Tenho explicado as fruitas e os legumes, Que dão a Portugal muitos ciumes; Tenho recopilado O que o Brasil contém para invejado, E para preferir a toda terra, Em si perfeitos quatro AA encerra. Tem o primeiro A, nos arvoredos Sempre verdes aos olhos, sempre ledos; Tem o segunda A nos ares puros, Na temperie agradaveis e seguros; Tem o terceiro A, nas aguas frias Que refrescam o peito e são sadias, O quarto A, no assucar deleitoso, Que é do mundo o regalo mais mimoso; São, pois, os quatro AA por singuares _Arvoredos_, _assucar_, _aguas_, _ares_.[14] All of which bears almost the same relation to poetry as the grouping of the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) to musical criticism. Romero found the poet’s nationalism an external affair; “the pen wished to depict Brazil, but the soul belonged to Spanish or Portuguese cultism.” So, too, Carvalho, who would assign the genuine beginnings of Brazilian sentiment to Gregorio de Mattos. Gregorio de Mattos Guerra (1633-1696) is easily the outstanding figure of his day. Romero, who considered him the pivot of seventeenth-century letters in Brazil, would claim for him, too, the title of creator of that literature, because he was--though educated, like most of the cultured men of his day, at Coimbra--a son of the soil, more nationally minded than Anchieta and in perfect harmony with his milieu. He reveals a Brazilian manner of handling the language; indeed, he “is the document in which we can appreciate the earliest modifications undergone by the Portuguese language in America.…” He reveals a consciousness of being something new and distinct from Europe’s consideration of the new-world inhabitants as a species of _anima vilis_. He represents the tendency of the various races to poke fun at one another. More important still, he betrays a nascent discontent with the mother country’s rule. He is “the genuine imitator of our lyric poetry and of our lyric intuition. His _brasileiro_ was not the caboclo nor the Negro nor the Portuguese; he was already the son of the soil, able to ridicule the separatist pretensions of the three races.” Thus far Romero. Verissimo however--and the case may well be taken as an instance of the unsettled conditions prevailing in Brazilian literary criticism--takes a view antipodally apart. “The first generation of Brazilian poets, Gregorio de Mattos included, is exclusively Portuguese. To suppose that there is in Gregorio de Mattos any originality of form or content is to show one’s ignorance of the Portuguese poetry of his time, and of the Spanish, which was so close to it and which the Portuguese so much imitated, and which he, in particular, fairly plagiarized.”[15] Long ago, Ferdinand Wolf, in the first history of Brazilian letters that made any claims to completeness,[16] noted the poet’s heavy indebtedness to Lope de Vega