Rodriguez Lobo laid the foundation of that excessive accumulation of pastoral poetry, existing in the Portuguese language. He exerted his utmost endeavours to fix the taste of the nation in that direction. Before he appeared, the poetic genius of the Portuguese earnestly and zealously sought distinction in different ways. But after the period in which Rodriguez Lobo flourished, the Portuguese poets evinced an exclusive predilection for the pastoral style, even in other classes of poetic composition. STATE OF PORTUGUESE ELOQUENCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. Though Portuguese poetry had now attained a degree of consideration which in the following century it was unable to surpass, eloquence, or the elegant literature of prose remained far behind. That no writer of talent should have produced a work in Portuguese prose, which in a rhetorical point of view is worthy to mark an epoch, may in some respects be accounted for by peculiar circumstances, and must in others be attributed merely to the caprice of chance. The same restrictions on intellectual freedom, which in Portugal so effectually opposed the full developement of pure eloquence, had likewise held captive the thinking faculty in Spain. In Spain, however, a few, but still some men of talent, who pretended to no distinction in poetry, learned to move, even in their fetters, with rhetorical freedom and dignity, and there was nothing to prevent the occurrence of similar instances at an equally early period in Portugal. But it appears, that the Portuguese authors who had no ambition to be poets, were not endowed with the true talent for cultivating the art of rhetorical representation, and that the poets were too much engaged with their own art, to take any particular interest in the improvement of any other branch of polite literature. With the single exception of Rodriguez Lobo, whose _Corte na Aldea_ afforded in Portugal the first example how a poet could elevate the language of common life, without confounding the boundaries of poetry and elegant prose, no Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century in any way contributed to the cultivation of eloquence; and the period when Rodriguez Lobo enjoyed his utmost celebrity was not earlier than the commencement of the seventeenth century. Now the Portuguese language was then, as the loud complaint of Lobo sufficiently proves, frequently denied, even in Portugal, any claim to the possession of that accuracy and elegance, without which poetry, deficient merely in cultivation, might indeed exist, but which is indispensably necessary to prose composition, when it is to be elevated above the formal style of ceremony, and the negligent expression of common life. Thus it seems to have happened that some Portuguese historians and moralists, who, even in the first half of the sixteenth century, had actually formed their style to a certain extent on the ancient models, still unconsciously fell into the rude manner of the chronicle and monastic prose.