Another comedy by Garçaõ appears to have been intended as an example of the kind of character drama which the author wished to introduce on the Portuguese stage. It is called _Assemblea ou Partida_, (the Assembly or the Party).[387] This modern Gallo-Portuguese title denotes that the author intended it to be an elegant conversational piece, affording a picture of fashionable manners. It is called merely a drama, and is attributed to no particular species, because it consists of only one act, which indeed is a tolerably long one. Thus it is not entirely faithful to the plan of a regular comedy in the style of Terence. The satire of the piece is directed against that sort of ostentatious boasting, to realize which the finances of the fashionable braggadocio are not always adequate. The characters are well drawn. To accommodate the national taste in every way, Garçaõ has introduced into the piece some well written sonnets, and a half-comic cantata, which is set to music and performed at the party of a lady. This comedy exhibits no trace of any particular imitation of the French style. Garçaõ wished to reform the Portuguese drama on classic principles, but, as he himself on another occasion observes, he wished to effect the reformation with a due regard to modern times and manners, and consequently without any rigorous adoption of the ancient dramatic laws in their full extent. THE ABBOT PAULINO. The ingenious prelate, Paulino Cabral de Vasconcellos, Abbot of Jazente, who is commonly called merely the Abbot Paulino, deserves to be honourably distinguished among those Portuguese poets, who at the latter end of the eighteenth century reclaimed the national taste, and brought it under the rules of classic cultivation.[388] The collection of his poems, printed in the year 1786, consists of sonnets only; but without having read them, it is scarcely possible to conceive that this species of poetic composition should have acquired so many new charms towards the close of the eighteenth century. In this collection of two hundred and forty-five sonnets, which are probably selected from a still greater number of compositions of the same kind by the Abbot Paulino, there is scarcely one that can be pronounced dull or heavy; most of them display a peculiar union of clearness, lightness and elegance, with a tone of Horatian philosophy and irony. The study of French literature seems to have contributed to the singular cultivation of the Abbot Paulino. But the spirit of his poetry is by no means French. In one poetic glance he comprehended the various situations of real life, viewing them sometimes on the romantic, sometimes on the rural, and sometimes on the comic side; and the pictures of sentiment and reflection which he thus calls up, are compressed into the sonnet form in the most pleasing and natural manner. The best of Paulino’s sonnets are those which are conceived in a tone of elegant satire;[389]