FRANCISCO ADOLPHO DE VARNHAGEN. _Florilegio da Poesia Brasileira._ (Vols. I and II, Lisbon, 1850. Vol. III, Madrid, 1853.) It is the _Introduction_ preceding the first volume of these noted selections, together with the prefatory notes to the selections themselves, that virtually begins the writing of Brazilian literary history. Without this work Ferdinand Wolf could not have written his _Le Brésil Littéraire_. All later investigators and critics have really built upon Varnhagen’s foundations, tearing a stone away here and there and substituting another, but leaving the structure fundamentally the same. SYLVIO ROMERO. _Historia da Litteratura Brasileira. 2a edição, melhorada pelo auctor._ Rio Vol. I, 1902, Vol. II, 1903. Romero is one of the most picturesque literary figures of the nineteenth century. He was a born fighter, with all the traits of the ardent polemist. Throughout a lifetime that was rife with self-contradiction, self-repetition, and self-glorification, he fought for Brazilian independence in the literary, scientific and political fields. He was by no means blind to esthetic beauty, but he insisted overmuch upon the national element and was easily lost in fogs of irrelevancy. He was a great admirer of German methods, and--justly, to my way of thinking--a believer in Anglo-German culture as a complement to Latin. As his life sought to cover almost every field of intellectual activity, so does his History of Brazilian Literature, which was left incompleted, seek to cover altogether too much ground. His book might more properly have been named a history of Brazilian culture. Such, indeed, was his conception of literature, which to him, as he states in his very first chapter, possessed “the amplitude given to it by the critics and historians of Germany. It comprises all the manifestations of a people’s intelligence:--politics, economics, art, popular creations, sciences … and not, as was wont to be supposed, in Brazil, only those entitled _belles lettres_, which finally came to mean almost exclusively _poetry_!…” A knowledge of this important work--important despite the list of objections that might be raised against it--is indispensable to the student. SYLVIO ROMERO and JOAO RIBEIRO. _Compendia da Literatura Brasileira._ 2a edição refundida. Rio, 1909. A useful compendium and condensation. The authors here consider art “a chapter of sociology,” laying down a belief in the “consciousness of the identity of human destinies,” which is, “in our opinion, the basis of all sociology and morality.” JOSÉ VERISSIMO. _Estudos de Literatura Brazileira._ Six series, published at Rio de Janeiro and Paris, between 1901 and 1910. These largely formed the basis for his _Historia da Literatura Brazileira_, Rio, 1916.