He composed a long poem, _Gama_ (1811), re-written as _O Oriente_ (1814),[646] to show how Camões should have written _Os Lusiadas_. His poem is no doubt more correct; it observes all the rules, but unfortunately it lacks genius and is as dull and turgid as Macedo’s other verse. A good word for the sea in Portuguese is _mar_; the poets often call it _oceano_, Camões had ventured to name it _o falso argento_, _o liquido estanho_, _o fundo aquoso_, _o humido elemento_; with Macedo it becomes _o tumido elemento_ (or perhaps he adopted the phrase from _Caramurú_, in which it occurs). We can scarcely blame Bocage for labelling him _tumido versista_.[647] Among his other philosophical poems are _Contemplação da Natureza_ (1801), _A Meditação_ (1813), _A Natureza_ (1846), and _A Creação_ (1865), now not more often read than his many odes and other verse. The most scandalous of his satires is _Os Burros_ (1827), in blank verse, in which he lavishly and outrageously insults nearly all the writers of the time, and which may have been suggested by Juan Pablo Forner’s _El Asno Erudito_ (1782). Like his poems, his dramatic works usually have some ulterior object; their purpose is not less practical than his pamphlets against _Os Sebastianistas_ (1810) or _Os Jesuitas_ (1830): behind Ezelino and Beatriz in his tragedy _Branca de Rossi_ (1819) loom Napoleon and Joséphine, and the prose comedy _A Impostura Castigada_ (1822) is an attack upon the doctors. The fact is that Macedo was essentially not a poet or a dramatist or a philosopher, but a forcible and eloquent pamphleteer. His philosophical letters and treatises, _A Verdade_ (1814), _O Homem_ (1815), _Demonstração da Existencia de Deos_ (1816), _Cartas filosoficas a Attico_ (1815), are at their best not when he is developing a train of scientific thought but when he is arguing _ad hominem_; and his literary criticism in _Motim Literario_ (1811) is primarily personal. As a critic militant he has his merits, and he is pleasantly patriotic in denouncing the glamour of _missangas estranjeiras_. But it is in his political periodicals, pamphlets, and letters, _Cartas_ (1821), _Cartas_ (1827), _Tripa virada_ (1823), _Tripa por uma vez_ (1823), _A Besta Esfolhada_ (1828-31), _O Desengano_ (September 1830-September 1831), that he puts forth all his spice and venom. Ponderous and angry like a lesser Samuel Johnson, he bullies and crushes his opponents in the raciest vernacular. He may be unscrupulous in argument, but his idiomatic and vigorous prose will always be read with pleasure.