"_Yaya Garcia_, like _Resurreicao_ and _Helena_, is a romantic account, perhaps the most romantic written by the author. Not only the most romantic, but perhaps the most emotional. In the books that followed it is easy to see how the emotion is, one might say, systematically repressed by the sad irony of a disillusioned man's realism." Verissimo goes on to imply that such a work as this merits comparison with the humane books of Tolstoi. But this only on the surface. "For at bottom, it contains the author's misanthropy. A social, amiable misanthropy, curious about everything, interested in everything,--what is, in the final analysis, a way of loving mankind without esteeming it... "The excellency with which the author of _Yaya Garcia_ writes our language is proverbial ... The highest distinction of the genius of Machado de Assis in Brazilian literature is that he is the only truly universal writer we possess, without ceasing on that account to be really Brazilian." When the Brazilian Academy of letters was founded in 1897, Machado de Assis was unanimously elected president and held the position until his death. Oliveira Lima, who lectured at Harvard during the college season of 1915-1916, and who is himself one of the great intellectual forces of contemporary Brazil, has written of Machado de Assis: "By his extraordinary talent as writer, by his profound literary dignity, by the unity of a life that was entirely devoted to the cult of intellectual beauty, and by the prestige exerted about him by his work and by his personality, Machado de Assis succeeded, despite a nature that was averse to acclaim and little inclined to public appearance, in being considered and respected as the first among his country's men-of-letters: the head, if that word can denote the idea, of a youthful literature which already possesses its traditions and cherishes above all its glories ... His life was one of the most regulated and peaceful after he had given up active journalism, for like so many others, he began his career as a political reporter, paragrapher and dramatic critic." Coelho Netto (Anselmo Ribas, 1864- ) is known to his countrymen as a professor of literature at Rio de Janeiro. His career has covered the fields of journalism, politics, education and fiction. Although his work is of uneven worth, no doubt because of his unceasing productivity, he is reckoned by so exacting a critic as Verissimo as one of Brazil's most important writers,--one of the few, in fact, that will be remembered by posterity. Among his best liked stories are "Death," "The Federal Capital," "Paradise," "The Conquest," and "Mirage." Netto's short stories are very popular; at one time every other youth in Brazil was imitating his every mannerism. He is particularly felicitous in his descriptions of tropical nature, which teem with glowing life and vivid picturesqueness.