No doubt his work is disfigured by pompous phrases[638] and hollow classical allusions. He did not always rise above the bad taste of the period; he was unable to concentrate his talent or separate prosaic from poetical subjects. Thus he sang of an ascent in a _balão aerostatico_ in 1794, and saw in the _vil mosquito_ a proof of the existence of God. But his was nevertheless a very real and above all a very Portuguese inspiration,[639] and some of his sonnets have force and grandeur and hover on the fringes of beauty, especially when they voice his unaffected enthusiasm for Portugal’s past greatness and heroes. One of the foremost poets of the _Nova Arcadia_ was BELCHIOR MANUEL CURVO SEMEDO (1766-1838), two volumes of whose _Composições Poeticas_ appeared in 1803. A crowd of secondary lights revolved round the great planets of the two _Arcadias_. The poems of _Alfeno Cynthio_, DOMINGOS MAXIMIANO TORRES (1748-1810), are not without vigour (_Versos_, 1791). Their unfortunate author died a political prisoner at Trafaria. The gay and lively Abbade of Jazente, PAULINO ANTONIO CABRAL[640] (1719-89), was the son of an Oporto doctor, and was parish priest at Jazente (near Amarante) from 1753 to 1784. His poems are still read for their pleasant satire, but he was careless of literary fame. Some of the sonnets of both these writers deserve not to be forgotten. JOÃO XAVIER DE MATTOS (†1789), a fourth edition of whose _Rimas_ appeared in the year after his death, is now remembered chiefly for some of his sonnets, as that beginning _Poz-se o sol_, with its melancholy charm. He was a true but not a great or original poet. Born at Oporto, the son of a Brazilian father and a Portuguese mother, THOMAS ANTONIO GONZAGA (1744-1807?) was a judge at Bahia when he was accused of taking part in the Republican conspiracy of Minas Geraes (1789), and after three years’ imprisonment was deported (1792) to Mozambique, where he died several years after his sentence had expired. Some of his Horatian and Anacreontic _lyras_ in many metres, addressed to Marilia and collected under the title _A Marilia de Dirceo_ (_Dirceo_ being his Arcadian name), are graceful lyrics of an idyllic character. Of the other poets implicated in the conspiracy, CLAUDIO MANUEL DA COSTA (1729-69), who was found dead in his prison cell, was an Arcadian poet of the Italian school, and shows a gentle love of Nature in his sonnets. Of the hundred sonnets printed in his _Obras_ (1768) some are in Italian. The eclogues number twenty. In Brazil at this time, as earlier in Portugal, patriotism if not poetry suggested epics. JOSÉ BASILIO DA GAMA (1740-95), who spent the greater part of his life in Portugal and died at Lisbon, wrote _O Uraguay_ (1769) in five cantos of prosaic blank verse--an account of the struggle between Portuguese and Indians. JOSÉ DE SANTA RITA DURÃO (_c._ 1720-84), Doctor in Theology (Coimbra), composed an epic entitled _Caramurú_ (1781) on the discovery of Bahia