PEDRO ANTONIO CORRÊA GARÇÃO (1724-72), one of the first members and most prominent poets of the _Arcadia_, did good service in his determined efforts to deliver his country’s literature from foreign imitations and the false affectation of the time, and to revert to the classics, Greek, Roman, and Portuguese. He even prophesied that Gil Vicente’s day would come. His master was Horace, _grande Horacio_, and his Horatian odes, if they show no remarkable lyrical gift, have a dry native flavour in the purity of their language. He was also successful in reviving the cultivation of blank verse. There is a fine sound in some of the sonnets in which he sings Marilia, Lydia, Belisa, Maria, Nise, writes to a friend to ask for a doubloon or for Spanish tobacco, sends birthday congratulations or laughs at a bald priest: the themes are mostly of this level. His satirical vein is marked in his two short comedies in blank verse, _Theatro Novo_, a skit on the drama then in vogue, and _Assemblêa ou Partida_, in which certain Lisbon types are ridiculed and which contains the famous and much overpraised _Cantata de Dido_. Corrêa Garção’s days ended tragically in prison. The motive of his arrest is not clear. Tradition wavers between a love intrigue and political reasons,[631] and declares that the Marques de Pombal, whom he had offended, signed the order for his release on the very day of the poet’s death after eighteen months of imprisonment. Pombal was effusively praised by DOMINGOS DOS REIS QUITA (1728-70), a Lisbon hairdresser who wrote bucolic poetry melodiously, but with perhaps even less originality than we have learnt to expect in that kind since the time when Virgil mistranslated Theocritus. The influence of Bernardez and Camões is clear,[632] in many passages too clear, and he had undoubtedly caught something of their skill and harmony in technique. But his poems leave the impression that he had no real feeling for the rustic life which they describe; no doubt he was more at home with the scissors than with the faithful Melampus or the nymphs and shepherd’s pipe. When he is relating an event, such as the earthquake of 1755, which touched him nearly, his ready flow of verse deserts him, in spite of his skill in improvisation,[633] although the sonnet written on the same occasion, _Por castigar, Senhor_, stands out with a certain majesty from most of his other sonnets, which are mere slices of eclogue. If his mellifluous idylls show no individuality, his return to the classic poets of Portugal was, as with other Arcadian poets, a welcome change from the Spanish influence, the _mao uso_, as he calls it, of ‘rude strangers from the Manzanares’ (Eclogue 6). His tragedies and pastoral drama _Licore_ are not more original. One of his tragedies, _Inés de Castro_, suggested that of João Baptista Gomes (†1813), _Nova Castro_, which had a great vogue in its day but is now scarcely more remembered than _Osmia_ (1788), a tragedy of which the