pare his own.
Though he escaped the penalty of his desertion, he had no resources and
lived on friends, whose help enabled him to return to Lisbon in the
middle of the following year.

Once back in Portugal he found his old popularity, and resumed his
vagabond existence. The age was one of reaction against the Pombaline
reforms, and the famous intendant of police, Manique, in his
determination to keep out French revolutionary and atheistic propaganda,
forbade the importation of foreign classics and the discussion of all
liberal ideas. Hence the only vehicle of expression left was satire,
which Bocage employed with an unsparing hand. His poverty compelled him
to eat and sleep with friends like the turbulent friar Jose Agostinho de
Macedo (q.v.), and he soon fell under suspicion with Manique. He became
a member of the New Arcadia, a literary society founded in 1790, under
the name of Elmano Sadino, but left it three years later. Though
including in its ranks most of the poets of the time, the New Arcadia
produced little of real merit, and before long its adherents became
enemies and descended to an angry warfare of words. But Bocage's
reputation among the general public and with foreign travellers grew
year by year. Beckford, the author of _Vathek_, for instance, describes
him as "a pale, limber, odd-looking young man, the queerest but perhaps
the most original of God's poetical creatures. This strange and
versatile character may be said to possess the true wand of enchantment
which at the will of its master either animates or petrifies." In 1797
enemies of Bocage belonging to the New Arcadia delated him to Manique,
who on the pretext afforded by some anti-religious verses, the _Epistola
a Marilia_, and by his loose life, arrested him when he was about to
flee the country and lodged him in the Limoeiro, where he spent his
thirty-second birthday. His sufferings induced him to a speedy
recantation, and after much importuning of friends, he obtained his
transfer in November from the state prison to that of the Inquisition,
then a mild tribunal, and shortly afterwards recovered his liberty. He
returned to his bohemian life and subsisted by writing empty _Elogios
Dramaticos_ for the theatres, printing volumes of verses and translating
the didactic poems of Delille, Castel and others, some second-rate
French plays and Ovid's _Metamorphoses_. These resources and the help of
brother Freemasons just enabled him to exist, and a pur