The sporadic evidences of a nascent nativism become in the seventeenth century a conscious affirmation. The struggle against the Dutch in Pernambuco and the French in Maranhão compelled a union of the colonial forces and instilled a sort of Brazilian awareness. The economic situation becomes more firm, so that Romero may regard the entire century as the epoch of sugar, even as the succeeding century was to be one of gold, and the nineteenth,--as indeed the twentieth,--one of coffee. Agriculture even before the mines,--as Lima has pointed out,--was creating the fortune of the land.[11] “The new society of the prosperous American colony is no longer essentially Portuguese; the mill-owners, well off and intelligent, forming a sort of rural aristocracy, similar to that of the feudal barons, are its best-read and most enlightened representatives. Around this tiny but powerful nucleus revolve all the political and economic affairs of the young nationality. Two profoundly serious factors also appear: the Brazilian family, perfectly constituted, and a hatred for the foreigner, nourished chiefly by religious fanaticism. The Lutheran, English or Flemish, was the common enemy … against whom all vengeance was sacred, all crime just and blessed.”[12] In Brazilian literature, the century belongs mainly to Bahia, which during the second half became a court in little, with its governor as the center of a luxurious entourage. Spanish influence, as represented in the all-conquering Góngora, vied with that of the poets of the Italian and Portuguese renaissance; Tasso, Lope de Vega, Gabriel de Castro and a host of others were much read and imitated. And in the background rose a rude civilization reared upon slavery and greed, providing rich material for the satirical shafts of Gregorio de Mattos Guerra, well-named by his contemporaries the “hell-mouth” of Bahia. In Antonio Vieira and Gregorio Mattos, Romero discovers the two antagonistic forces of the epoch: Vieira, the symbol of “Portuguese arrogance in action and vacuity in ideas”; Gregorio Mattos, the most perfect incarnation of the Brazilian spirit, “facetious, informal, ironic, sceptical, a precursor of the _Bohemios_.” As we shall presently note, opinion upon the “hell-mouth’s” Brazilianism is not unanimous.