Note 27 — INTRODUCTION
Reading edition
Or political, or anticlerical, or anything except literary. The critics seem to have forgotten that an auto-da-fé does not necessarily make its victim a good poet, and that even a priest may have literary talent. A few literary critics, as Dias in the eighteenth, Guilherme Moniz Barreto in the nineteenth century, are only exceptions to the rule. It has been the weakness of Portuguese criticism, more lenient than the gods and booksellers of ancient Rome, to suffer mediocres gladly.