Portuguese literature

Philip II entered his new capital under triumphal arches on June 29, 1581, and the subjection of Portugal to Spain during the next sixty years in part accounts for the fact that nowhere was the decadence of literature in the seventeenth century more marked than at Lisbon. For Spain in her sturdy independence and reaction from rigid classicism had led the way in those precious affectations which invaded the literatures of Europe, and the universal malady, gongorism with its Lylyan conceits and cultured style, now found a ready welcome in Portugal. The literary style which corresponded to the Churriguerresque in architecture naturally proved congenial to the land of the estilo manuelino. King Philip was glad to conciliate and provide for Portuguese men of letters,[581] but if in the preceding centuries many of them wrote in Spanish, that tendency was now necessarily strengthened. Another cause of decadence was no doubt the Inquisition, although its influence in this respect has been greatly exaggerated. It required no immense tact on the part of an author to prevent his works from being placed on the Index. An examination, for instance, of the differences between the 1616 edition of Eufrosina and the condemned 1561 edition shows that the parts excised were chiefly coarse passages or unsuitable references to the Bible (this was also the charge against the letters of Clenardus). That remarkable mathematician, Pedro Nunez, pays a tribute to the enlightened patronage of letters by Cardinal Henrique, the most ardent promoter of the Inquisition in Portugal: qui cum nullum tempus intermittat quin semper aut animarum saluti prospiciat aut optimos quosque auctores evolvat aut literatorum hominum colloquia audiat.[582]

No literary figure in Portugal of the seventeenth century, few in the Peninsula,[583] can rank with D. Francisco Manuel de Mello (1608-66). Born at Lisbon,[584] he belonged to the highest Portuguese nobility and began both his military and literary career in his seventeenth year. He wrote in Spanish, although, in verse at least, he felt it to be a hindrance,[585] and it was not till he was over forty that he published a work in Portuguese: Carta de Guia de Casados (1651).[586] Few men have accomplished more, and towards the end of his life he could say with pride that it would be difficult to find an idle hour in it. He was shipwrecked near St. Jean de Luz in 1627 and fought in the battle of the Downs in 1639. He was sent with the Conde de Linhares to quell the Evora insurrection in 1637, and took part in the campaign against revolted Catalonia (1640), which he described in his Guerra de Cataluña[587] (1645), written em varias fortunas and recognized as a classic of Spanish literature. A man frankly outspoken like Mello must have made many enemies, enemies dangerous in a time of natural distrust. During the Catalan campaign he was sent under arrest to Madrid, apparently on suspicion of favouring the cause of an independent Portugal,[588] and a little later, when he was in the service of the King of Portugal, the suspicion as to his loyalty recurred. On November 19, 1644, he was arrested at Lisbon on a different charge. It appears that a servant dismissed by Mello revenged himself by implicating his former master in a murder that he had committed (of a man as obscure as himself). Whether he did this of his own initiative or at the bidding of Mello’s enemies is uncertain, but they saw to it that Mello once in prison should not be soon released. They might, probably did, assure the king that this was the best place for one ‘devoted to the cause of Castile’. There are other theories to account for Mello’s long imprisonment, the most romantic of which—that he and the king were rivals in the affections of the Condessa de Villa Nova, and, meeting disguised and by accident at the entrance of her house, drew their swords, the king recognizing Mello by his voice—is now generally abandoned. Although no evidence of Mello’s participation in the murder was forthcoming, he was condemned to be deported for life to Africa, for which Brazil was later substituted. It was only in 1655, after eleven years of more or less[589] strict confinement, that he sailed for Brazil. João IV died in 1656 and two years later Mello returned to Portugal: he was formally pardoned[590] and spent the last years of his life in important diplomatic missions to London, Rome, and Paris. The unfaltering courage and gaiety with which he faced his adventures and misfortunes win our admiration, but his life can strike no one as literary. Yet it is probable that but for his long imprisonment he would never have found leisure to write many of his best works, and prosperity might have dimmed his insight and dulled his style—that style (influenced no doubt by Quevedo and Gracián) which is hard and clear as the glitter of steel or the silver chiming of a clock, with concinnitas quaedam venusta et felix verborum.[591] Even when full of points and conceits it retains its clearness and trenchancy, and in his more familiar works he is unrivalled, as the Carta de Guia de Casados, in which, innuptus ipse, he brings freshness and originality to the theme already treated in Fray Luis de Leon’s La Perfecta Casada (1583), Diogo Paiva de Andrade’s sensible but less caustic Casamento Perfeito (1631), and Dr. João de Barros’ Espelho de Casados (1540),[592] or the pithy and delightful Cartas Familiares, of which five centuries—a mere fragment—were published at Rome in 1664, with a rapier-thrust of his wit and a maxim of good sense on every page, preserving for us some vestige of what Frei Manuel Godinho described as his ‘admirable conversation’ when he met him at Marseilles in 1633.[593] The Epanaphoras de varia Historia Portugueza (1660) are unequal and often excessively detailed.[594] Three of the five are, however, the accounts of an eyewitness and as such are full of interest: the Alteraçoens de Evora (i), the Naufragio da Armada Portuguesa em França (ii), and the Conflito do Canal de Inglaterra (iv).[595]

