The four lyrists of the Mineira group are Claudio Manoel da Costa (1729-1789); Thomas Antonio Gonzaga (1744-1807-9) the most famous of the quartet; José Ignacio de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744-1793), and Manoel Ignacio da Silva Alvarenga (1749-1814). Examination of their work shows the inaccuracy of terming them a “school,” as some Brazilian critics have loosely done. These men did not of set purpose advance an esthetic theory and seek to exemplify it in their writings; they are children of their day rather than brothers-in-arms. Like the epic poets, so they, in their verses, foreshadow the coming of the Romanticists some fifty years later; the spirits of the old world and the new contend in their lines as in their lives. They are, in a sense, transition figures, chief representatives of the “Arcadian” spirit of the day. Claudio de Costa, translator of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” was chiefly influenced by the Italians and the French. Romero, in his positive way, has catalogued him with the race of Lamartine and even called him a predecessor of the Brazilian Byronians. A certain subjectivity does appear despite the man’s classical leanings, but there is nothing of him of the Childe Harold or the Don Juan. Indeed, as often as not he is a cold stylist and his influence, today, is looked upon as having been chiefly technical; he was a writer rather than a thinker or a feeler, and one of his sonnets alone has suggested the combined influence of Camões, Petrarch and Dante: Que feliz fôra o mundo, se perdida A lembrança de Amor, de Amor e gloria, Igualmente dos gostos a memoria Ficasse para sempre consumida! Mas a pena mais triste, e mais crescida He vêr, que em nenhum tempo é transitoria Esta de Amor fantastica victoria, Que sempre na lembrança é repetida. Amantes, os que ardeis nesse cuidado, Fugi de Amor ao venenozo intento, Que lá para o depois vos tem guardado. Não vos engane a infiel contentamento; Que esse presente bem, quando passado, Sobrará para idéa de tormento.[7] The native note appears in his work, as in _A Fabula do Riberão do Carmo_ and in _Villa-Rica_, but it is neither strong nor constant. He is of the classic pastoralists, “the chief representative,” as Carvalho calls him, of Arcadism in Brazil.