOSA MACHADO (1682-1772), had spent a long life in bibliographical study and compiled his indispensable and magnificent _Bibliotheca Lusitana_ (1741-59) with a generous inaccuracy which is attractive in the minute pedantry of a later age. The scarcely less famous _Vocabulario Portuguez_ of RAPHAEL BLUTEAU (1638-1734), who was born of French parents in London but spent over fifty years in Portugal, began to appear in 1712. The work of research was now carried on, among others by FRANCISCO JOSÉ FREIRE (1719-73); FREI JOAQUIM DE SANTA ROSA DE VITERBO (1744-1822); the librarian ANTONIO RIBEIRO DOS SANTOS (1745-1818); D. FRANCISCO ALEXANDRE LOBO (1763-1844), Bishop of Viseu; CARDINAL SARAIVA (1766-1845), Patriarch of Lisbon; and FREI FORTUNATO DE S. BOAVENTURA (1778-1844). Critics of poetry were LUIS ANTONIO VERNEY (1713-92), Archdeacon of Evora, ‘El Barbadiño’, whose criticisms in his _Verdadeiro Methodo de Estudar_ (2 vols., 1746) are severe, even harsh; FRANCISCO DIAS GOMES (1745-95), whom Herculano called _o nosso celebre critico_, and who was indeed a better critic than poet, as may be seen in the notes and poems of his _Obras Poeticas_ (1799); and MIGUEL DE COUTO GUERREIRO (_c._ 1720-93), who showed good sense in the twenty-six rhymed rules of his _Tratado da Versificaçam Portugueza_ (1784).