Mello’s knowledge of men was as wide as his knowledge of books, and both appear to great advantage in his Apologos Dialogaes (1721). An individualist in religion[596] and politics,[597] an acute thinker and a keen student of men and manners, he found no dullness in life even at its worst and no solitude, for, if alone, his fancy instilled wit and wisdom into clocks[598] and coins[599] and fountains.[600] The first three Apologos contain incisive portraits in which types and persons are sharply etched in a few lines: the poor escudeiro, the beata, the Lisbon market-woman, the litigious ratinho, the fidalgo from the provinces,[601] the ambitious priest, the shabby grammarian,, the worldly monk, political place-hunter, miles gloriosus, or melancholy author, a tinselled nobody boiling down the good sayings of past writers. The fourth Apologo entitled Hospital das Lettras (1657) is devoted more especially to literary criticism; Mello with Quevedo, Justus Lipsius, and Traiano Boccalini (who died when Mello was five) makes a notable scrutiny of Spanish and Portuguese literature. As a literary critic Mello is excellent within limits. Himself an artificial writer, although as it were naturally artificial, bred at Court, versed in social and political affairs, he considered that the proper study of mankind was man, and, like Henry Fielding a century later, admired ‘the wondrous power of art in improving Nature’.[602] For him the country and Nature, the bucolic poetry and prose of Fernam Alvarez do Oriente, the ingenuous narratives of the early chroniclers, had no charm; he preferred Rodrigo Mendez Silva’s Vida y hechos del gran Condestable (Madrid, 1640) to the Cronica do Condestabre.[603] But all that was vernacular and indigenous attracted him, as is proved in his letters, in his lively farce Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz (1676), and in the Feira dos Anexins, which is a long string of popular maxims and of those plays upon words in which Mello delighted. His poetry—Las Tres Musas del Melodino (1649), Obras Metricas (1665)—is marred by the conceits which in his prose often serve effectively to point a moral or drive home an argument. It is far too clever. When in a poem ‘On the death of a great lady’ we find the line contigo o sepultara a sepultura we do not know whether to laugh or weep, but we suspect the sincerity of the author’s grief, and although he wrote some excellent quintilhas, most of his poems, which are, as might be expected, always vigorous, are too sharp and thin, stalks without flowers, the very skeletons of poetry. It is to his prose in its wit and grace, its shrewd thought, its revelation of a sincere and lofty but unassuming character, its directness,[604] its bom portugues velho e relho, that he owes his place among the greatest writers of the Peninsula.

