Sá de Miranda, Garci Lasso, Ariosto, and other poets. While the work was still in manuscript another poet, and perhaps a relation, Andre da Silva Mascarenhas, helped himself liberally to its stanzas (they number 2,287) for his epic _A Destruição de Hespanha_ (1671). He could have given no better proof of the poverty of his genius. FRANCISCO DE SÁ DE MENESES (_c._ 1600-1664?), although less true a poet than his cousin and namesake the Conde de Mattosinhos, won a far wider fame by his epic poem _Malaca Conqvistada_ (1634), in which he recounts _a heroica historia dos feitos de Albuquerque_. The reader who accompanies his frail bark[613] through twelve cantos of _oitavas_ feels that he has well earned the fall of Malacca at the end. For although the author is not incapable of vigorous and succinct description he too often decks out the pure gold of Camões’ style[614] with periphrases and Manueline ornaments which delay the action. The sun is ‘the lover of Clytie’ or ‘the rubicund son of Latona’. He stops to tell us that a diamond won by Albuquerque had been ‘cut by skilled hand in Milan’, and some of his more elaborate similes are not without charm. Canto 7 tells of the future deeds of the Portuguese in India. The gods interfere less than in the _Lusiads_ (Asmodeus plays a part in canto 6), but the general effect is that of a great theme badly handled. After the death of his wife, the author spent the last twenty years of his life (from 1641) in the Dominican convent of Bemfica as Frei Francisco de Jesus.