distracted kingdom, and Miranda’s death followed a few months later. In a sense this philosopher was the most un-Portuguese of poets, for he had no facility in verse. He went on hammering his lines, altering, erasing, compressing in a divine discontent. He had a lofty conception of the poet’s art--to express the noblest sentiment in the best and fewest words--five versions of _Alexo_, twelve of _Basto_, attest his untiring zeal and his ‘art to blot’. The elliptical abruptness of his native _quintilhas_, by which they have something in common with those of Ribeiro, are not their least charm, and gives an effective emphasis to his sententious philosophy. In introducing the new measures[326] he used the Castilian language as being the most natural and suitable until, but only until, they should be thoroughly acclimatized. He wrote Castilian not fluently--that was not his gift--but correctly, with only occasional _lusitanismos_. His best work, however, was written in Portuguese: in the new poetry with which his name is for ever associated he is only the forerunner of the work of Diogo Bernardez and Camões,[327] the founder of a school to which Portuguese literature owes some of its chief glories. In Portuguese he wrote his comedies and, about half a century before Samuel Daniel’s _Cleopatra_ (1592), a tragedy _Cleopatra_, of which we only possess a few lines.[328] The poem on the life and conversion of St. Mary of Egypt[329] (a favourite theme a few centuries earlier, as in the Spanish _Vida de Santa Maria Egipciaqua_ (13th c.?), the fourteenth-century _Vida de Maria Egipcia_, and the French _Vie de Sainte Marie l’Égyptienne_) is stamped with the author’s sententious wisdom and love of discipline. It contains quaint plays on words (_Ide ao mar que por amar_, p. 169), _tours de force_ such as the three _quintilhas_ of _esdruxulos_ (pp. 179-80), and rises to wonderful lyric beauty in the saint’s farewell to Earth (_Vou para um jardim de flores_, pp. 166-9). He intended the poem to be ‘rare, unique and excellent’ and to some extent he achieved his aim. In much of his work the diction is rough and halting, but the greatness of the man nevertheless extends to his poetry. Perhaps the best example of this is the melancholy grandeur of the sonnet, technically so imperfect, _O sol é grande_. Force of character made him not only a laborious but a successful craftsman. When he died, honoured and admired by all the best intellects in the country, the position of the new school was assured and he had been able to hail with joy the support of younger writers: _Venid buenos zagales!_ Foremost in time among these poets of _el verso largo_ was D. MANUEL DE PORTUGAL[330] (1520?-1606), son of the first Conde de Vimioso and of D. Joana de Vilhena, cousin of King Manuel. He outlived all his fellow-poets, welcomed the appearance of _Os Lusiadas_, and in 1580 took the side of the Prior D. Antonio. His _Obras_ (1605) consist of seventeen books of