The taste in poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is seen in two collections, partly Spanish, partly Portuguese: Fenix Renascida (5 vols., 1716-28) and Eccos que o Clarim da Fama dá (2 vols., 1761, 2). The latter is sufficiently characterized by its title, too long to quote in full. As to the former the Phoenix seems to have given real pleasure to contemporary readers, but for us the bird and song are flown and only the ashes remain, from which a sixteenth-century poem such as the sonnet Horas breves stands out conspicuously. The subjects are often as trivial as those of the Cancioneiro published two centuries earlier and more domestic: to a cousin sewing, to an overdressed man, to a large mouth, a sonnet to two market-women fighting, another to the prancing horse of the Conde de Sabugal, on a present of roses, two long romances on a goldfinch killed by a cat, verses sent with a gift of handkerchiefs or eggs or melons, or to thank for sugar-plums—the Fenix rarely soars above such themes. The magistrate Antonio Barbosa Bacellar (1610-63) figures largely, with glosses on poems by Camões, a romance A umas saudades, a satirical poem A umas beatas. His romances varios are mostly in Spanish, but a few of his sonnets in Portuguese have some merit. The fifth volume opens (pp. 1-37) with a far more elaborate satire by Diogo Camacho (or Diogo de Sousa): Jornada que Diogo Camacho fez ás Cortes do Parnaso, the best burlesque poem of the century, in which the author did not spare contemporary Lisbon poets.[605] The poems of Jeronimo Bahia likewise cover many pages. He it is who bewails at length the sad fate of a goldfinch. In oitavas he wrote a Fabula de Polyfemo a Galatea,[606] and in octosyllabic redondilhas jocular accounts of journeys from Lisbon to Coimbra and from Lisbon into Alentejo (on a very lean mule) which are sometimes amusing. His sonnet Fallando com Deos shows a deeper nature, and the collection contains other religious verse, notably that of Violante Montesino, better known as Soror Violante do Ceo (1601-93). Here,[607] as in her Rythmas varias (Rouen, 1646) and Parnaso Lusitano de divinos e humanos versos (2 vols., 1733), this nun, who spent over sixty years in the Dominican Convento da Rosa at Lisbon, and who from an early age was known for her skill upon the harp and in poetry—admiring contemporaries called her the tenth Muse—showed that she could write with simple fervour, as in the Portuguese deprecações devotas of the Meditações da Missa (1689) or her Spanish villancicos. But she could also be the most gongorical of writers, her very real native talent being too often spoilt by the taste of the time.[608] Bernarda Ferreira de Lacerda (1595-1644), another femina incomparabilis, like Soror Violante and Dercylis considered the tenth Muse and fourth Grace, wrote almost exclusively in Spanish, nor can her Soledades de Buçaco (1634) or her epic Hespaña Libertada (2 pts., 1618, 73) be considered a heavy loss to Portuguese literature. Soror Maria Magdalena Euphemia da Gloria (1672-? c. 1760), in the world Leonarda Gil da Gama, in Brados do Desengano (1739), Orbe Celeste (1742), and Reino de Babylonia (1749), rarely descends from the high-flown style indicated in these titles. On the other hand, the Franciscan nun of Lisbon, Soror Maria do Ceo (1658-1753), or Maria de Eça, in A Preciosa (2 pts., 1731, 3) and Enganos do Bosque, Desenganos do Rio (1741), among much verse of the same kind has some poems of real charm and an almost rustic simplicity.

By reason of a certain intensity and a vigorous style D. Francisco Child Rolim de Moura (1572-1640), Lord of the towns of Azambuja and Montargil, although more versed in arms than in letters, wrote in Os Novissimos do Homem (1623) a poem quite as readable as the longer epics of his contemporaries, despite its duller subject (man’s first disobedience and all our woe). The four cantos in oitavas are headed Death, Judgement, Hell, Paradise.[609] Of the life of Manuel da Veiga Tagarro we know little or nothing, but his volume of eclogues and odes, Lavra de Anfriso (1627), stands conspicuous in the seventeenth century for its simplicity and true lyrical vein. There is nothing original in these four eclogues, but the verse is of a harmonious softness. In the odes he succeeds in combining fervent thought with a classical restraint of expression. He aimed high; Horace, Lope de Vega, and Luis de Leon seem to have been his models. Some measure of the latter’s deliberate tranquillity he occasionally attained. The works of the ‘discreet and accomplished’, keen-eyed and graceful D. Francisco de Portugal (1585-1632) appeared posthumously[610]: Divinos e humanos versos (1652) and (without separate title-page) Prisões e solturas de hũa alma, consisting of mystic poems mostly in Spanish in a setting of Portuguese prose, and, in Spanish, Arte de Galanteria (1670), of which a second edition was published in 1682. Lope de Vega praised the ‘elegant verses’ of the Gigantomachia (1628) written by Manuel de Galhegos (1597-1665). That he could write good Portuguese poetry the author showed in the 732 verses of his Templo da Memoria (1635), in the preface of which he declares that it had become a rash act to publish poems written in Portuguese but quotes the example of Pereira de Castro and of Góngora as having used the language of everyday life and plebeian words without indignity.

