He took his doctor's degree on 14 July 1555, an event which was celebrated, according to custom, by a sort of Roman triumph, and he stayed on as a professor, finding Coimbra, with its picturesque environs, congenial to his poetical tastes and love of a country life.

[1] Ferreira was intimate with princes, nobles and the most distinguished literary men of the time, such as the scholarly Diogo de Teive, and the poets Bernardes, Caminha and Corte-Real.

The intrigues and moral twists of the courtiers and traders, among whom he was forced to live, hurt his fine sense of honor, and he felt his mental isolation more, because his friends were few and scattered in that great city which the discoveries and conquests of the Portuguese had made the centre of a world empire.

[1] The death in 1554 of Prince John, the heir to the throne, drew from him, as from Camões, Bernardes and Caminha, a poetical lament, which consisted of an elegy and two eclogues, imitative of Virgil and Horace.

His love is the chaste, timid affection of a wife and a vassal, rather than the strong passion of a mistress, but Pedro is really the man, history describes, the love-fettered prince whom the tragedy of Inês’s death converted into the cruel tyrant.

Horace was his favorite poet, erudition his muse, and his admiration of the classics made him disdain the popular poetry of the Old School (Escola Velha) represented by Gil Vicente.

It was the beginning of a revolution, which Ferreira completed by abandoning the traditional peninsular verse forms for the Italian hendecasyllable, and by composing the noble and austere Roman poetry of his letters, odes and elegies.