The writings of Rodriguez Lobo are susceptible of three divisions which approximate to each other. To the first belongs his prose work:--“the Court in the Country,” in which no verses are introduced. Three connected pastoral romances form the second and most considerable portion; here the prose is merely a beautiful combining link by which the work is made a whole. The third comprises the author’s miscellaneous poems. The _Corte na Aldea, e Noites de Inverno_, (the Court in the Country, and Winter Nights,) is the title of a book, by which Rodriguez Lobo endeavoured to introduce a kind of Ciceronean style into Portuguese prose, and at the same time to furnish a useful guide to the formation of character for public life. The antiquated style of the title is in a certain degree at variance with the classic elegance of the book itself. It is probable that no more in this, than in his other works, would Rodriguez Lobo have avoided the gothic ornaments of which the romantic prose of the Spaniards and Portuguese was never entirely divested, had he not, as a prose writer, been here guided by his favourite Cicero, in whose footsteps he trod. Perhaps he was also acquainted with some Italian works of a similar kind; for at this period the Italian prose writers imitated Cicero; and _Il Cortegiano_ of Castiglione, bears in its subject at least a resemblance to Lobo’s “Court in the Country.” But the direct imitation of Cicero’s style is unquestionably an essential feature in this work. Precisely with the same forms of friendly courtesy, as those which characterize Cicero’s Tusculan and Academic discourses, but with some romantic modifications, Rodriguez Lobo collects around him a party of friends in the country. These friends discourse together concerning the proper education of an elegant man of the world. As conversation occupies the chief portion of the work, the whole is not inappropriately divided into dialogues. Each dialogue has, however, an historical frame work. But even though copying after Cicero’s models, it appears, that Rodriguez Lobo could not, without difficulty, find the path of pure prose composition. The first dialogue opens precisely in the style of an old romance.[211] Nevertheless the long sentence with which it commences, bespeaks, by its facility and rhetorical harmony a cultivation of style, which is not discoverable in the works of any earlier Portuguese prose writer. At the same time the reader is still farther charmed by the delicate and sharp outline which is given of the characteristic features of the assembled interlocutors.[212] The conversation does not take the turn which might be expected; but the natural colouring of the representation is thus augmented. The degree of cultivation by which these gentlemen are distinguished from the ordinary portion of society, leads them, in the first place, to discourse of literature. One of the party very properly observes, that,