The later epics testified to the perseverance of their authors rather than to their poetical talent. They are perhaps less guilty than the critics, who should have discouraged the kind and recognized that the Lusiads were only an accident in Portuguese literature, the accident of the genius of Camões. As a rule the epic spirit of the Portuguese expressed itself better in prose. Gabriel Pereira de Castro (1571?-1632) forestalled Sousa de Macedo in his choice of a subject. His Vlyssea, ov Lysboa Edificada, Poema heroyco (1636) was published posthumously by his brother Luis, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that it should have run through six editions. The structure of the poem, in ten cantos of oitavas, is closely modelled on that of the Lusiads, and the gods of Olympus duly take a part in the story. He sings, he says boldly, to his country, to the world and to eternity, but his sails flap sadly for lack of inspiration and enthusiasm, and his daring enjambements[611] do not compensate for the dullness of theme and treatment. If, for instance, we compare his storm[612] with that of the Lusiads (vi. 70-91) it must be confessed that the former has much the air of a commotion in a duckpond. Ulysses on his way to Lisbon visits (canto 4) the infernal regions, is astonished to meet kings there, and (canto 6) relates the siege and fall of Troy.

The life of Bras Garcia de Mascarenhas (1596-1656) was more interesting than his verses. He was born at Avó, near the Serra da Estrella, and his adventures began early, for he was arrested on account of a love affair (1616) and made a daring escape from Coimbra prison after wounding his jailer. His careful biographer, Dr. Antonio de Vasconcellos, has shown that there is no record of his having studied at Coimbra University. Subsequently he travelled and fought in Brazil (1623-32), Italy, France, Flanders, and Spain, and in 1641, as captain, raised and commanded a body of horse known as the Company of Lions. As Governor of Alfaiates, the ‘key of Beira’, he was wrongfully accused of having a treasonable understanding with Spain and imprisoned at Sabugal, some ten miles from Alfaiates (1642). He obtained a book (the Flos Sanctorum), flour, and scissors and cut out a letter in verse to King João IV, who restored him to his governorship and gave him the habit of Avis. His long epic Viriato Tragico (1699) contains some forcible descriptions and has a pleasantly patriotic and indigenous atmosphere—one feels that he is singing os patrios montes as much as the hero—but in style it differs little from prose. Tedious geographical descriptions, dry catalogues of names, a whole stanza (vii. 39) composed exclusively of nouns, another (iv. 63) of proper names, incline the reader less to praise than sleep, from which he is only gently stirred when the sun is called a solar embaixadora. In the prevailing fashion of the time the author works in lines of Camões, Sá de Miranda, Garci Lasso, Ariosto, and other poets. While the work was still in manuscript another poet, and perhaps a relation, Andre da Silva Mascarenhas, helped himself liberally to its stanzas (they number 2,287) for his epic A Destruição de Hespanha (1671). He could have given no better proof of the poverty of his genius. Francisco de Sá de Meneses (c. 1600-1664?), although less true a poet than his cousin and namesake the Conde de Mattosinhos, won a far wider fame by his epic poem Malaca Conqvistada (1634), in which he recounts a heroica historia dos feitos de Albuquerque. The reader who accompanies his frail bark[613] through twelve cantos of oitavas feels that he has well earned the fall of Malacca at the end. For although the author is not incapable of vigorous and succinct description he too often decks out the pure gold of Camões’ style[614] with periphrases and Manueline ornaments which delay the action. The sun is ‘the lover of Clytie’ or ‘the rubicund son of Latona’. He stops to tell us that a diamond won by Albuquerque had been ‘cut by skilled hand in Milan’, and some of his more elaborate similes are not without charm. Canto 7 tells of the future deeds of the Portuguese in India. The gods interfere less than in the Lusiads (Asmodeus plays a part in canto 6), but the general effect is that of a great theme badly handled. After the death of his wife, the author spent the last twenty years of his life (from 1641) in the Dominican convent of Bemfica as Frei Francisco de Jesus.

