FERREIRA.--Ferreira, who wrote lyric poems, elegiac poems, and especially epistles, by which he gained for himself the name of the Portuguese Horace, was more particularly a dramatist. He created _Farcas_, which must not be regarded as farces, but as dramatic poems in which the profane and religious are interwoven; he wrote _The Bristo_, a popular comedy; _The Jealous One_, which was perhaps the earliest comedy of character ever produced in Europe, and finally, a tragedy, _Inez de Castro_, the national tragedy, a tragedy so orthodox and regular in form that the author felt bound to introduce a chorus in the classic manner; it is charged with pathos and handled with much art. GIL VICENTE.--Gil Vicente, a prolific poet who wrote forty-two dramatic pieces, two thirds in Spanish and the rest in Portuguese, touched every branch of theatrical literature; he produced religious plays (_autos_), tragedies, romantic dramas, comedies, and farces. His chief works are _The Sibyl Cassandra_, _The Widow_, _Amadis de Gaule_, _The Temple of Apollo_, _The Boat of Hell_. His comedies possess a vivacity that is Italian rather than Portuguese. Tradition has it that Erasmus learnt Portuguese for the sole purpose of reading the comedies of Gil Vicente. CHAPTER XV THE EIGHTEENTH AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES: FRANCE Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Fontenelle, Bayle. Of the Eighteenth: Poets: La Motte, Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. Prose Writers: Montesquieu, Voltaire, Buffon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, etc. Of the Nineteenth Century: Poets: Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Musset, Vigny, etc.; Prose Writers: Chateaubriand, Michelet, George Sand, Mérimée, Renan, etc. FONTENELLE.--The eighteenth century, which was announced, and announced with great precision, by La Bruyère, was inaugurated by his enemy Fontenelle. Fontenelle, nephew of Corneille, began with despicable trifles, eclogues, operas, stilted tragedies, letters of a dandy, so he might be justly regarded as an inferior Voiture. Very soon, because he possessed the passion of the eighteenth century for science and free-thought, he showed himself to be a serious man, and because he had wit he showed himself an amusing serious man, which is rare. His _Dialogues of the Dead_ were very humorous and, at the same time, in many passages profound; he wrote his _Discourses on the Plurality of_ (Habitable) _Worlds_; then because he was perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, came his charming and often astonishing _Eulogies of Sages_, which ought to be regarded as the best existent history of science in the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth up to 1740.