before William Caxton and Robert Henryson, with great naturalness, vigour, and brevity. The earliest entry of the _Cronica Breve do Archivo Nacional_ is dated 1391, and both it and the _Cronicas Breves e memorias avulsas de Santa Cruz de Coimbra_ are laconic annals of the first kings of Portugal, a few lines covering a whole reign. The _Livro da Noa de Santa Cruz de Coimbra_ is an extract from the _Livro das Heras_ of the same convent, and is, as the latter title indicates, a similar simple chronicle of events by years.[110] It begins in Latin, then Latin and Portuguese entries alternate till 1405. From 1406 to the end (1444) they are exclusively Portuguese. The _Cronica da Ordem dos Frades Menores_ (1209-85) is a fifteenth-century Portuguese translation of a fourteenth-century Latin chronicle, and has been carefully edited by Dr. J. J. Nunes from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional; the _Vida de D. Tello_ (15th c.), and the _Vida de S. Isabel_, the Queen-consort of King Dinis (earlier 15th c.), are ‘historical’ biographies which contain more legend and less history than the _Cronica da Fundaçam do Moesteiro de S. Vicente de Lixboa_ (_Cronica dos Vicentes_), a fifteenth-century version from a Latin original, _Indiculum_, of the eleventh century. There is far more life if equal brevity in the _Cronica da Conquista do Algarve_ (_Cronica de como Dom Payo Correa. .. tomou este reino de Algarve aos Moros_)--a rapid, vivid sketch which reads almost like a chapter out of Fernam Lopez. Here at last was some one with will and power to make the dry bones live.[111] But meanwhile history of another kind had been written from a very early date. As a first rough catalogue of names the _livros de linhagens_, books of descent, as they were called by their compilers,[112] go back farther than the chronicles or religious prose, but so far as concerns their claim to literary form they belong like those to the fourteenth century. Of the four that have come down to us the _Livro Velho_ is a jejune family register (11th-14th c.); the second is a mere fragment of the same kind. The manuscript of the third (_O Nobiliario do Collegio dos Nobres_) was bound up with the _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_, and together with the fourth, _O Nobiliario do Conde D. Pedro_, represents the lost original of the _Livro de Linhagens_ of D. PEDRO, CONDE DE BARCELLOS (1289-1354). The _Nobiliario do Conde_ has been shown by Alexandre Herculano, who printed it from the manuscript in the Torre do Tombo, to be the work of various authors extending over more than a century (13th-14th), the Conde de Barcellos being but one of them. It was in fact compiled like a modern peerage,[113] and was not intended to be final, new entries being added as time made them necessary, so that the passage _diz O Conde D. Pedro em seu livro_ is as natural as the mention of Innocencio da Silva in a later volume of his great dictionary. But it was this son of King