blank verse has vigour, although it is often scarcely distinguishable from prose. This play, published anonymously, was long attributed to Antonio de Araujo de Azevedo (1754-1817), but its real author was D. Theresa de Mello Breyner, Condessa de Vimieiro, who married her cousin, the fourth Count, in 1767. It was a cruel kindness to edit the works of ANTONIO DINIZ DA CRUZ E SILVA (1731-99) in six volumes, for, despite the fame of his high-flown Pindaric odes, his three centuries of sonnets and his other lyrics are not of conspicuous merit and are often imitative. Having nothing to say, _Elpino Nonacriense_, like too many of the Arcadian poets, said it at inordinate length. _Que enorme confusão!_ he exclaims in an elegy on the Lisbon earthquake, and most of his poems are on a like plane of thought and expression. The son of a _Sargento Môr_,[634] he was born at Lisbon, and after studying law at Coimbra was appointed a judge at Castello de Vide. With Manuel Nicolau Esteves Negrão (†1824) and Theotonio Gomes de Carvalho (†1800) he founded the _Arcadia Ulyssiponense_, of which he drew up the statutes in September 1756. The first aim of these early Arcadians was, as we have noticed, to break the shackles of Spanish influence and _gongorismo_, which was, indeed, on the wane in the land of its birth. Diniz da Cruz’ own poems were written in good idiomatic Portuguese. In _O Hyssope_ he satirizes with telling vigour the use of gallicisms, and his comedy _O Falso Heroismo_ is thoroughly Portuguese in subject and treatment. From 1764 to 1774 he was stationed at Elvas, and here a quarrel between the bishop, D. Lourenço de Lancastre, and the dean, D. José Carlos de Lara, furnished him with the subject of his celebrated mock-heroic poem _O Hyssope_. The legend runs that he was summoned to read his satire to the all-powerful Pombal in the presence of the infuriated bishop, and that the poem proved too much for the gravity of the minister, who appointed him a judge at Rio de Janeiro (1776). Thence he was transferred to Oporto (1787), but in 1790 was again appointed to Rio de Janeiro, and showed himself merciless in sentencing the Brazilian poets Claudio Manuel da Costa, Gonzaga, and Ignacio José de Alvarengo Peixoto (1748-93), accused of conspiring to secure the independence of their country. _O Hyssope_ was first published in 1802, three years after the author’s death. The idea of the poem was derived from Boileau’s _Le Lutrin_. Boileau would have been horrified by its eight cantos of slovenly and monotonous blank verse, which often scarcely rises above prose; but as a satire on the times and in its grotesque portraiture of prelate and lawyer and notary it is sometimes irresistibly comic. The mock-heroic _Benteida_, written by ALEXANDRE ANTONIO DE LIMA of Lisbon (1699-_c._ 1760?) and published fifty years before _O Hyssope_, consisted of three cantos of _oitavas_. Two editions appeared in 1752, published at ‘Constantinople’ as written by ‘Andronio Meliante