but is entertained by the quick dialogue and almost clownish humour of the separate scenes. _Lagrimas e Thesouros_[670] (1863) may interest English readers from the fact that its principal character is William Beckford, but it has not the great merits of the preceding novel. The author was already at work on his unfinished _Historia de Portugal nos seculos XVII e XVIII_ (5 vols., 1860-71). In this, as in his _Fastos da Igreja_ (1854-5) and _Varões Illustres_ (1870), his defects fall away, while his real skill as a historian, his intensity, and his excellent style remain; indeed, an added intensity gives his style a new vigour and simplicity. His _Historia_, although less rigorously scientific and far less methodically ordered than that of his master Herculano, has value as history as well as literature. Rebello da Silva wrote too much, but his work generally improved with the years and might have resulted in a real masterpiece had he not died before attaining the age of fifty. Meanwhile the novel had entered on a new and intensely modern phase in the hands of a slightly younger contemporary. The life of CAMILLO CASTELLO BRANCO (1825-90), whose numerous novels have been and still are read enthusiastically in Portugal, had about it an element of improbability which is reflected in his works and made it possible to combine their apparent sincerity with a peculiar unreality. Born at Lisbon but left an orphan at the age of eight, and brought up by a sister, wife of a doctor, in a small village of Tras-os-Montes,[671] a widower in his teens, then a boisterous Oporto medical student, twice imprisoned for love affairs and finally guilty of abducting an heiress as a bride for his son, his whole life was spent in a whirlwind, actual or imaginary, a tragicomedy which, stricken with blindness, he ended by suicide. He read and wrote in the same tempestuous fashion. The sentimental atmosphere of his novels is relieved systematically by outbursts of cynicism and sarcasm. When he began to write romanticism was in full swing, but his last twenty years were spent under what was to him the vexing and tantalizing shadow of the new realism. His first story, _Maria não me mates, que sou tua mãe!_ (1848),[672] was sentimental and sensational, and something of these qualities remained in the greater part of his work. His first more elaborate novel _Anathema_ (1851), in which the story is interrupted by lengthy musings and moralizings, he himself described as ‘a kind of literary crab’, and most of his novels are somewhat lop-sided: he confessed that his discursiveness was incurable. It is the more hysterical among his works, such as _Amor de Perdição_ (1862)--its character is well described by the title of the Italian version, _Amor sfrenato_--or _Amor de Salvação_ (1864) and those which combine this character with a chain of amazing coincidences, as _Os Mysterios de Lisboa_ (1854) and _O Livro Negro do Padre Diniz_ (1855), which were read most avidly in Portugal.