Pombal had not only expelled the Jesuits, but had taken effective measures against enslaving the Indians. The latter separated themselves from the whites, and miscegenation largely decreased. On the other hand, the importation of negro slaves had been continued on a large scale throughout the eighteenth century and the proportion of blacks in the mining and sugar districts had increased. Intermixture with negroes was stimulated by the seclusion of the white women. The young men often took mistresses from among the slaves, and these unions sometimes subsisted after legitimate marriage. The system of double _menages_, however, decreased as manners became more liberal, and opportunities for social intercourse between the sexes increased. The more energetic Brazilians acquired the rudiments of learning in the Jesuit schools, and a few fortunate youths were sent to the University at Coimbra in Portugal. In the early decades of the eighteenth century societies for the discussion of literary and scientific questions were established in Rio and Bahia. In the centres of population little groups of scholars began to gather who surreptitiously obtained the writings of French and English political philosophers. Suddenly, in the latter half of the century, a dazzling literary outburst occurred. Its seat was not in Rio, the political, nor Bahia, the ecclesiastical capital, nor yet in Pernambuco, the cradle of the nationality, but in Ouro Preto, the chief place of the mining province of Minas, twenty days' journey on muleback from the coast, and among a rude and unlettered population. Within a few years appeared six of the foremost poets of the Portuguese language: the lyrics, Gonzaga, Claudio, Silva Alvarengo, and Alvarengo Peixoto, and the epics, Basilio da Gama and Santa Rita Durao. He who writes the songs of a people rather records their history than influences it. The writings of the Minas lyric poets are the best documents extant on the character of the Brazilians of the colonial period. They clearly reveal that culture was only at its beginnings; that patriotism and national pride were indefinite and shadowy; that religion was neither dogmatic nor absorbing; that polite society had not come into being, and that the intellectual element entered little into the relations of the sexes.