Gilvaz and D. Fuas to obtain rich wives at the expense of miserly father and country cousin. The action consists in a bewildering succession of disguises, the scene (Pt. ii, Sc. 5) in which Gilvaz and Fuas doctor their stolid rival and ridicule the medical profession has humour but shows the usual inability to end before the reader’s patience has been long exhausted. In the _Vida do Grande D. Quixote de la Mancha_ (1733) Silva made bold to dramatize _Don Quixote_ in a series of scenes not over-skilfully connected. Of his own invention there is a comical scene (Pt. i, Sc. 8), in which Don Quixote is harassed by doubts as to whether the enchanters have not transformed Dulcinea into Sancho Panza: he begins to see a certain likeness; but most of the scenes are directly copied and here become signally insipid, as that of Sancho’s judgements (ii. 4), or that of the lion (i. 5), which is as far removed from Cervantes as the sorry lions of the Alhambra at Granada from those in Trafalgar Square. The drama of NICOLAU LUIS, whose life is obscure but whose name was possibly Nicolau Luis da Silva, belongs to the _literatura de cordel_, popular plays imitated and often directly translated from the Spanish and Italian and acted with great applause in the eighteenth century at Lisbon. Most of them were published without the author’s name, and although it is believed that he wrote over one-third of the numerous _comedias de cordel_ of the century[653] only a few, as _O Capitão Belisario_ (1781) and _O Conde Alarcos_ (1788), can be definitely assigned to him, a fact which incidentally bears witness to his lack of individuality. His best-known tragedy is _D. Ignez de Castro_ (1772), an imitation of _Reinar después de morir_ by Luis Velez de Guevara (1579-1644).