Laxaed’. Pedro de Azevedo Tojal (†1742) had used the same metre for his _Foguetario_ (1729). The burlesque poem _O Reino da Estupidez_ (1819), written in four cantos of easily-flowing blank verse by the Brazilians Francisco de Mello Franco (1757-1823) and José Bonifacio de Andrade e Silva (1763-1838), is professedly an imitation of _aquelle activo e discreto Diniz na Hyssopaïda_, only the butt here is not the Chapter of Elvas but the professors of Coimbra University. Like the less celebrated poet son of an Alentejan painter, JOSÉ ANASTASIO DA CUNHA (1744-87), artillery officer, mathematician, Professor of Geometry at Coimbra, who translated Pope and Voltaire and had milk in his tea and buttered toast on a fast-day, FRANCISCO MANUEL DO NASCIMENTO (1734-1819), better known as _Filinto Elysio_,[635] was denounced to the Inquisition. His thrilling escape in the year of Cunha’s condemnation for apostasy and heresy (1778) brought him almost as much fame as his poems. The son of a Lisbon lighterman and a humble _varina_,[636] he was accused of not believing in the Flood and of throwing ridicule on the doctrine of original sin, and by another witness of being simply an atheist. He succeeded in locking up in his own rooms the official sent to arrest him early on the 4th of July, hid for eleven days in Lisbon, and then, disguised as a poor man carrying a load of oranges, escaped on a boat bound for Havre. Had this persecution come earlier, the disquieting atmosphere of Paris, into which he was now transplanted and where, except for a few years at The Hague, he lived for the rest of his life, might have given some originality to his talent. But his mind and poetic style were already fixed, and through every political disturbance he continued his steady flow of Horatian odes and similar artificial verse. He wrote for seventy years (Lamartine notes the _précoces faveurs_ of his muse), and at the age of sixty-four calculated that he had already composed 730,000 lines, probably too modest an estimate. He received by royal decree an amnesty and the restoration of his property, but never returned to Portugal. His influence on younger Portuguese poets was nevertheless great. Bocage, when his verses were praised by the older poet, exclaimed: Filinto, o gran cantor, prezou meus versos ... Posteridade, és minha!