Antonio de Sousa de Macedo (1606-82), moço fidalgo of Philip IV and later Secretary of Embassy and Minister (Residente) in London (1642-6) and Secretary of State to the weak and unlettered Afonso VI, wrote at the age of twenty-two Flores de España, Excelencias de Portugal (1631). This historical work of considerable interest and importance was written in Spanish por ser mais universal, but he returned to Portuguese presently in a curious prose miscellany, Eva e Ave (1676), and in the epic poem Vlyssippo (1640) in fourteen cantos of oitavas. He seems to have felt that interest could not easily be sustained by the subject, the foundation of Lisbon by Ulysses. Accordingly, following the example of Camões, he inset various episodes. Canto 6 summarizes the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, canto 10 describes a tapestry adorned with future Portuguese victories, in canto 11 the Delphic Sibyl foretells the deeds of Portugal’s kings, down to Sebastian, in canto 12 the wise Chiron prophesies of her famosos varões. The style is correct, but the poem as a whole is commonplace. Vasco Mousinho de Quevedo, of Setubal, although no records of his life remain, won high fame by his epic poem in oitavas (twelve cantos) Afonso Africano (1611), in which ‘the marvellous prowess of King Afonso V in Africa’ is described. The poem, admired by Almeida Garrett, is particularly wearisome because it is largely allegorical. The king conquering Arzila represents the strong man subduing the city of his own soul, the Moors are the spirits of the damned, and seven of their knights representing the seven deadly sins are defeated by seven Christian knights who stand for the virtues.

The poverty of profane prose, compared with its flourishing condition in the preceding century, is also remarkable. A few historians of the seventeenth century have already been mentioned. The literary academies, of which the most famous were the Academia dos Generosos (1649-68) and the Academia dos Singulares (1663-5),[615] existed rather for the interchange of wit and complimentary or satiric verses than for the encouragement of historical and scientific research. The Conde da Ericeira’s Portugal Restaurado and Freire de Andrade’s Life bear no comparison with works of the Quinhentistas. Yet it was the second golden age of Portuguese prose, as the names of Manuel Bernardes and Vieira prove. The latter’s letters, with those of Frei Antonio das Chagas and Mello, are in three different kinds—the political, religious, and familiar—the most notable written in the century. Gaspar Pires de Rebello in the preface to his Infortvnios tragicos da Constante Florinda (1625) excuses himself for its publication on the ground that ‘not spiritual and divine books only benefit our intelligence’. The book, which records the love of Arnaldo and Florinda, of Zaragoza, shows the modern novel growing through Don Quixote out of the Celestina plays and the romances of chivalry, but has little other interest. A second part was published in 1633, and Novellas Exemplares, six stories by the same author, in 1650. Numerous other works appeared with more or less alluring or sensational titles but contents disappointingly dull. Mattheus de Ribeiro (c. 1620-95), in his Alivio de Tristes e Consolação de Queixosos (1672, 4), shows greater skill than Pires de Rebello in the invention of the story, but it is marred by the diffuse and pedantic style—April becomes an ‘academy in which Flora was opening the doors for the study of flowers’. The pastoral novel ended in sad contortions with the Desmayos de Mayo em sombras de Mondego (1635) by Diogo Ferreira de Figueiroa (1604-74). Its title and the three involved sentences which cover the first three pages (ff. 10, 11) convey an adequate idea of its character and contents.

