He himself favoured the quieter _Romance de um Homem Rico_ (1861) and _Livro de Consolação_ (1872). We may prefer the attic flavour of the humorous sketch of a country gentleman (born in the year of Waterloo) at Lisbon, in _A Queda d’um Anjo_ (1866), which somehow recalls the best work of Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Castello Branco had a true vein of comedy, and although a great part of the work of this specialist in hysterics has an air of unreality, he is many-sided and yields frequent surprises. The true Camillo appears only intermittently in his novels, and charms with a simplicity of style and description worthy of Frei Luis de Sousa, as in some of his _Novellas do Minho_ (12 vols., 1875-7), the country-house in _Coração, Cabeça e Estomago_ (1862), the Tras-os-Montes _fidalgo_‘s house in _Os Mysterios de Lisboa_, the village priest in _A Sereia_ (1865), Padre João in _Doze Casamentos Felizes_ (1861), the farrier in _Amor de Perdição_, the charcoal-burners in _O Santo da Montanha_ (1865). Then (as if with the question: what will the Chiado, what will the Lisbon critics say?) he pulls himself up, lashes himself with sarcasms, and plunges into his improbabilities and passions. A poet and a learned and ingenious if unscholarly critic, he saw and described the charm of the villages of North Portugal, but he satirized with peculiar venom the _bourgeois_ life and the enriched _brazileiros_ of Oporto, as in _A Filha do Arcediago_ (1855), _A Neta do Arcediago_ (1856), _A Douda do Candal_ (1867), _Os Brilhantes do Brazileiro_ (1869), _Memorias de Guilherme do Amaral_ (1863), and _Um Homem de Brios_ (1856),[673] the last two being continuations of _Onde está a Felicidade?_ (1856). This last work has a broader historical setting, and many of his novels are really historical episodes,[674] some of which bear a strong resemblance to Pérez Galdós’ _Episodios Nacionales_. Especially is this the case with the latter part of _As Tres Irmãs_ (1862) and with _A Bruxa de Monte Cordova_ (1867), both written before the appearance of the first _Episodio Nacional_. In _Eusebio Macario_ and _A Corja_ he set his hand to the naturalistic novel, and in _A Brazileira de Prazins_ (1882) modified this method to suit his favourite phantasy of extremes, in which the angel and martyr are contrasted with the romantic Don Juan or vulgar _brazileiro_ or narrow-minded Minho noble. Apart from their historical interest and occasional charming glimpses of life and literature, his books are invaluable for their style, and he is the author of many masterly passages rather than of any masterpiece. He sometimes--here, as in all else, leaving moderation to the _bourgeois_ _épaté_--allows himself to be carried away by his immense vocabulary, but often, indeed usually, his language is a flawless marble, a rich quarry of the purest, most vernacular Portuguese, derived from the Portuguese religious and mystic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[675] Absorbed in