fellow-workers; _Arte da grammatica da lingoa mais usada na costa do Brasil_, a philological study; his _Cartas_ (letters); and a number of _autos_ and poems. Next to Anchieta, Bento Teixeira Pinto, who flourished in the second half of the sixteenth century, is Brazil’s most ancient poet.[8] Much ink has been spilled over the question as to whether he was the author of the entertaining _Dialogo das Grandezas do Brazil_ and the scrupulous Varnhagen, who at first denied Bento Teixeira’s authorship of that document, later reversed his position. Similar doubt exists as to the real author of the _Relação do Naufragio que passou Jorge de Albuquerque Coelho, vindo do Brasil no anno de 1565_, a moving prose account of a shipwreck in which figures the noble personage of the title, but wherein the supposed author nowhere appears. To that same noble personage, governor of Pernambuco, is dedicated the _Prosopopéa_, undoubtedly the work of Bento Teixeira, and just as undoubtedly a pedestrian performance in stilted hendecasyllabic verses, ninety-four octaves in all, in due classic form. There is much imitation of Camões, who, indeed, entered Brazilian literature as a powerful influence through these prosaic lines of Bento Teixeira. “His poem (i. e., the _Lusiads_ of _Camões_) is henceforth to make our epics, his poetic language will provide the instrument of our poets and his admirable lyrism will influence down to the very present, our own in all that it has and preserves of sorrow, longing, nostalgia and Camonean love melancholy.”[9] In the _Prosopopéa_ occurs a description of the _recife_ of Pernambuco which has been looked upon as one of the first evidences of the Brazilian fondness for the native scene. The passage is utterly uninspired; Neptune and Argos rub shoulders with the _barbaros_ amid an insipid succession of verses. Verissimo sees, in the entire poem, no “shadow of the influence of the new milieu in which it was conceived and executed.” The earliest genuine manifestation of such nativism in poetry he does not discover until _A Ilha da Maré_, by Manoel Botelho de Oliveira, which, though published in the eighteenth century was, most likely, written in the seventeenth.[10]