Few authors are more interesting to the critic (owing to the courageous and persistent development of his art) than JOSÉ MARIA DE EÇA DE QUEIROZ (1843-1900), a far more robust writer than Julio Diniz and the greatest Portuguese novelist of the realistic school. Born at Villa do Conde, the son of a magistrate, he was duly sent to study law at Coimbra, and after taking his degree contributed in 1866 and 1867 a series of _feuilletons_ to the _Gazeta de Portugal_. These _folhetins_, reprinted in _Prosas Barbaras_ (1903), are remarkable because they show beside a love of the gruesome and fantastic (_O Milhafre_, _O Senhor Diabo_, _Memorias de uma Forca_) at least one story (_Entre a neve_) of a perfect simplicity, such as the author is sometimes supposed to have attained only towards the end of his life. His partiality for the exotic was fostered by travels in Egypt and Palestine in 1869 and manifested itself in _A Morte de Jesus_, _Adão e Eva no Paraiso_, and _A Perfeição_, as well as in _A Reliquia_ and in part of _A Correspondencia de Fradique Mendes_. In 1873 he went to Havana as Portuguese Consul, and twenty-six years as Consul at Newcastle-on-Tyne (1874-6), Bristol (1876-88), and Paris (1888-1900), where he died, enabled him to see his own country in a new light. His prose lost its exuberance, his taste became more severe, his extravagant fancy, so strangely combined with realism in many of his works, was merged in natural descriptions of his native land. He regained his own soul without losing that peculiar mockery with which he veiled a kindly, sensitive temperament, and which agreeably stamps the greater part of his writings. But indeed the introducer of the naturalistic novel into Portugal only played with materialism, which in his hands was always unreal: legendary and romantic, as in _Frei Genebro_, _S. Christovam_, _O Tesoiro_; deliberately false and artificial, as _A Civilisação_; a macabre fantasy, as _O Defunto_; or half-intentional caricature, as _O Primo Basilio_ and _Os Maias_. What more chimerical than _A Reliquia_ or more elusive than _O Suave Milagre_, or more fanciful than _O Mandarim_ (1879), in which without himself knowing China the author makes his readers know it! All through his life he was as it were groping through Manueline for a purer Gothic; the pity was that his education from the first should have thrown him into contact with French models--so that his very language too often reads like translated French--instead of directing him to a truer realism (such as that of his nearer neighbour Pereda), to which he turned in his last works, and in which he might have written regional masterpieces had he not died at a moment when his art apparently had lost nothing of its vigour. More probably, however, his still unsatisfied craving for perfection would have sought relief in mysticism. His first novel was a sensational story written in collaboration with Ramalho Ortigão: