GONZAGA, ANTONIO COSTA DE, 1744-1809; the "Portuguese Petrarch." Having completed his law studies at the university of Coimbra, which he attended from 1763 to 1768, Gonzaga in the latter year returned to Brazil, and after having acted for some years as local magistrate at Beja and elsewhere, lie was appointed judge at Villa Rica, in the province of Minas, where he highly distinguished himself by adminis trati.ve ability and by the many excellences of hi, private character. Before this time lie developed some talent for versification, and his literary tastes soon brought him into intimate association with Claudio Manoel, Alvarenza Peixoto. and other writers of the so-called Minas school; but the love which inspires the poet did not, in his own opinion at least, come upon him until he had made the acquaintance (about 1788) of D. Maria Joaquina Dorothea de Seixas, the Marilia de Direcu to whom all his extant poems relate. He had just been nominated a member of the supreme court of Bahia, and was
on the eve of his marriage, when discovery was made of the treasonable plot of Minas, and he was arrested on suspicion of having been implicated in it. On merely eirctim stantial evidence, and that of a very inconclusive kind, lie was condemned, 1792, to banishment for life to Pedras de Angoche. a sentence which was afterwards commuted to one of ten years exile at Mozambique. Here he made some effort to practice as an advocate, but he never recovered from the depression with which his cruel lot had affected him. He was attacked by nervous fever which undermined his health, and after years of increasing melancholy, which occasionally alternated with fits of acute mania, he died.