in the sixteenth century by Diogo Alvarez Corrêa. This poem in ten cantos of _oitavas_ is inferior to _O Uraguay_, but it contains some interesting notes on the country and the customs of Brazil.[641] If a great poet lurked in Bocage, he had certainly never existed in Bocage’s contemporary and rival in Arcadia, JOSÉ AGOSTINHO DE MACEDO (1761-1831), who lived to be confronted by an even more formidable adversary in his old age, Almeida Garrett. (In one of his fierce political letters he prays that either he or Garrett may be sent to the galleys.) Born at Beja, he took the vows as an Augustinian monk at Lisbon in 1778. The future champion of law and order provoked the displeasure of his superiors at Lisbon, Evora, Coimbra, Braga, Torres Vedras, by his pranks and mutinies, his boisterous and dissipated life. Methodical theft of books was one of his minor failings. At last after fourteen years, his Order, tired of transferring and imprisoning, formally expelled the delinquent in 1792. He, however, obtained recognition as a secular priest, won fame as a preacher, and for the next forty years wrote in verse and prose with an amazing copiousness.[642] He is said to have composed a hundred Anacreontic odes in three days: _Lyra Anacreontica_ (1819). During the last three years of his life, after he had, as he said, capitulated to the doctors, he continued to write, although in great pain. His financial circumstances did not require this effort. His works had brought him considerable sums, he had become Court preacher and chronicler, and had many friends in high places, including Dom Miguel himself. His vanity was soothed, the unfrocked Augustinian had won the regard of princes. But to this learned[643] and splenetic priest virulent denunciation of his literary and political opponents had become a necessity, and he was at work on the twenty-seventh number of his periodical _O Desengano_ a fortnight before his death. He was spared the mortification of seeing his enemies triumph in 1832. His character was not amiable, and a large part of his life was unedifying, but there is something fine in his unfailing energy, for by sheer energy he imposed himself, and his self-conceit was so colossal as to be virtually innocuous, while his real horror of revolution, a horror based on experience, was expressed with persistency and courage. He seems to have been quite honest in the belief that the poems of Homer, which he could not read in the original, were worthless,[644] and that his own _O Oriente_ was a great epic. His utilitarian conception of literature was inevitably fatal to his verse. He wished to extend the boundaries of poetry.[645] He wrote a long poem--four cantos of blank verse--on _Newton_ (1813), recast and increased to 3,560 lines under the title _Viagem Extatica ao Templo da Sabedoria_ (1830), because Newton had conferred greater benefits on humanity than many a great conqueror (yet so may a dentist).