As a writer of serious sonnets, and particularly of romantic love sonnets in the style of Camoens, no Portuguese poet of the seventeenth century was more successful than the elegant and ingenious Antonio Barbosa Bacellar, who was also celebrated as one of the most skilful disputants of the university of Coimbra. After filling various public offices, he died in the year 1663.[283] Barbosa Bacellar’s inclination to form his taste on the model of Camoens, is proved by several excellent glosses, which he composed on some of that great poet’s sonnets. He may indeed be ranked among the most distinguished writers of poetic glosses. In all his poems, many of which are written in the Spanish language, he has disdained those excrescences which Faria e Sousa commends as a proof of unconstrained genius. Barbosa Bacellar was one of the supporters of the correct style of sonnet composition, in whom the spirit of the sixteenth century survived; but so little was he disposed to approve the jejune correctness of Ferreira and Caminha, that he preferred deviating into the opposite extreme, rather than repress the spirit of his poetry by a rigid adherence to forms. He excelled in the art of ingeniously amplifying a romantic idea without allowing the sentimental to degenerate into the fantastic. Besides some very charming sonnets,[284] the most remarkable productions of this poet are the extended pictures of romantic aspiration which since his time have been distinguished in Portuguese poetry by the untranslatable name of _Saudades_.[285] The complaints of a lovelorn heart vented in solitude, are the only materials which enter into the composition of these poems; and the peculiar character of their class, which had rapidly grown into favour, was fixed by Barbosa Bacellar. A certain degree of prolixity is essential to these compositions. They do not well afford opportunity for the display of a brilliant store of novel ideas; and to employ an inexhaustible flow of words in painting the tender longing of love was deemed a proof of the ardour of the passion. They might very properly be classed with elegies, were it not that they have usually a narrative form. There are also among the Spanish and Portuguese eclogues, many poems which present the same character as these pictures of amatory aspiration. Barbosa Bacellar seems to have conferred on these pictures the highest degree of improvement which they were capable of receiving, consistently with fidelity to the style, which was then exclusively appropriated to the poetry of love in Spain and Portugal. But the modern forms of cultivation have given, at least on this side of the Pyrenees, a direction so totally different to poetic susceptibility, that the endless complaining of lovers must soon become tedious even to the readers most disposed to indulge in such romantic sentiments. It is, however, a remarkable circumstance in the history of the human mind, that the Portuguese taste in the seventeenth