best works, and prosperity might have dimmed his insight and dulled his style--that style (influenced no doubt by Quevedo and Gracián) which is hard and clear as the glitter of steel or the silver chiming of a clock, with _concinnitas quaedam venusta et felix verborum_.[591] Even when full of points and conceits it retains its clearness and trenchancy, and in his more familiar works he is unrivalled, as the _Carta de Guia de Casados_, in which, _innuptus ipse_, he brings freshness and originality to the theme already treated in Fray Luis de Leon’s _La Perfecta Casada_ (1583), Diogo Paiva de Andrade’s sensible but less caustic _Casamento Perfeito_ (1631), and Dr. João de Barros’ _Espelho de Casados_ (1540),[592] or the pithy and delightful _Cartas Familiares_, of which five centuries--a mere fragment--were published at Rome in 1664, with a rapier-thrust of his wit and a maxim of good sense on every page, preserving for us some vestige of what Frei Manuel Godinho described as his ‘admirable conversation’ when he met him at Marseilles in 1633.[593] The _Epanaphoras de varia Historia Portugueza_ (1660) are unequal and often excessively detailed.[594] Three of the five are, however, the accounts of an eyewitness and as such are full of interest: the _Alteraçoens de Evora_ (i), the _Naufragio da Armada Portuguesa em França_ (ii), and the _Conflito do Canal de Inglaterra_ (iv).[595] Mello’s knowledge of men was as wide as his knowledge of books, and both appear to great advantage in his _Apologos Dialogaes_ (1721). An individualist in religion[596] and politics,[597] an acute thinker and a keen student of men and manners, he found no dullness in life even at its worst and no solitude, for, if alone, his fancy instilled wit and wisdom into clocks[598] and coins[599] and fountains.[600] The first three _Apologos_ contain incisive portraits in which types and persons are sharply etched in a few lines: the poor _escudeiro_, the _beata_, the Lisbon market-woman, the litigious _ratinho_, the _fidalgo_ from the provinces,[601] the ambitious priest, the shabby grammarian,, the worldly monk, political place-hunter, _miles gloriosus_, or melancholy author, a tinselled nobody boiling down the good sayings of past writers. The fourth _Apologo_ entitled _Hospital das Lettras_ (1657) is devoted more especially to literary criticism; Mello with Quevedo, Justus Lipsius, and Traiano Boccalini (who died when Mello was five) makes a notable scrutiny of Spanish and Portuguese literature. As a literary critic Mello is excellent within limits. Himself an artificial writer, although as it were naturally artificial, bred at Court, versed in social and political affairs, he considered that the proper study of mankind was man, and, like Henry Fielding a century later, admired ‘the wondrous power of art in improving Nature’.[602] For him the country and Nature, the bucolic poetry and prose of Fernam Alvarez do Oriente,