The salient chroniclers and preachers of the century may be passed over in rapid review. At their head easily stands Frei Vicente do Salvador, (1564-1636/39) author of the _Historia da Custodia do Brasil_, which was not published until 1888, more than two hundred and sixty years after it was written (1627). His editor, Capistrano de Abreu, has pointed out his importance as a reagent against the dominant tendency of spiritual servitude to Portugal. “To him Brazil means more than a geographical expression; it is a historical and social term. The XVIIth century is the germination of this idea, as the XVIIIth is its ripening.” The _Historia_ possesses, furthermore, a distinct importance for the study of folk lore. Manoel de Moraes (1586-1651) enjoys what might be called a cenotaphic renown as the author of a _Historia da America_ that has never been found. Little more than names are Diogo Gomes Carneiro and Frei Christovão da Madre de Deus Luz. Of far sterner stuff than his vagrant brother Gregorio was the preacher Eusebio de Mattos (1629-1692) who late in life left the Company of Jesus. There is little in his sermons to fascinate the modern mind or rejoice the soul, and one had rather err in the company of his bohemian brother. As Eusebio was dubbed, in the fashion of the day, a second Orpheus for his playing upon the harp and the viola, so Antonio de Sá (1620-1678) became the “Portuguese Chrysostom.” Yet little gold flowed in his speech, which fairly out-Góngora-ed Góngora himself. “His culture, like that of almost all the Jesuits was false; rhetorical rather than scientific, swollen rather than substantial.”[13] The poets of the century narrow down to two, of whom the first may be dismissed with scant ceremony. Manoel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1711) was the first Brazilian poet to publish a book of verses. His _Musica do Parnaso em quatro coros de rimas portuguezas, castelhanas, italianas e latinas, com seu descante comico reduzido em duas comedias_ was published at Lisbon in 1705. Yet for all this battery of tongues there is little in the book to commend it, and it would in all likelihood be all but forgotten by today were it not for the descriptive poem _A Ilha da Maré_, in which has been discovered,--as we have seen in our citation from Verissimo,--one of the earliest manifestations of nativism; Botelho de Oliveira’s Brazilianism, as appears from his preface, was a conscious attitude, and the patient, plodding cataloguing of the national fruit-garden precedes by a century the seventh canto of the epic _Caramurú_; but for all this, there are in the three hundred and twenty-odd lines of the poem only some four verses with any claim to poetic illumination. The depths of bathetic prose are reached in a passage oft quoted by Brazilian writers; it reads like a seed catalogue: