Portuguese literature

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:

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:

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).

The best-known work of the learned son of a Lisbon blacksmith who became the first Bishop of Beja and Archbishop of Evora, Manuel do Cenaculo Villas-Boas (1724-1814), is his Cuidados Litterarios (1791). Theodoro de Almeida (1722-1804), an erudite and voluminous writer, one of the original members of the Academy of Sciences, was more ambitious. In O Feliz Independente do Mundo e da Fortuna in twenty-four books (3 vols., 1779), he took Fénelon’s Télémaque for his model and sought to combine the gall of instruction with the honey of entertainment. He wrote it first (uma boa parte) in rhyme, then turned to blank verse, but, still dissatisfied, finally adopted prose, taking care, however, he says, that it should not degenerate into a novel. The book had a wide vogue, but is quite unreadable. One may be thankful that it was not written in verse like that of his Lisboa Destruida (1803), an account of the earthquake of 1755, with sundry moralizings in six cantos of oitavas, of which a Portuguese critic has said that the author, in an excess of Christian humility, resolved to mortify his pride of learning by making himself ridiculous to posterity in verse. A flickering interest enlivens the Cartas Familiares (1741, 2) of Francisco Xavier de Oliveira (1702-83). Their subjects are various: love, literature, witchcraft, and even the relation of a man’s character to the ribbon on his hat. The author gave up a diplomatic career, perhaps on account of his Protestant tendencies, and went to Holland (1740) and England (1744), where he publicly abjured Roman Catholicism (1746). After the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 he addressed a pamphlet in French to the King of Portugal, exhorting him to mend his ways; to become Protestant with all his subjects and abolish the Inquisition. He was duly burnt in effigy at Lisbon (1761), but died quietly at Hackney twenty-two years later. The letters of Alexandre de Gusmão (1695-1753), born at Santos in Brazil, have not been collected; those of the remarkable Portuguese Jew of Penamacor, Antonio Nunes Ribeiro Sanches (1699-1783), physician to the Empress Catherine II of Russia, Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade, appeared in 1760 at Cologne. The Cartas Curiosas (1878) of the Abbade Antonio da Costa (1714-c. 1780) consist of thirteen letters written from Rome and Vienna from 1750 to 1780, mainly on the subject of music. The century was not rich in memoirs. The Miscellaneas of D. João de S. Joseph Queiroz (1711-64) contain some interesting and amusing anecdotes. He speaks of the Memorias Genealogicas of Alão de Moraes and of the general discredit of genealogists, and attributes Mello’s imprisonment to his polite acquiescence in the suggestions of the Condessa de Villa Nova, made at the instigation of King João IV: para lisongea-la disse que seguiria o partido de Castella. But without seeing the manuscript it is impossible not to suspect that there is as much of Camillo Castello Branco as of the Bishop of Grão-Para in the Memorias (1868), which he was the first to publish.