In addition, he learnt to know the whole range of popular literature (litteratura de cordel) songs, comedies, knightly stories and fairy tales, which were then printed in loose sheets (folhas volantes) and sold by the blind in the streets of the capital.

These circumstances explain the richness of his vocabulary, and joined to an ardent patriotism they fitted him to become the herald of the literary revival known as Romanticism, which was inaugurated by his distinguished follower Almeida Garrett.

These men nourished the common ambition to restore Camões, then half forgotten, to his rightful place as the king of the Portuguese Parnassus, and they proclaimed the cult of the Quinhentistas, regarding them as the best poetical models, while in philosophy they accepted the teaching of the French Encyclopaedists.

[1] In 1792 his admirer António de Araújo, afterwards Count of Barca, then Portuguese minister to the Dutch Republic, offered the poet the hospitality of his house at the Hague, but neither the country, the people, nor the language were congenial, and when his host went to Paris on a diplomatic mission in 1797 Nascimento accompanied him, and spent the rest of his life in and near the French capital.

[1] He retained to the end an intense love of country, which made him wish to die in Portugal, and in 1796 a royal decree permitting his return there and ordering the restoration of his goods was issued, but delays occurred in its execution, and the transfer of the court to the Portuguese colony of Brazil as a result of the French invasion finally dashed his hopes.

Exile and suffering had enlarged his ideas and given him a sense of reality, making his best poems those he wrote between the ages of seventy and eighty-five, and when he died, it was recognised that Portugal had lost her foremost contemporary poet.

[1] Garrett declared that Nascimento was worth an academy in himself by his knowledge of the language, adding that no poet since Camões had rendered it such valuable services; but his truest title to fame is that he brought literature once more into touch with the life of the nation.