The two salient figures of the epoch are Sebastião da Rocha Pitta (1660-1738) and Antonio José da Silva (1705-1739). Brazilian critics seem well disposed to forget Rocha Pitta’s mediocre novels and sterile verses; it is for his _Historia_ that he is remembered, and fondly, despite all the extravagances of style that mark the book. Romero regards it as a patriotic hymn, laden with ostentatious learning and undoubted leanings toward Portugal. Oliveira Lima’s view, however, is more scientific and historically dispassionate. One could not well expect of a writer at the beginning of the eighteenth century a nationalistic sentiment, “which in reality was still of necessity embryonic, hazy, or at least, ill-defined.… In our historian, none the less, there reigns a sympathy for all that is of his land.”[23] And, indeed, the _Historia_, as Romero wrote, is more a poem than a chronological narrative, cluttered with saints and warriors, prophets, heroes of antiquity and mediaeval days. “In no other region,” runs one of the passages best known to Brazilians, “is the sky more serene, nor does dawn glow more beautifully; in no other hemisphere does the sun flaunt such golden rays nor such brilliant nocturnal glints; the stars are more benign and ever joyful; the horizons where the sun is born or where it sinks to rest are always unclouded; the water, whether it be drunk from the springs in the fields or from the town aqueduct, is of the purest; Brazil, in short, is the Terrestrial Paradise discovered at last, wherein the vastest rivers arise and take their course.”