António Feliciano de Castilho

Who was António Feliciano de Castilho?

António Feliciano de Castilho, 1st Viscount of Castilho, Portuguese man of letters, born at Lisbon.

He lost his sight at the age of six, but the devotion of his brother Augusto, and aided by a retentive memory, enabled him to go through his school and university course with success; and he acquired an almost complete mastery of the Latin language and literature.

His first work of importance, the Cartas de Echo e Narciso, belongs to the pseudo-classical school in which he had been brought up, but his romantic leanings became apparent in the Primavera and in Amor e Melancholia, two volumes of honeyed and prolix bucolic poetry. In the poetic legends A noite do Castello and Ciúmes do bardo Castilho appeared as a full-blown Romanticist. These books exhibit the defects and qualities of all his work, in which lack of ideas and of creative imagination and an atmosphere of artificiality are ill-compensated for by a certain emotional charm, great purity of diction and melodious versification.

Belonging to the didactic and descriptive school, Castilho saw nature as all sweetness, pleasure and beauty, and he lived in a dreamland of his imagination. A fulsome epic on the succession of King John VI brought him an office of profit at Coimbra. On his return from a stay in Madeira, he founded the Revista Universal Lisbonense, in imitation of Herculano's Panorama, and his profound knowledge of the Portuguese classics served him well in the introduction and notes to a very useful publication, the Livraria Classica Portugueza, while two years later he established the "Society of the Friends of Letters and the Arts."