and additions which he wished to make, and accordingly handed over his translation and the original to his confessor, Frei João Verba, who made the necessary alterations,[194] and expanded the book from a literal translation to a paraphrase of the _De Beneficiis_. The reader who does not bear this in mind might be startled to find references in a work of Seneca’s to St. Thomas, Nun’ Alvarez, the noble knight Abraham, or the virtuous knight Cid Ruy Diaz. The work lacks King Duarte’s gift of style which set the _Leal Conselheiro_ high above contemporary prose. LOPO DE ALMEIDA, created first Count of Abrantes in 1472,[195] accompanied D. Lianor, daughter of King Duarte, on her marriage to the Emperor Frederick III in 1451. In four letters written to King Afonso V from Italy (February to May 1452) he displays a keen eye for colour and much directness in description, so that the Emperor bargaining miserly over the price of damask or the two wealthy Italian dukes so sorrily horsed (_em sima de senhos rocins magros_) remain in the memory, and the letters are more original than most of the Portuguese prose of the century. One of the most important early prose works is the _Boosco Delleytoso_ (1515). It consists of 153 short chapters,[196] and is dedicated (on the verso of the frontispiece portraying the ‘delightful wood’) to Queen Lianor, widow of King João II. It is a homily in praise of the hermit’s life of solitude and against worldly joys and traffics, and is marked by a pleasant quaintness, an intense and excellent style, a fervent humanity and love of Nature. The hermit’s independent and healthy life[197] is contrasted with that of the merchant in cities.[198] In chapter I the repentant sinner is introduced in ‘a very thick wood of very fair trees in which many birds sang very sweetly’ near ‘a very fair field full of many herbs and scented flowers’--_frolles de boo odor_. He prays to be delivered from this darkness of death, and a very fair youth appears ‘clothed in clothes of gleaming fire and his face shone as the sun when it rises in the season of great heat’. His ‘glorious guide’, _grorioso guyador_, leads him to a _dona sabedor_ and to _dom francisco solitario_, who in a _fremoso fallamento_ praises the solitary life and condemns those who are puffed up with the conceit of learning, in itself ‘a very fair thing’. He tells of the lives of saintly hermits; St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dom Seneca, Dom Cicero, _a mui comfortosa donzella_, and others exhort the sinner to leave the world, and he ends by relating his frequent raptures until his soul is carried to the _terra perduravil_. In its main subject, praise of the solitary life, the book recalls the title of the treatise ascribed to D. Philippa de Lencastre: _Tratado da Vida Solitaria_, a translation or adaptation from the Latin of Laurentius Justinianus.[199] The latter’s _De Vita Solitaria_ is, however, quite different from the _Boosco deleytoso_, which was probably composed