Manoel de Faria e Sousa who has been so repeatedly mentioned in the course of the present volume, and who has not been passed by unnoticed in the history of Spanish poetry,[265] exercised an important influence on the poetry of the Portuguese sonneteers, particularly in the first half of the seventeenth century. Possessing uncommon faculties, which were early disclosed, and early perverted, he distinguished himself while yet a youth by his extraordinary talents and powers of memory. In the year 1605, he participated, in quality of secretary, in the official duties of one of his relations, under whom he received the education fitting for a statesman. But neither his talents and acquirements, nor his connection with the most distinguished families of his native country, having conducted him to an object commensurate with his diligence and ambition, he quitted Portugal and visited Madrid. Though he did not realize all his expectations in the Spanish capital, he was not entirely neglected. He obtained a post in an embassy to Rome; and on his return to Madrid he found at least a tolerable source of subsistence. Still, however, he continued dissatisfied with his income, and on that account his pen was in constant activity. He himself states that he daily wrote twelve sheets, each page containing thirty lines. He possessed so great a facility in rhetorical turns and flourishes, that in the space of a single day he could compose a hundred addresses of congratulation and condolence, all sufficiently different from each other. As an author both in verse and in prose, he continued to labour with unabated assiduity to the period of his death, which happened in the year 1649.[266] A considerable portion of his numerous works will preserve his name in honourable recollection; but the value of that portion greatly depends on the subjects it embraces. They belong to the department of history and statistics, but they are all written in Spanish, and therefore cannot with propriety be farther noticed in the history of Portuguese literature. Faria e Sousa’s poems are also chiefly in Spanish; he wrote only sonnets and eclogues in Portuguese verse.[267] Of the six hundred, or to use his own phrase, “the six centuries” of sonnets, which, as it appears he selected for posterity out of a still greater number, precisely two hundred are Portuguese. Some of these compositions merit the praise which Faria e Sousa’s admirers have lavished on them all;[268] and the whole collection is animated by a buoyant spirit, which soars above ordinary and moderate elegance. But this spirit could not long accommodate itself to sound poetic judgment, nor to the old simplicity and natural flow of ideas and images. Without intentionally becoming an imitator of the Italian Marinists, the Spanish Gongorists, or the school of Lope de Vega, Faria e Sousa revelled in bold flights of fancy, like Lope de Vega, and indulged in eccentric extravagancies like the Marinists and Gongorists.