Macedo portrayed the frivolous society of the epoch of Dom Pedro II. He was not so much a leader of taste as a skilful exploiter of it. He has been called “par excellence the novelist of the Brazilian woman”; we need look to him, then, for little in the way of frankness or psychological depth. To the reader of today, who has been tossed high in the waters of the contemporary novel, Macedo and his ilk are tame, naïve, a mite insipid. Not that some of his pages lack a certain piquancy in their very simplicity. His Rachel, for example, in _O Moço Louro_ (_The Blond Young Man_) can talk like a flapper who has been reading Bernard Shaw, but we know that love is to teach her better in the end. Macedo was a writer for the family hearth; his language, like his ideas, is simple. But our complex civilization has already outdistanced him; it is not at all impossible that in a short while he will join the other precursors and, with the exception of his books _Moreninha_ (_The Brunette_) and _O Moço Louro_, be but a name to his countrymen and even his countrywomen. The first, published in 1849, made his reputation; it is a tale of the triumph of pure love. The second is after _The Brunette_, his best-known novel, narrating the hardly original tale of the virginal, dreamy Honorina and the free, mocking Rachel who love the same youth; Honorina’s true love, as we might expect, wins out, for Rachel sacrifices her passion without letting the happy pair realize the extent of her abnegation. “By no means should I say that he possesses the power of idealization of José de Alencar, the somewhat _précieuse_ quality of Taunay or the smiling, bitter pessimism of Machado de Assis; if we wish to judge him in comparison with them or with the writers of today, his work pales; his modest creations disappear into an inferior category. But accepting him in the time for which he wrote, when the novel had not yet received the Flaubertian esthetics that ennobled it and had not been enriched by the realistic genius of Zola,--beside his contemporaries Teixeria de Souza, Manoel de Almeida and Bernardo Guimarães, he seems to us living, picturesque, colorful, as indeed he is. I esteem him because he has contributed to the development and the wealth of our literature.”[16]