Francisco José Freire () (3 January 1719 – 5 July 1773), Portuguese

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...

and

philologist Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of ...

, was born in

Lisbon Lisbon ( ; ) is the capital and largest city of Portugal, with an estimated population of 567,131, as of 2023, within its administrative limits and 3,028,000 within the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, metropolis, as of 2025. Lisbon is mainlan ...

. He belonged to the monastic society of St Philip Neri, and was a zealous member of the literary association known as the Academy of Arcadians, in connexion with which he adopted the pseudonym of Cândido Lusitano. He contributed much to the improvement of the style of Portuguese prose literature, but his endeavour to effect a reformation in the national poetry by a translation of

Horace Quintus Horatius Flaccus (; 8 December 65 BC – 27 November 8 BC), Suetonius, Life of Horace commonly known in the English-speaking world as Horace (), was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus (also known as Octavian). Th ...

's ''Ars poetica'' was less successful. The work in which he set forth his opinions regarding the vicious taste pervading the current Portuguese prose literature is entitled ''Maximas sabre a Arte Oratoria'' (1745) and is preceded by a chronological table forming almost a social and physical history of Portugal. His best known work, however, is his ''Vida do Infante D. Henrique'' (1758), which has given him a place in the first rank of Portuguese historians, and has been translated into French (Paris, 1781). He also wrote a poetical dictionary (''Diccionario poetico'') and a translation of Racine's ''Athalie'' (1762), and his ''Reflexions sur la langue portugaise'' was published in 1842 by the Lisbon society for the promotion of useful knowledge. Freire died at

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on 5 July 1773.

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References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Freire, Francisco 1719 births 1773 deaths 18th-century Portuguese historians Portuguese philologists People from Lisbon