of peasant life very naturally told. A young playwright of promise is Snr. VASCO DE MENDONÇA ALVES, author of _Promessa_ (1910) and _Filhos_ (1910). The subject of _Filhos_ is unpleasant if not original (it is that of Eça de Queiroz’ _Os Maias_ and Ennes’ _Os Engeitados_), but is treated with dignity and in a good prose style. Snr. JAIME CORTESÃO, hitherto known rather as a poet, has turned to the drama in _Egas Moniz_ (1918). The novelists of the second half of the century were numerous and, as a rule, too dependent upon foreign models, chiefly French. JOAQUIM GUILHERME GOMES COELHO (1839-71) neither by date nor inclination belonged to one or other of the two schools between which lies his brief ten years’ activity. His talent developed early. As a medical student at his native Oporto he published poems and several stories, originally printed in the _Jornal do Porto_ and later collected with the title _Serões de Provincia_ (1870), and at the age of twenty-one, under the pseudonym JULIO DINIZ, he wrote the novel which brought him immediate fame and is still sometimes preferred to his later works: _Uma Familia Ingleza_ (1868). In these scenes of the life of Oporto he drew with the most elaborate analysis the relations between English and Portuguese which he had had frequent opportunities of observing in that city. Portuguese critics hint that what to superficial readers has seemed the tediousness of his novels is due to the influence of Dickens and other English novelists who revel in detail, and it is interesting that Gomes Coelho’s maternal grandmother was an Englishwoman, Maria, daughter of Thomas Potter. But it is a mistake to call his work tedious; the deliberate dullness of his novels has an excitement of its own, ‘’tis a good dullness’. The reader, tired with sensational plots and strained incidents, follows not only with relief but with growing absorption the homely daisy-chain of his stories, in which not the tiniest link in the development of the action or thought, especially the latter, is omitted. The interest never flags and never disappoints, leading gently on with carefully measured steps; the approval of virtue and disapproval of wickedness only occasionally becomes obtrusive and insipid. Julio Diniz confessed to a preference for _bourgeois_ types, but his real interest was in the country, and _As Pupillas do Senhor Reitor_[686] (1866), a village chronicle suggested by Herculano’s _O Parocho de Aldea_, is by many held to be his best work. The characters are delineated with the same delicate charm as that of Jenny in his earlier novel, and there is a background of curious observation--_esfolhadas_ (husking the maize), _espadeladas_ (braking flax), _ripadas_ (dressing the flax), _fiadas_ (gatherings of women to spin at the winter _lareira_ in the faint light of a lamp hanging on the smoke-blackened wall), the men at cards in the tavern, the old country doctor going his rounds on horseback, the solemn