Of several prose works written by Martim Afonso de Miranda, of Lisbon, in the first third of the century, the most important is Tempo de Agora (2 pts., 1622, 4). It contains seven dialogues dealing with truth and falsehood, the evils of idleness, temperance, friendship, justice, the evils of dice and cards, and precepts for princes. Much of their matter is interesting and the comments incisive, especially as to the prevailing luxury in food and dress. They tell of the infinite number of curiously bound books at Lisbon, of the soldiers unpaid, ‘eating at the doors of convents’, of the delight in foreign fashions, and the craze for ‘diabolical’ books from Italy to the exclusion of livros de historias and books in Portuguese. The anonymous Primor e honra da vida soldadesca no Estado da India (1630), edited by the Augustinian Frei Antonio Freire (c. 1570-1634), is a different work from Geronimo Ximenez de Urrea’s Diálogo de la verdadera honra militar (1566), which it resembles slightly in title. It is divided into four parts and contains various episodes of the Portuguese in the East and some curious information. Miguel Leitão de Andrade (1555-1632) went straight from Coimbra University to Africa with King Sebastian. After the battle of Alcacer Kebir he succeeded in escaping from captivity, followed the cause of the Prior of Crato, and was imprisoned under Philip II. In his book, in twenty dialogues, Miscellanea do Sitio de N. Sᵃ da Lvz do Pedrogão Grande (1629), he disclaims any purpose of writing history. It reveals an inquiring and observant but uncritical mind, interested in fossils, inscriptions, astrology, the early history of Portugal, etymology, heraldry, and the ‘infinite wonderful secrets of Nature daily being revealed’. It contains a graphic account of his escape from Fez, but on the whole, in spite of attractive passages and interesting details, scarcely merits its great reputation. Do Sitio de Lisboa (1608), which Mello praises as aquelle elegantissimo livro, by the author of Arte Militar (1612), Luis Mendes de Vasconcellos, is written in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher, a soldier, and a politician, and deserves its place among the minor classics of Portuguese literature.

The famous love letters of the Portuguese nun Marianna Alcoforado (1640-1723), which bring a breath of life and nature into the stilted writing of that day, only belong to Portuguese literature in the sense that Osorio’s history belongs to it—by translation. They first appeared in indifferent French (Lettres Portvgaises, Paris, 1669) and were not retranslated, or, if we accept the theory that the nun originally wrote them in French[616]—French suranné et dénué d’élégance—translated into Portuguese for a century and a half: Cartas de uma Religiosa Portugueza (1819).[617] Meanwhile, even before their obscure author died in the remote and beautiful city of Beja, they had been translated into English and Italian and had received over fifty French editions. Colonel (later Marshal) Noël Bouton, Comte de Saint-Léger, afterwards Marquis de Chamilly (1636-1715), accompanied the French troops sent to help Portugal against Spain, and was in Portugal from 1665 to 1667. Marianna Alcoforado, belonging to an old Alentejan family, was a nun in the convent of Nossa Senhora da Conceição at Beja. Her five letters, written between the end of 1667 and the middle of 1668 after her desertion, in their artlessness, contradictions, and disorder, vibrate with emotion. They are a succession of intense cries like the popular quatrain:

Sometimes, it is true, a trace of French reason seems to mingle with the ingenuous Portuguese sentiment, and it is almost incredible, although of course not impossible, since omnia vincit amor, that the nun should have written certain passages. From these and not on the amazing assumption of Rousseau that a mere woman could not write so passionately—he was ready to wager that the letters were the work of a man[618]—one may suspect that the lover, who did not scruple to hand over the letters to a publisher (unless he was merely guilty of showing them to his friends), sank a little lower and edited them, adding a phrase here and there more peculiarly pleasing to his vanity.[619] In that case the nun actually wrote these letters, full of passion and despair, and perhaps in French, to her French lover; but we only read them as they were touched up for publication by another hand.

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.