A few works of research which were written during the first half of the eighteenth century, are, with the exception of books of devotion, almost the only compositions which still preserved a kind of national prose style in Portuguese literature. Barbosa Machado’s great national Dictionary of Learned Men, is not written without rhetorical care. The author wished to express himself with correctness and elegance, particularly where he uses the language of panegyric, but even then he could not avoid frigid and pompous phraseology; and some phrases, which he seems to have admired, are constantly recurring in the work; as for example when he calls a poet “one of the most melodious swans of the Portuguese Parnassus,” without considering that Parnassus is neither a river nor a pond. A few affected metaphors were the only recognized beauties of prose composition at this period in Portugal. Didactic prose could no longer exist when the philosophic and scientific cultivation of the Portuguese became daily more abridged, and was almost limited to the small remnant which was taught in the cloisters and the colleges of the Jesuits. The lectures which under these circumstances were delivered in the academies, were considered to have sufficiently fulfilled their objects if they did not lull the auditors to sleep. The art of historical composition was now completely extinguished in Portugal. NEW CULTIVATION OF ELOQUENCE--CLASSICAL PROSE AUTHORS STILL WANTING IN MODERN PORTUGUESE LITERATURE.