It was certainly not without influence on the _Dialogos_ (1589) of the energetic and austere Bishop of Portalegre, AMADOR ARRAEZ (_c._ 1530-1600), who spent his boyhood at Beja and professed as a Carmelite at Lisbon a year after Frei Thomé de Jesus and two years after Frei Heitor Pinto had professed in the same city. Like the former he studied theology at Coimbra.[559] Cardinal Henrique, when Archbishop of Evora, chose Arraez to be his suffragan, and in 1578 appointed him to the see of Tripoli. Three years later he was made Bishop of Portalegre by Philip II. He resigned in 1596, and spent the last four years of his life in retirement, in the college of his Order at Coimbra. A few weeks before his death he wrote the prefatory letter for the revised edition of his great work.[560] It consists of ten long dialogues between the sick and dying Antiocho and doctor, priest, lawyer, or friends. The longest, over a quarter of the whole, is a mystic life of the Virgin, and of the others some are purely religious, as _Da Paciencia e Fortaleza Christam_, some historical or political (_Da Gloria e Triunfo dos Lusitanos_; _Das Condições e Partes do Bom Principe_). That on the Jews (_Da Gente Judaica_) is marred by a spirit of bitter intolerance; on the other hand there is an outspoken protest against slavery. The whole of this interesting miscellany, which incidentally discusses a very large number of subjects,[561] is tinged with mystic philosophy, and at the same time shows a keen sense of reality. In style as in degree of mysticism it stands midway between Pinto’s _Imagem_ and the _Trabalhos de Jesus_. It is evident that its composition, although less artificial than that of the _Imagem_, has been the subject of much care, and the author declares in his preface that while adopting a ‘common, ordinary style’, to the exclusion of forced tricks and elegances, he has striven after clearness and harmony (the two postulates of his contemporary, Fray Luis de Leon). The result is a treasury of excellent prose, in which the harmonious flow of the sentences in nowise interferes with precision and restraint, that grave brevity which Arraez notes as one of the principal qualities of Portuguese. It can rise to great eloquence (as in the lament of Olympio) without ever becoming rhetorical or turgid.