Yet the effect of the French neo-classicists upon the Brazilian poets was, as Verissimo has shown, threefold: form was perfected, the excessive preoccupation with self was diminished, the themes became more varied. “This same influence, following the example of what had happened in France, restored the sonnet to the national poetry, whence the Romantics had almost banished it, and on the other hand banished blank verse, which is so natural to our tongue and our poetry.… As to form, our Parnassian poets merely completed the evolution led in Portugal and there by two poets who, whatever their merits, had a vast effect upon our poetry, Antonio de Castilho and Thomaz Ribeiro. Machado de Assis evidently and confessedly owes to the first, if not also to the second, the advantages of his metrification and of his poetic form in general over that of some of his contemporaries, such as Castro Alves and Varella. Parnassianism refined this form … with its preoccupations with relief and colour, as in the plastic arts,--with exquisite sonorities, as in music,--with metrical artifices that should heighten mere correctness and make an impression through the feeling of a difficulty conquered,--with the search for rich rhymes and rare rhymes, and, as in prose, for the adjective that was peregrine, and if not exact, surprising. All this our poets did here as a strict imitation of the French, and since it is the externality of things that it is easy and possible to imitate and not that which is their very essence, a great number of them merely reproduced in pale copy the French Parnassians. Thus, for some fifteen years, we were truly inundated with myriads of sonnets describing domestic scenes, landscapes, women, animals, historic events, seascapes, moonlight … a veritable gallery of pictures in verse that pretended to be poetry.” Here, as everywhere else, the true personalities survive. Chief among the Brazilian Parnassians are the few whom we have here considered. III The naturalistic novel in Brazil is, from the artistic standpoint, the work of some four men,--Machado de Assis, Aluizio de Azevedo, Julio Ribeiro and Raul Pompeia. Ribeiro’s _Carne_ (Flesh) and Pompeia’s _Atheneu_ represent, respectively, the influence of Zola upon the natural sensuousness of the Brazilian and the impact of complex modernity upon that sensuousness.