The prose work of Machado de Assis is not exclusively naturalistic; indeed, he should be considered, though of his age, a spirit apart; as he rises above the limitations of Brazilian letters, so he is too big for any circumscribed epoch to contain. With the year 1879 he began a long period of maturity that was to last for thirty years. It was during this fruitful phase that he produced the _Memorias Postumas de Braz Cubas_, _Quincas Borba_, _Historias Sem Data_, _Dom Casmurro_, _Varias Historias_, and other notable works. His long fiction, as his short, exhibits the same bitter-sweet philosophy and gracious, yet penetrating irony. In the best of his prose works he penetrates as deep as any of his countrymen into the abyss of the human soul. The judgment of Verissimo upon Machado de Assis differs somewhat from that of his distinguished compatriots. “With _Varias Historias_,” he says in his studies of Brazilian letters, “Sr. Machado de Assis published his fifteenth volume and his fifth collection of tales.… To say that in our literature Machado de Assis is a figure apart, that he stands with good reason first among our writers of fiction, that he possesses a rare faculty of assimilation and evolution which makes him, a writer of the second Romantic generation, always a contemporary, a modern, without on this account having sacrificed anything to the latest literary fashion or copied some brand-new esthetic, above all conserving his own distinct, singular personality … is but to repeat what has been said many times already. All these judgments are confirmed by his latest book, wherein may be noted the same impeccable correctness of language, the same firm grasp upon form, the same abundancy, force and originality of thought that make of him the only thinker among our writers of fiction, the same sad, bitter irony.… “After that there was published another book by Sr. Machado de Assis, _Yaya Garcia_. Although this is really a new edition, we may well speak of it here since the first, published long before, is no longer remembered by the public. Moreover, this book has the delightful and honest charm of being in the writer’s first manner.