I have singled out, for more than passing comment, but two works of some threescore and a half that range from short tales and newspaper fragments to the novel, the drama, the text-book, speeches and essays upon the education of women. For such early novels as _A Capital Federal_ and such later ones as _A Conquista_ I can feel no literary interest; they are, together with more than one other of their fellows, valuable for a study of the day in which they were written and for the instable temperament that produced them. Similarly, _Esphinge_, a novel of exotic mystery that begins with high promise soon descends to the helpless confusion which threatens all dallying with other-worldly themes, particularly when the author would maintain contact with external reality rather than plunge frankly and fearlessly into the unseen realms. As to the short stories, one may open any collection quite at random; the good will be strangely mixed with the bad. Now the tale is a mere excuse for commentary, usually upon men and women and passion, with Netto in cynical mood; nature becomes a luxuriant, inciting procuress, as witness the long titular story in the collection called _Agua de Juventa_ (Fountain of Youth),--a tale that, like more than one of Netto’s, belongs rather to the liquor and cigars of stag parties than to literature. Not, understand, because it is “immoral,” but because it lacks the texture, the illumination, the significance, of art. That he can be sentimental he shows in _Epithalamio_ of the same collection; the propaganda impulse is so strong that it overflows into tale after tale. And over it all, the fructifying ardour of his voluptuousness, as prodigal as nature itself, which scatters myriad seeds where only one can take root and thrive. * * * * * “Naturalism,” writes Costa, “with Aluizio de Azevedo was the epic of the race’s sexual instincts; with Coelho Netto, neo-romanticism will be the eternal praise of Nature,--the incessant and exaggerated exaltation of the landscape.” Both “isms,” I believe, are but the reflection of the authors’ temperaments; in Netto, Nature is but one of the symbols of sex, one of the means of representing, expressing the superabundant vitality. It is his imagination that works upon Nature rather than Nature upon his imagination; he is a distorting mirror; he has not created character, he has not invented situation, so much as he has utilized men, places and events in the presentation of his overflowing personality.