the ingenuous narratives of the early chroniclers, had no charm; he preferred Rodrigo Mendez Silva’s _Vida y hechos del gran Condestable_ (Madrid, 1640) to the _Cronica do Condestabre_.[603] But all that was vernacular and indigenous attracted him, as is proved in his letters, in his lively farce _Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz_ (1676), and in the _Feira dos Anexins_, which is a long string of popular maxims and of those plays upon words in which Mello delighted. His poetry--_Las Tres Musas del Melodino_ (1649), _Obras Metricas_ (1665)--is marred by the conceits which in his prose often serve effectively to point a moral or drive home an argument. It is far too clever. When in a poem ‘On the death of a great lady’ we find the line _contigo o sepultara a sepultura_ we do not know whether to laugh or weep, but we suspect the sincerity of the author’s grief, and although he wrote some excellent _quintilhas_, most of his poems, which are, as might be expected, always vigorous, are too sharp and thin, stalks without flowers, the very skeletons of poetry. It is to his prose in its wit and grace, its shrewd thought, its revelation of a sincere and lofty but unassuming character, its directness,[604] its _bom portugues velho e relho_, that he owes his place among the greatest writers of the Peninsula. The taste in poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is seen in two collections, partly Spanish, partly Portuguese: _Fenix Renascida_ (5 vols., 1716-28) and _Eccos que o Clarim da Fama dá_ (2 vols., 1761, 2). The latter is sufficiently characterized by its title, too long to quote in full. As to the former the Phoenix seems to have given real pleasure to contemporary readers, but for us the bird and song are flown and only the ashes remain, from which a sixteenth-century poem such as the sonnet _Horas breves_ stands out conspicuously. The subjects are often as trivial as those of the _Cancioneiro_ published two centuries earlier and more domestic: to a cousin sewing, to an overdressed man, to a large mouth, a sonnet to two market-women fighting, another to the prancing horse of the Conde de Sabugal, on a present of roses, two long _romances_ on a goldfinch killed by a cat, verses sent with a gift of handkerchiefs or eggs or melons, or to thank for sugar-plums--the _Fenix_ rarely soars above such themes. The magistrate ANTONIO BARBOSA BACELLAR (1610-63) figures largely, with glosses on poems by Camões, a _romance_ _A umas saudades_, a satirical poem _A umas beatas_. His _romances varios_ are mostly in Spanish, but a few of his sonnets in Portuguese have some merit. The fifth volume opens (pp. 1-37) with a far more elaborate satire by DIOGO CAMACHO (or Diogo de Sousa): _Jornada que Diogo Camacho fez ás Cortes do Parnaso_, the best burlesque poem of the century, in which the author did not spare contemporary Lisbon poets.[605] The poems of JERONIMO BAHIA likewise cover many pages. He it is who bewails at length the sad fate of a goldfinch.