PORTUGUESE CRITICISM OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
The progress of genuine prose in Portuguese literature during the eighteenth century, may, upon the whole, be estimated by the style of Portuguese criticism in the same period. It may be presumed that the authors of critical treatises on literary subjects, endeavoured by their own prose to shew the relationship, which, according to their opinion, ought to exist between poetry and eloquence; and it is certain that the principles on which they wrote precisely corresponded with the rhetorical cultivation of the age, within the boundaries of Portuguese taste. These theoretical labours, in their relation to Portuguese poetry and eloquence, deserve to be particularly noticed.