_Pensando vos estou, filha_ (Pt. I, cap. 21) and _Pola ribeira de um rio_ (Pt. II, cap. 11).[313] The eclogues may not excel those poems, but in their directness, primitive freshness, and grace they form a group apart, entirely distinct from their numerous eclogue progeny. One eclogue only, the celebrated _Trovas de Crisfal_, resembles them. The resemblance is remarkable and cannot fail to strike the most careless reader. Before Snr. Delfim Guimarães began his spirited campaign in favour of identification, the similarity had been recorded by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in the _Grundriss_[314]: the extraordinary similarity of these _Trovas_ to the poetry of Ribeiro and to nothing else in Portuguese literature. In this poem of some 900 lines written in octosyllabic _decimas_, like Ribeiro’s eclogues, we have that romantic, passionate _saudade_ and sentimental grief, the mystic visions, the simplicity, the ingenuous conceits, wistfully humorous, the sententious reflections, the elliptical concision, the real shepherds, the familiar language, the love of Nature which are peculiarly Ribeiro’s. Tradition assigns the _Trovas_ to CRISTOVAM FALCÃO (_c._ 1512-53?),[315] who was born at Portalegre, in Alentejo, was made a _moço fidalgo_ in 1527, and is supposed to have fallen in love with and secretly married D. Maria Brandão (i.e. the Maria of the _Trovas_), whom her parents confined as a punishment in the convent of Lorvão. At the risk of being dubbed incorrigibly _simplicista_ one must confess that the simultaneous appearance of these two poets from Alentejo, not _fertil en poetas_, taxes one’s belief to the utmost. May not the secret marriage deduced from the _Trovas_ have been described by Ribeiro in his keen sympathy for his friend’s position, so like his own? The contention is not that Cristovam Falcão did not exist--there were several--or did not fall in love with Maria Brandão--_a do Crisfal_--or did not marry her, but that he did not write verses in the style familiar to us as that of Ribeiro.[316] It is remarkable that the very critics who represent Ribeiro in his _novela_ as hiding like a cuttle-fish in his own ink change their method when they come to the eclogues and accept every name and allusion with the greatest literalness, as though it were a poet’s duty to wear his heart in his verses. It is idle to adduce the fact that Cristovam Falcão wrote ungrammatical letters (so did Keats), or to devise far-fetched interpretations (such as _Crisma falso_) for the word Crisfal. What more probable than that Ribeiro and Falcão, born in the same province, became friends at Court, and that Ribeiro introduced his friend in one of his poems as he is supposed to have introduced Sá de Miranda in another, and as Miranda introduces Ribeiro (_Canta Ribero los males de amor_)? If in his favourite manner he added a little mystification in the word Crisfal, what more characteristic? The very form of the