what he considered his rights, and it led to a lawsuit, dividing the town into two sections, which eagerly debated the arguments on both sides and enjoyed the ridiculous incidents which accompanied the dispute. Ultimately the dean died, and was succeeded by his nephew, who appealed to the crown with success and the bishop lost his pretension. The Hyssope arose out of and deals with this affair. It was dictated in seventeen days, in the years 1770 to 1772, and, in its final redaction, consists of eight cantos of blank verse. The pressure of absolutism left open only one form of expression, satire, and in this poem Diniz produced an original work which ridicules the clergy and the prevailing Gallomania, and contains episodes full of humour. It has been compared with Boileau's Lutrin, because both are founded on a petty ecclesiastical quarrel, but here the resemblance ends, and the poem of Diniz is the superior in everything except metrification. Returning to Lisbon in 1774, Diniz endeavoured once more to resuscitate the Arcádia, but his long absence, had withdrawn its chief support, its most talented members Garção and Quita were no more, and he only assisted at its demise. In April 1776 he was appointed desembargador of the court of Relação in Rio de Janeiro and given the habit of Aviz. He lived in Brazil, devoting his leisure to a study of its natural history and mineralogy, until 1789, when he went back to Lisbon to take up the post of desembargador of the Relação of Porto; in July 1790 he was promoted, and became desembargador of the Casa da Suplicação. In this year he was sent again to Brazil to assist in trying the leaders of the Republican conspiracy in Minas, in which Gonzaga and other men of letters were involved, and in December 1792 he became chancellor of the Relação in Rio. Six years later he was named councillor of the Conselho Ultramarino, but did not live to return home, dying in Rio on 5 October 1799. Description Diniz possessed a poetic temperament, but his love of imitating the classics, whose spirit he failed to understand, fettered his muse, and he seems never to have perceived that mythological comparisons and pastoral allegories were poor substitutes for the expression of natural feeling. The conventionalism of his art prejudiced its sincerity, and, inwardly cherishing the belief that poetry was unworthy of