To him, criticism was an art, and, reduced to its essential elements, is practised by any one who expresses an opinion or a feeling concerning a work of art. His mind was open to every wind of doctrine that blew, but this was hospitality rather than indiscrimination. “Let us not rebel against the new poetic tendencies,” he wrote in a controversy with Medeiros e Albuquerque, “for we must understand that they are all natural, the result of poetry’s very evolution. Let us not, on the other hand, accept them as universal and definitive. There is nothing definitive under the sun.… Schools, tendencies, fashions, pass. Poetry remains, invariable in its essence, despite the diversity of its form.” It is possible, however, that the conditions under which he wrote prevented his work from attaining the heights that often it suggests. His Brazil needed a teacher rather than a critic,--a policeman of the arts, as it were,--and he had to supply the deficiency. Perhaps it is one’s imagination that detects in his lines a certain all-pervading sadness,--a sadness that seems sister to serenity. Only when stirred to just combat--as in his controversy with Sylvio Romero--does he abandon his unruffled demeanour, and ever here he is more restrained than Sylvio could be in his moments of calm. Verissimo,--and again he suggests Rodó for a similar quality,--is ever a mite melancholy. His thought and its expression at their best are like a beautiful landscape seen in the afterglow of sunset; a sort of intellectual twilight, most natural to one who found truth and virtue in the middle. Yet is there much Truth and Virtue in Verissimo,--whoever that lady and gentleman may be? He sought to bring no eternal verities; his aim, like Rodó’s, was to instil rather the love of truth than any specific truth itself. He is a dispassionate analyst. Hence his tolerance (another quality of the middle, it will be noted), his diffidence, his sincerity. After Verissimo, Brazilian criticism is confronted with new standards,--flexible, it is true, but all the more exigent. As Machado de Assis belongs to the company of Anatole France, so Verissimo belongs with Lemaître. At a proper distance, to be sure, but within the circle of the elect. He was not deceived by theories, for he looked to the creation itself; neither was he deceived, and for the same reason, by men and women. By their works he knew them, as by his work we know him. It was his attitude as much as his accomplishment that made of him the national glory he has become. And no little of that glory is his because his sincerity transcended the narrower claims of nationalism,--a nationalism in Brazil as elsewhere too often identical with unthinking pride, puerile boastfulness and the notions of whatever political party happens to be predominant. * * * * *