Oliveira Lima belongs, more than to the history of Brazilian letters, to the history of Brazilian culture. He is an integral part of that culture and his life, coincidentally, runs parallel with the emergence of Brazil into an honoured position among the nations of the world. Once, in a happy phrase, the Swedish writer Goran Björkman, a corresponding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, characterized him aptly as “Brazil’s intellectual ambassador to the world,” and the phrase has stuck because it so eminently fitted the modest, indefatigable personality to whom it was applied. In a sense Oliveira Lima has been, too, the world’s intellectual ambassador to Brazil; he has seen service literally in every corner of the globe,--in Argentina as in the United States, in Japan as in France, Belgium, Sweden and Germany. Wherever he has come he has torn aside the dense veil of ignorance that has hidden Brazil from the eyes of none too curious foreigners; from wherever he has gone he has sent back to his native land solidly written, well considered volumes upon the civilization of the old world and the new. In both the physical and the intellectual sense he has been, largely, Brazil’s point of contact with the rest of the world. And the nation has been most fortunate in that choice, for Manoel de Oliveira Lima, most “undiplomatic” of diplomats, is the most human of men. He is, in the least spectacular sense of the word, an inspirer, not of words but of deeds. Trace his itinerary during the past twenty-five years and it is a miniature map of a double enlightenment. If diplomacy is ever to achieve anything like genuine internationality, it must travel some such path as this. And I dare say that Senhor Oliveira Lima is one of the rare precursors of just such a diplomacy. The example of his career has helped to raise that office from one of sublimated social hypocrisy to the dignity of lofty human intercourse. Manoel de Oliveira Lima was born on December 25th, 1867, in the city of Recife, Pernambuco,--that state of which Silveira Martins has strikingly declared that the Brazilian gaucho--indomitable defender of the nation’s frontiers--was simply a Pernambucan on horseback. He was sent early to Portugal to complete his education, becoming one of the favourite students of the noted historian Oliveira Martins; at the age of twenty-one he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Letters from the University of Lisbon and set out, after a couple of years, upon his career of diplomacy, into which he was initiated by Carvalho Borges and the Baron de Itajubá.