In the second half, and more especially during the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, the spirit of improvement was awakened, and began to diffuse itself into every department of Portuguese eloquence. The admirable clearness, precision and facility of the French prose, has at length exercised an advantageous influence on the Portuguese. Without enforcing with pedantic rigour the restoration of all the old forms of the sixteenth century, the best Portuguese authors now endeavour to write their mother tongue with purity, and at the same time to satisfy the new wants created by the progress of time and the spirit of the age. The praiseworthy diligence which the Portuguese now manifest in collecting scientific knowledge of every kind, and in republishing the works of their early authors, appears, however, to have operated indirectly to the prejudice of eloquence, for among the men of talent, to whom Portugal is indebted for her regeneration, none have yet distinguished themselves in prose composition. But the Portuguese have had so many things to retrieve, that they have scarcely had time to devote particular attention to the rhetorical form of didactic works. An effort to avoid the bad taste of the preceding age, and upon the whole to cultivate a clear and dignified form of expression, is perceptible in most of the modern treatises of the Portuguese. Empty bombast has given place to the language of reason. The Portuguese nation have now to wish for a modern historian qualified to tread in the footsteps of Barros, Brito and Andrada. Such a writer might succeed in still more firmly rivetting the connecting link between the promising present and glorious past in the hearts of Portuguese patriots. ROMANTIC PROSE--TRANSLATIONS. A new era of romantic prose might also have been commenced in Portugal, had the poetic spirit of the old Portuguese pastoral romances been modified, instead of being enfeebled by the introduction of the cultivated forms of modern prose. Translations of foreign novels seem to have too readily satisfied that portion of the Portuguese public, whose cultivation was, through this species of reading, gradually approximating to the taste of the other nations of Europe. A translation from the French of Le Sage’s popular Gil Blas was supplied by the poet Barbosa Du Boccage, who is probably descended from a French family. This was soon followed by translations of the Moral Tales of D’Arnaud, and of various works of a similar description. PORTUGUESE CRITICISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.