In Portugal the first quarter of the nineteenth century was filled with violence and unrest. The French invasion and years of fighting on Portuguese soil were followed by a series of revolutions and civil wars. It seemed as if a more general earthquake had come to complete the ruin of 1755, against which Lisbon had so finely re-acted. The historian who attempts to record the conflicts between Miguelists and Constitutionalists, and the miserable political intrigues which accompanied the ultimate victory of the latter, must waver disconsolately between tragedy and farce. But horrible and pitiful as were many of these events, they succeeded in awakening what had seemed a dead nation to a new life. The introduction of the parliamentary system called into being eloquent orators, and, more valuable than much eloquence, the conviction sprang up, partly under foreign influence, partly through love of the soil, deepened by persecution and banishment, that literature might have a closer relation to earth and life than a philological Filintian ode. Returning exiles brought fresh ideas into the country, and the two men who dominated Portuguese literature in the first half of the century had both learnt much from their enforced sojourn abroad. ALMEIDA GARRETT (1799-1854), one of the strangest and most picturesque figures in literature, was born at Oporto, but spent his boyhood in the Azores (Ilha Terceira), where his uncles, especially the Bishop of Angra, gave him a classical education and destined him for the priesthood. He, however, preferred to study law at Coimbra (1816-21). Here politics were in the air and he soon made himself conspicuous as a Liberal. The fall of the Constitution drove him into exile (1823) in England (near Edgbaston and in London), and France (Havre and Paris), and for the next thirty years politics remained one of his ruling passions. His first great opportunity for rhetorical display was his defence in the law-courts against the charge of impiety incurred by the publication of his poem _O Retrato de Venus_ (1821), although even before going to Coimbra he is said to have preached to a church full of people. He was able to return to Portugal in 1826, and edited _O Chronista_ and _O Portuguez_, which evoked Macedo’s wrath and ended in Garrett’s imprisonment. When Dom Miguel returned from Brazil and, instead of ‘signing the paper’ (the famous _Carta_ of 1826), had himself declared absolute king (1828) Garrett again became an exile, chiefly in London, and did not return to his country till July 1832, when he landed as a private soldier at Mindello, one of the famous 7,500 who fought for King Pedro and his daughter, Maria da Gloria. His zeal and outspokenness rendering him an uncomfortable colleague at Lisbon, he fared rather badly in the ignoble scramble for office which followed the triumph of the cause. He was sent first on a mission to London and then as _chargé d’affaires_ to Brussels (1834-6).