LOBO, FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ (c. Portuguese bucolic writer, was born of rich and noble parents at Leiria, and wrote of shepherds and shepherdesses by the rivers Liz and Lena. He studied at the university of Coimbra, took the degree of licentiate about 1600, and entered the service of Theodosio, duke of Braganza. He died some time before the end of 1622 by drowning on his way to Lisbon as he was descending the Tagus from Santarem. Though his first book, a little volume of verses (Romances) published in 1596, and his last, a rhymed welcome to King Philip III., published in 1623, are written in Spanish, he composed his eclogues and prose pastorals entirely in Portuguese, at a time when Castilian was the language preferred by polite society and by men of letters. His Primavera, a book that may be compared to the Diana of Jorge de Montemor (Montemayor), appeared in 1601, its second part, the Pastor Peregrino, in 1608, and its third, the Desenganado, in 1614. The dullness of these pastoral romances is relieved by charming and ingenious songs named serranilhas. His eclogues in endecasyl
lables are an echo of those of Camoens, but like his other verses they are inferior to his redondilhas, which show the traditional fount of his inspiration. In his Corte na Aldeia e Noites de Inverno (1619), a man of letters, a young nobleman, a student and an old man of easy means, beguile the winter evenings at Cintra by a series of philosophic and literary discussions in admirable prose dialogue. Lobo also wrote an epic in twenty cantos in ottava rima on the Constable D. Nuno Alvares Pereira, a volume of Eglogas (16o5), and of Romances (1596), the latter in Spanish. His descriptions of natural scenery are unsurpassed in the Portuguese language, and generally his writings strike a true note and show a sincerity that was rare at the time. An edition of his collected works was published in one volume in Lisbon in 1723, and another in four volumes, but less complete, appeared there in