Volume 2 / Book 3 — BOOK III. FROM THE CLOSE OF THE SEVENTEENTH TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS.

The third period of Portuguese poetry and eloquence arises so imperceptibly out of the second, that no particular date, or remarkable event in Portuguese literature can be said to form a dividing point between them. The influence of the French taste on the Portuguese is the characteristic mark of the commencement of this last period. But even that influence never produced any thing like a revolution in the state of polite learning in Portugal. French taste worked its way into the language and the literature of the Portuguese, as tranquilly as into their manners. It therefore neither forcibly supplanted the old taste, nor caused any conflict of literary factions at all resembling that warfare, which arose between the Gallicists and the adherents of the old style in Spain. Thus the literature of Portugal, for the second time, asserted its peaceful character. As in the sixteenth century no Portuguese Boscan had to contend with an old romantic party, so in the eighteenth century there arose no Portuguese Luzan to uphold the French taste by methodical rules of art. There occurred, therefore, no violent reaction of old patriotism against Gallicism, like that experienced in Spanish literature. Under these circumstances an opportunity was at last afforded for the English taste also to operate quietly and imperceptibly on that of the Portuguese. The historian, however, who finds it necessary to fix on some particular point for the commencement of this last principal division of the history of Portuguese poetry and eloquence, is constrained to take his departure from the change of political relations, which has been the main cause of Portuguese cultivation and literature becoming, in the struggle between French and English tendencies, what they now are. Towards the close of the seventeenth century, those conflicting tendencies which have threatened the very existence of the kingdom of Portugal, first began to manifest themselves.