Chaucer wrote “It am I” where we would say “It is I” and where current colloquial usage, perhaps foreshadowing the accepted standard of tomorrow, says “It’s me.” English changes in England; why shall it cease to change in the United States? And justly, Verissimo asks a similar question for Brazil. “I have always felt,” he remarks somewhat farther on, “that the Portuguese tongue never attained the discipline and the relative grammatical and lexical fixity that other languages arrived at. I do not believe that among cultured tongues there is one that has given rise to so many controversial cases, or to so many and so diverse contradictions among its leading writers.” The fight about the collocation of personal pronouns is waged so earnestly in Brazil that it has become as funny, in some of its aspects, as the quarrel of the “lo-istas” and the “le-istas” in Spain. And so true are Verissimo’s words that as late as March, 1921, a writer could complain in the _Revista do Brazil_[14] that “we are at the very height of linguistic bolshevism”; the very next month, indeed, the editorial board of the same representative intellectual organ found it necessary to comment upon the various systems of orthography employed by its contributors and to designate a choice.[15] Verissimo, in accordance with A. H. Sayce, takes as his standard of grammatical correctness that which is “accepted by the great body of those who speak a language, not what is laid down by a grammarian.” Still more to the point, Verissimo, who was a man of exemplary honesty and fearlessness in a milieu that easily tempts to flattery and the other social amenities, declares that “if we are by language Portuguese, if through that tongue our literature is but a branch of the Portuguese, we have already almost ceased to be such … because of our fund of ideas and notions, which were all constituted outside of Portuguese influence.” The important thing, then, is “to have something to say, an idea to express, a thought to transmit. Without this, however deep his grammatical knowledge of the language, however perfectly he apes the classics, no man is a writer.” Platitudinous, perhaps, but how often some platitudes bear repetition!