The diplomatic service was in many ways congenial to his character, but his enemies made the mistake of slighting and neglecting him, and, refusing the post of Minister at Copenhagen, he returned to Portugal and helped to bring about the Revolution of September 1836. But his life is the whole history of the time: enough to say that for the next fifteen years his activities in politics and literature were unceasing. In a hundred ways he showed his versatility and energy. He served on many commissions, was appointed Inspector of Theatres (1836), _Cronista Môr_ (1838), elected deputy (1837), raised to the House of Peers (1852). As journalist, founder and editor of several short-lived newspapers, as a stylist and master of prose, his country’s chief lyric poet in the first half of the nineteenth century (coming as a fire to light the dry sticks of the eighteenth-century poetry) and greatest dramatist since the sixteenth; as politician and one of the most eloquent of all Portugal’s orators, an enthusiastic if unscientific folk-lorist,[655] a novelist, critic, diplomatist, soldier, jurist and judge, Garrett played many parts and with success. This patriot who did not despair of his country, this marvellous dandy who seemed to bestow as much thought on the cut of a coat as on the fashioning of a constitution, and who refused to grow old, preferring to incur ridicule as a _velho namorado_ (his love intrigues ended only with his life and he wrote his most passionate lyrics when he was over fifty), this artist in life and literature, lover of old furniture and old traditions, this lovable, ridiculous, human Garrett, whom his countrymen called divine, can still alternately charm and repel us as he scandalized and fascinated his contemporaries. His motives were often curiously mixed. His immeasurable peacock vanity as well as his generosity prompted him to champion weak causes and assist obscure persons. A man of high ideals and an essential honesty, he only rarely deviated into truth in matters concerning himself. When past fifty he was still ‘forty-six’ and he wrote an anonymous autobiography and filled it with his own praise. He often gave his time and talent ungrudgingly to the service of the State and then cried out that his disinterestedness went unrewarded. Fond of money but fonder of show and honours, he died almost poor but a viscount. Although of scarcely more than plebeian birth he liked to believe that the name Garrett, which he only assumed in 1818, was the Irish for Gerald and that he was descended from Garrt, first Earl of Desmond,[656] and through the Geraldines from Troy.[657] At the mercy of many moods, easily angered but never vindictive, capable occasionally of half-unconscious duplicity but never of hypocrisy, he remained to the last changing and sensitive as a child. His faults were mostly on the surface and injured principally himself, offering a hundred points of attack to critics incapable of understanding his greatness.