But the greatest qualification of Dom Diniz for the sovereignty of a country, which had at last got time to learn the arts of peace and to become civilized, was his affection for literature and his encouragement of education. It was Diniz, who, in 1300, founded the first Portuguese university at Lisbon, which after many changes between that city and Coimbra, found its permanent home in the latter city, and became the centre of literary influence in Portugal. The king was also a poet of exquisite taste, and in the number, beauty, and variety of his songs he proved himself the greatest poet of his Court. Educated by Aymeric d’Ebrard of Cahors, whom he made Bishop of Coimbra, he shows in his poems the influence of the troubadours, and not of the trouvères who had thronged his father’s Court. He had inherited poetic feeling and power of expression from his father, Affonso III., who was no mean poet, and who is said to have written a powerful “sirvente” against Alfonso X., but his father had during his long residence at Paris been impressed with the poetry of northern France, and had invited trouvères only to his Court. Dom Diniz, both by education and feeling, belonged to a different school, and preferred the softer themes and methods of the troubadours. With the Courts of Love which he introduced into Portugal came the substitution of the Limousin decasyllabic for the national octosyllabic metre, and the ancient forms were lost in the intricacies of the “ritournelle.” But the best service done by Diniz and his poetic courtiers was in developing the Portuguese dialect into a beautiful and flexible literary language. The king went further; as he grew older, he threw off the trammels of Provençal forms, and perceiving the beauty of his people’s lyrics, he wrote some quaint and graceful “pastorellas” inspired by their influence, which are full of poetic life and truth. The effects of the influence of Dom Diniz, in the words of a recent writer on Portuguese literature, “pervade the whole of Portuguese poetry; for not only was he in his ‘pastorellas’ the forerunner of the great pastoral school, but by sanctifying to literary use the national storehouse of song, he perpetuated among his people, even to the present day, lyric forms of great beauty.”[5] Literary excellence and the growth of a national poetry form the natural sequel of the attainment of national independence; and it is interesting to observe that the king, who peacefully consolidated the Portuguese kingdom, was the founder of Portuguese literature. Camoens happily hits off in a couple of stanzas the characteristics of his reign.