NASCIMENTO, FRANCISCO MANOEL DE 1819), Portuguese poet, known as Filinto Elysio, his "Arcadian" name, though he was never a member of the Arcadia and later was a leader of the revolt against it, was born in Lisbon, the son of a lighterman. As a boy he acquired an extensive knowledge of national literature and folklore, the foundation of his rich Portuguese vocabulary and of a deep and enduring patriotism. He was ordained priest in 1754, and became treasurer of the Chagas church in Lisbon. Nascimento was soon the centre of a literary group which opposed the ruling group of the Arcadia, and fought for the recognition of Camoens as the greatest of Portu guese poets. But in June 1778 an order was issued by the inquisi tion for the arrest of Nascimento on the ground of heterodoxy and the reading of "modern philosophers who follow natural reason." He escaped to a French ship in the harbour, found his way to Havre and then to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, with the exception of five years in the house of the Portuguese ambassa dor at The Hague. Lamartine addressed an ode to him ; he en joyed the esteem of Chateaubriand; and his admirers at home, who imitated him extensively, were called after him Os Filintistas. 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 7o and 85, and when he died it was recognized that Por tugal had lost her foremost contemporary poet.
Garrett declared that Nascimento was worth an academy in himself by his knowledge of the language, adding that no poet since Camoens 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. By his life, as by his works, Nascimento links the i8th and 19th centuries, the Neo-Classical period with Romanticism. Wieland's Oberon and Chateaubriand's Martyrs opened a new world to him, and his contos or scenes of Portuguese life have a real romantic flavour; they are the most natural of his compositions, though his noble patriotic odes— those "To Neptune speaking to the Portuguese" and "To the lib erty and independence of the United States"—are the most quoted and admired. On leaving Portugal, he abandoned the use of rhyme as cramping freedom of thought and expression; never theless, his highly-polished verses are generally robust to hardness and overdone with archaisms.