It might be said of that marvellous poet Victor Hugo that he is not for exportation: the tendency has been for those who lack his genius to take shelter in his defects. Since one of his earliest followers, CLAUDIO JOSÉ NUNES (1831-75), published _Scenas Contemporaneas_ (1873) his influence has been very marked in Portugal and manifests itself in the grandiloquence, over-emphasis, and love of antithesis of much of Snr. ABILIO MANUEL GUERRA JUNQUEIRO’S work. The greatest of Portugal’s living poets was born at Freixo de Espada á Cinta in 1850 and was thus a small child when Hugo’s poems _Les Contemplations_ (1856) and _La Légende des Siècles_ (1859) appeared. After studying law at Coimbra he was returned to Parliament in 1878. Enthusiastically revolutionary until 1910, he became Portuguese Minister at Berne in the following year, but retired from the service of the Republic in 1914. His first verses were published at the age of fourteen, _Duas paginas dos quatorze annos_ (1864), and before he was twenty he had written _Mysticae Nuptiae_ (1866), _Vozes sem Echo_ (1867), and _Baptismo do Amor_ (1868), with a preface by Camillo Castello Branco. But it was _A Morte de Dom João_ (1874), a poem or series of poems in which Don Juan and Jehovah are attacked impartially, that brought him resounding success, a success followed up and increased by _A Velhice do Padre Eterno_ (1885) and, under the influence of the political crisis of 1890, _Finis Patriae_ (1890) and the play _Patria_, in which his eager and vigorous patriotism found vent. In all these, as in the quieter volume _A Musa em Ferias_ (1879), there is true poetry (as well as unfailing sincerity and passionate sympathy for the oppressed), but it has to be looked for. A weird ghostliness in _Finis Patriae_ and in the _doido’s_ part in _Patria_ is accompanied by a strange and impressive lilt in the rhythm[695] which corresponds to the haunting refrains of some of the shorter poems. But there seemed a danger that on the wings of applause, in political invective, and turgid rhetoric the poet might allow his genius to be totally misdirected, and it is his most remarkable achievement that in _Os Simples_ (1892) he laid all that aside and returned to the simpler themes of peasant life which cast a spell over some of the lyrics in _Finis Patriae_: harvesters, the _linda boeirinha_ guiding her great oxen, the old shepherd with his flute and crook on the scented hills, the _cavador_ going to his work at cockcrow beneath the red morning star. _A Caminho_, the inimitable opening poem, has a delicate inspiration which is masterly in its restraint and ingenuous charm. It was well to rest on such laurels. In two subsequent odes, _Oração ao Pão_ (1902) and _Oração á Luz_ (1904), filled with a vague music, Snr. Guerra Junqueiro’s poetry merges into a mystic philosophy which he intends to express in prose. Some early poems appeared in _Poesias Dispersas_ (1921). A victim of Victor Hugo