The beginning of the World War found Monteiro Lobato established upon a _fazenda_, far from the thoughts and centres of literature. It was by accident that he discovered his gifts as a writer. The story is told that one day, rendered indignant by the custom of setting fire to the fields for cleansing purposes, and thus endangering the bordering inhabitants, he sent a letter of protest to a large daily in São Paulo. It seems that the letter was too important, too well-written, too plainly indicative of natural literary talent, to be relegated to the corner where readers’ jeremiads usually wail, and that, instead, it was “featured” upon the first page. From that day the die was cast. The episode, in my opinion, is far more important than it appears. For, whatever form in which the man’s later writings are published, they are in a more important degree just what this initial venture was: a protest, a means of civic betterment, a national contribution. Turn this letter and its mood into a short story and you have, say, such a tale-message as _O Jardineiro Timotheo_, in which even a garden may be transformed into a mute, many-hued plea for the native flora; make politics of it, and you get such a genuinely humorous product as _A Modern Torture_, from that strange collection called _Urupês_. Indeed is not the piece _Urupês_ itself a critique and an exposition of the indigenous “cobrizo”? * * * * * It was with the collection _Urupês_ that Monteiro Lobato definitely established himself. In three years it has reached a sale that for Brazil is truly phenomenal: twenty thousand copies. It has been extravagantly praised by such divergent figures as the uncrowned laureate Olavo Bilac (who might have had more than a few words to say about legitimate French influence upon Brazilian poetry) and the imposing Ruy Barbosa, who instinctively recognized the fundamentally sociological value of Lobato’s labours. For of pure literature there is little in the young Saint-Paulist. I fear that, together with a similar group in Buenos Aires, he underestimates the esthetic element in art, confusing it, perhaps, with the snobbish, aloof, vapoury spirits who have a habit of infesting all movements with their neurotic lucubrations. Yet such a view may do him injustice. His style, his attitude, his product, are directly conditioned by the ambient in which he works and the problems he has set out to solve. Less unjust, surely, is the criticism that may be made against him when his earnestness degenerates into special pleading, when his intense feeling tapers off into sentimentality and when what was meant to be humour falls away to caricature. From which it may be gathered that Lobato writes--or rather reprints--too much; for plenty of good journalism should be left where it first appeared and not be sent forth between covers. Also, in an appreciable amount of his work, his execution lags behind his