“Portugal, for already a century, had possessed a language solidly constructed and policed, and in this respect the labor of Camões is incomparably less than that of Dante. Portugal was in its golden age of literature, which already possessed chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes, novelists like Bernardim Ribeiro, historians like João de Barros, dramatists like Gil Vicente, poets such as those of the _cancioneiros_ and a line of writers of all kinds dating back to the fourteenth century. Despite the rusticity of the people, Portugal, in the epoch of Brazil’s colonization, is one of the four countries of Europe that may be called intellectual. The identification of the colony of Brazil with the mother-country seems to me one of the expressive facts of our history, and this identification rendered easy the influence of Portuguese spiritual life upon a wild region, so that it was possible to obtain results which, given other feelings between the court and the colony, would not have been forthcoming. Since gold was not at once discovered here, and those mines that were discovered proved relatively few and poor, Brazilian life soon took on, from Reconcavo to Pernambuco, where it was first lived, and later in Rio Janeiro and even--though less--in S. Vicente, a modest manner,--what today we should call bourgeois,--more favourable to literary expression, to the leisure needed for writing, than the agitated, adventurous existence of the colonizers of mine lands. “The collegios of the Jesuits, established with higher studies as early as the XVIth century, and later--in imitation of them--the convents of the other religious orders, infiltrating Latin culture into the still half-savage colony, favoured the transmigration hither of the powerful literary spirit of the metropolis.