are in the main picturesque, informative, rambling rather
than artistic; the poets are either vacuous or swollen with
the pomp of old-world rhetoric. Even so virile a spirit
as Gregorio de Mattos conducts his native satire with
the stylistic weapons forged in Europe, and the dawn of
a valid nativism is shot through with gleams of spiritual
adherence to Portugal and intellectual subjection to the
old continent. Yet, as the child is father to the man, so
even in these faltering voices may be detected the domin-
ant notes of the later literature,--its imagination, its
fondness for rotund expression, its pride of milieu, its
Oriental exuberance, its wistful moodiness, its sensual
ardor.

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