The Portuguese novelists in the nineteenth century showed an increasing tendency to write plays, while authors whose reputation belonged more exclusively to the drama rarely rose above mediocrity. The success of Garrett’s plays was bound to fire a crowd of dramatists. Gomes de Amorim’s _Ghigi_ (1852), on a fifteenth-century theme, was followed by plays with a thesis, such as _A Viuva_ (1852), _Odio de Raça_ (1854), written on the slavery question at Garrett’s request, and _Figados de Tigre_ (1857), which entitles itself a parody of melodramas. Having emigrated as a boy to Brazil, he was able to use his knowledge of South America, sometimes with more zeal than discretion, as in _O Cedro Vermelho_, an exotic play in five acts and seventy-nine scenes, which the unfamiliar dresses and hybrid dialogue helped to make popular at Lisbon.[684] The notable success of more recent playwrights has perhaps developed in proportion as the drama has ceased to be drama in order to become a series of isolated scenes, a novel or _conto_ in green-room attire. They are at their happiest when they abandon formal drama for the lighter _revista_. Pathos is theirs and a deft handling of social themes; they can reproduce the peasant or _bourgeois_ or noble as a class in thought and action and external conditions. Some of them possess technical skill, choose indigenous subjects and an atmosphere of chastened romanticism. But individual psychology and dramatic action are scarcely to be found. A reader with the patience to peruse the hundreds of plays acted and published in Lisbon during the last fifty years would be rewarded by many delicate half-tones, polished and impeccable verse, excellent prose, admirable sentiments, and poignant scenes, but could with difficulty afterwards recall a striking character or situation. FERNANDO CALDEIRA (1841-94) was a poet, and his plays, _O Sapatinho de Setim, A Mantilha de Renda_ (1880), _Nadadoras, A Madrugada_ (1894), are read less for the plot than for his carefully limned verse. His volume of poems, _Mocidades_, appeared in 1882. ANTONIO ENNES (1848-1901), journalist, librarian, politician, diplomatist, Minister of Marine, showed command of pathos and humour as well as of style in his plays _O Saltimbanco_ (1885), the tragedy of the noble devotion of a mountebank, Falla-Só, descendant of Jean Valjean, for his daughter, who has been brought up in ignorance of her birth, _Os Lazaristas_ (1875), and _Os Engeitados_ (1876), which insists throughout on its thesis, the wickedness and cruelty of exposing children, but has some good scenes and living characters, and the notable one-act piece _Um Divorcio_ (1877). The principal play of MAXIMILIANO DE AZEVEDO (1850-1911), author of many light and commonplace comedies, as _Por Força_ (1900), was the drama _Ignez de Castro_ (1894). The scene in which Inés, full of foreboding, takes leave of Pedro before he goes hunting, and that at the end of Act IV,