Greater historical interest attaches to the letters of an earlier Governor, AFONSO DE ALBUQUERQUE (1461-1515). That grim conqueror of the East might have smiled somewhat sardonically to be numbered among Portugal’s writers. He merely said what he had to say, and there was an end of it, would be his comment. But it is precisely this directness--the powerful grasp of reality and the horror of useless rhetoric--which gives excellence to the prose of his _Cartas_. These incomparable reports, written to King Manuel in moments snatched from his many occupations as Governor of India (1509-15), sometimes rise to a biblical grandeur and eloquence, as in the splendid passage beginning _Goa é vossa; Onor, o rei dele paga-vos pareas_. Perhaps, after all, he was not wholly unconscious of his art, and certainly the source of it is clear: as Osorio[534] notices, he was a devoted student of the Bible. In more familiar mood he can give a vivid sketch in a few emphatic words, as when he describes the judge, ‘a little man dressed in a cloak of coarse cloth with a crooked stick under his arm’, or the impostors who will practise ‘a thousand wiles and deceits for one ruby’. To turn to lesser men, FERNAM RODRIGUEZ LOBO SOROPITA (born _c._ 1560), a distinguished Lisbon advocate and the first editor of the _Rythmas_ (1595) of Camões, was a poet celebrated for his wit in his day. That of his letters is perhaps a little forced, and the obscurity of the allusions now interferes with our enjoyment. The interest of the extracts from a manuscript in the British Museum written by FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ SILVEIRA (1558-_c._ 1635) in 1608, published under the title _Memorias de um Soldado da India_ (1877), consists both in the record of his thirteen years’ service in India (1585-98) and in the account during the succeeding ten years of Portugal and especially Beira, the condition of the roads, the land, the peasants, and the sway of the local _caciques_--thief, Turk, Pasha, tyrant, he calls them--and his indignation gives a pleasant vigour to his prose. The _Arte da Caça da Altanaria_ (1616) of DIOGO FERNANDEZ FERREIRA (born _c._ 1550), page of the Pretender D. Antonio, is a work of great interest. The writer evidently delights in his theme and has a real love of birds, the migratory habits of which he describes in Part 6; and he treats ‘of swallows and of the swallow-grass which restores sight’, of the food made of sugar, saffron, and almonds for nightingales, and other alluring topics. Among the rare and curious books of the time we may notice that on the prerogatives of women, _Dos priuilegios & prœrogatiuas q ho genero femenino tẽ por dereito comũ & ordenações do Reyno mais que ho genero masculino_ (1557), by RUY GONÇALVEZ, Professor of Law at Coimbra in 1539 and subsequently Court Advocate at Lisbon.