Before it was possible for any thing like true eloquence to find a place in Portuguese literature, public spirit had to revive from that state of feebleness and apathy into which it had been plunged by the rapid decline of Portugal from the pinnacle of national glory. It was indispensable that a time should return in which the human mind might move with somewhat more freedom in the trammels of ecclesiastical tyranny. The nation had to become once more capable of contemplating great objects. The national taste was to be reclaimed from the affectation of pompous phraseology, and it was necessary that the spirit of philosophy should be allowed to make suitable approaches towards the spirit of poetry. But these, and all the other conditions requisite for the revival of polite prose in Portugal, were never more decidedly wanting than precisely at the period when the introduction of French manners seemed likely to infuse a French taste into the national literature. But reckoning from the latter end of the seventeenth century, the imitation of French taste had operated for a considerable time, and yet had influenced only the forms of social life. Its presence in Portuguese literature, was scarcely perceptible. It has already been shewn that during the first half of the eighteenth century, Portuguese poetry, even in the hands of the few poets who were not unwilling to learn elegance from the French, continued subject to the style of the Gongorists and Marinists. Of course still less was it to be expected that Portuguese writers should be capable of imitating the polite prose of the French, since such an imitation would pre-suppose a cultivation of the understanding which at that time was not practicable in Portugal. The French taste in so far as it really found admission into Portugal, doubtless contributed at first, as about the same time its adoption did in Germany, to repress the loftier style of eloquence, for the language became so corrupted by foreign words and phrases, that it was difficult for the prose writer to know what tract it was proper to follow. The poet might, if he pleased, still adhere to the style of the sixteenth century; for his language was not like that of prose composition, subject to the laws of fashion. But no author could attempt classic prose, in the language of the sixteenth century, without encountering the risk of being regarded as a pedant by his contemporaries; and if he wished to follow the fashion, he was obliged to disfigure the language in which he wrote.