José Agostinho de Macedo (11 September 1761 – 2 October 1831) was a Portuguese poet and prose writer. He was born in Beja to a plebeian family, and studied Latin and rhetoric with the Oratorians in Lisbon, Portugal. He became professed as an Augustinian in 1778, but owing to his turbulent character he spent a great part of his time in prison,and was constantly being transferred from one convent to another, finally giving up the monastic habit to live licentiously in the capital. In 1792 he was unfrocked, but by the aid of powerful friends he obtained a papal brief which secularized him and permitted him to retain his ecclesiastical status. Taking to journalism and preaching he now made for himself a substantial living and a unique position. In a short time he was recognized as the leading pulpit orator of the day, and in 1802 he became one of the royal preachers. Macedo was the first to introduce from abroad and to cultivate didactic and descriptive poetry, the best example of which is his notable transcendental poem Meditation (1813). His made an attempt to supersede Luís de Camões as Portugal's greatest poet, and in 1814 he produced Oriente, an epic dealing with the same subject as the Os Lusíadas, namely Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to India. This amended paraphrase met with a cold reception, whereupon Macedo published his Censura dos Lusiadas, containing a minute examination and virulent indictment of Camões. Macedo founded and wrote for a large number of journals, and the tone and temper of these and his political pamphlets induced his leading biographer to name him the chief libeller of Portugal, though at the time his jocular and satirical style gained his popular favor. An extreme adherent of absolutism, he expended all his powers of invective against the Constitutionalists and advocated a general massacre of the opponents of the Miguelist régime. Notwithstanding his priestly office and old age, he continued his aggressive journalistic campaign, until his own party, feeling that he was damaging the cause by his excesses, threatened him with proceedings, which caused him in 1829 to resign the post of censor of books for the Ordinary, to which he had been appointed in 1824. Less