wrote Diniz da Cruz (_O Hyssope_, canto 1). The epic-fever had not abated even in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Madeira poet Francisco de Paula Medina e Vasconcellos (_c._ 1770-1824) alone wrote two: _Zargueida_ (1806), _Georgeida_ (1819); and José Agostinho de Macedo in his _Motim Literario_ imagines himself at the mercy of a poet with an epic in sixty cantos entitled _Napoleada_, and himself became the mock-hero of one in nine: _Agostinheida_ (Londres, 1817), written by his unfortunate opponent Nuno Alvares Pereira Pato Moniz (1781-1827). The strange poet of Setubal, Thomaz Antonio de Santos e Silva (1751-1816), published a _Braziliada_ in twelve cantos in 1815. Of the earlier epics Camillo Castello Branco wrote sarcastically: ‘They contain impenetrable mysteries of dullness and inspire a sacred awe, but they are the conventional glory of our literary history, untouched and intangible.’[431] Of the two long epic poems of JERONIMO CORTE REAL (_c._ 1530-1590?): _Svcesso do Segvndo Cerco de Div_ (1574) and _Naufragio, e Lastimoso Svcesso da Perdiçam de Manoel de Sousa de Sepulveda_, &c. (1594), we may perhaps say that they are excellent prose. He dwells more than once upon the inconstancy of fortune, and this may be something more than a platitude. Of his life little is known. He is by some believed to have been born in the Azores in 1533. A document in the possession of the Visconde de Esperança shows that he died before May 12, 1590. He may have been a musician as well as a poet and a painter. It is probable, but not certain, that he accompanied King Sebastian to Alcacer Kebir and was taken prisoner. Faria e Sousa says that he was too old to go. After varied service by land and sea he wrote these poems when living in retirement on his estate near Evora, and his own experiences stood him in good stead for his descriptions, which are often not without life and vigour, as the account of the battle in canto 18 of the _Segundo Cerco de Diu_, or of the storm in canto 7 of the _Naufragio_. The former poem records the famous defence of Diu by D. João de Mascarenhas and its relief by D. João de Castro (1546), in whose mouth is placed a long and tedious speech. The last two cantos (21, 22) are tacked on to the main theme and occupy more than a quarter of the whole. They tell from paintings the deeds of past captains and prophesy future events and the ‘golden reign’ of King Sebastian. The prophetic vision, although it included a generation beyond the nominal date of the poem (1546), did not extend to the battle of Alcacer Kebir (1578). The hendecasyllables of the blank verse have an exceedingly monotonous fall and the lines merge prosaically into one another.[432] The use of adjectives is excessive, and generally there is an inclination to multiply words without adding to the force of the picture.[433] The same plethora of epithets, elaborate similes, and slow awkward development of the story mark the seventeen cantos--some 10,000 lines