In literature the Portuguese writers of the eighteenth century followed and imitated the French authors of the reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. instead of striving to develop the characteristics of their own nation. The “Academia Real de Lisboa,” the “Academia Real de Portugal,” the “Arcadia de Lisboa,” and the “Academia Real das Sciencias,” which succeeded each other at short intervals, were all attempts to imitate the French Academy and its offshoots, and though they did good work in encouraging research and rewarding literary endeavour, they failed, as such institutions generally do fail, to produce great writers and thinkers. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, before the academies exercised their influence, the only literary productions in Portugal were lyric poems of no great merit, which were much admired by the members of numerous little literary clubs resembling the Italian arcadias, and which were chiefly imitations of the forms of verse most in vogue in France and Italy. But during the rule of Pombal a more healthy spirit appeared; the works of the French encyclopædists and their contemporaries were studied instead of tricks of versification, and a new departure was made alike in poetry and prose. The new poets did not confine themselves to lyrics; they attempted epics, dramas, and eclogues, all more or less based upon an imitation of the French, but yet possessing a more truly national ring than the lyrics of their predecessors. All these poets were not lovers of Pombal; the great minister was too heedless of hurting their susceptibilities and too sparing of his pensions for that; and the best known among them, Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva, who was termed the Portuguese Boileau, vehemently attacked the great man after his fall. The influence exerted by this poet on the progress of Portuguese literature was, however, slight compared to that of his successors, Francisco Manoel de Nascimento and Manoel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, whose followers under the names of the “Filintists” and “Elmanists” preached freedom from the rigour of the French canons of criticism, and adherence to national forms. Epic poetry was not neglected, though none of its writers can compare with the great Camoens, whose “Lusiads” were several times reprinted with notes during this century. The fame of the great Portuguese epic was indeed spread abroad throughout Europe; it was translated into French by Duperron de Castera and by the French critic La Harpe; into Dutch by L. S. Pieterzoon; and into English by Mickle who, as a translator of their master-poet, was cordially received at the Portuguese Court in 1780. Nor was the drama forgotten; the Portuguese stage was held by tragedies after the French classical model, the subjects of which were generally borrowed from the annals of the country, of which the titles of the three tragedies of Du Bocage, “Viriato,” “Affonso Henriques,” and “Vasco da Gama,” may be cited as a proof.