the country library of a man of their class, should consist chiefly of works on history, poetry, and practical philosophy. This gives rise to an encomium on the Portuguese language, which at that period had to contend with enemies in its native land, and which was still more vehemently attacked by the Spaniards. Cultivation of language again becomes the subject of discussion in these dialogues; and the epistolary style being considered more important than any other to a gentleman who is to figure in the world, Rodriguez Lobo, through the medium of one of the party, gives a full, and for the age in which it was written, a new treatise of the art of correct letter-writing. Even the external elegance of the letter comes under consideration. The interlocutors then discuss appointments, messages and visits; ornamental hyperboles (_encarecimentos_); the difference between love and desire; selfishness; social decorum in manners and discourse; social eloquence generally; the art of social anecdote in particular; witty conversation in society; true gallantry (_cortesia_); education at court, in the army and in the schools. The reader who forms his judgment of this ingenious work, apart from the age in which, and for which, it was written, will probably depreciate its intrinsic merits. Now that the first principles of modern cultivation have become common, the precepts of Rodriguez Lobo will be scorned as trivial by the merest noviciates in politeness; and our students of psychology will feel more inclined to receive instructions from a French observer of mankind of the eighteenth century, than from this Portuguese writer. But in the sixteenth century such a work as the _Corte na Aldea_ could only have been written by a man initiated in the refined manners of his age, and combining a delicate spirit of observation with an extraordinary store of literary knowledge. In Portuguese eloquence it had no prototype. In the descriptive passages only is the style somewhat overcharged with antiquated and pompous phrases. The turns of the dialogue are, like the similar passages in the writings of Cicero, natural and pleasing, though they do not possess the poignant spirit of more recent productions of this kind.[213] Where the exposition of the ideas assumes a totally didactic character, the expression is clear, decided and unostentatiously harmonious.[214] Upon the whole the prose of Rodriguez Lobo has more of an oratorical character than the modern style of conversation admits; but the romantic tone of chivalrous gallantry in the sixteenth century, produced, even in the conversational style, a certain formality and rounding of long periods, by an influence similar to that which the oratorical prose of the forum exercised at Rome in Cicero’s time, over every species of prosaic composition.