Ribeiro exhibits in his poetry the influence of the revival of classical learning to a slight degree; after his time that influence increased, and his successors, who bridged over the chasm between Ribeiro and Camoens, were thorough classicists, who imitated the Greek and Roman poets, not only in form, but in spirit. The chief poets of this classicist group were Sá de Miranda and Ferreira. Francisco Sá de Miranda was born at Coimbra, the Portuguese Oxford, in 1495, of a noble family, and he became professor of jurisprudence in his native town. On the death of his parents, he resigned his professorship, and travelled in Italy, where he studied the works not only of the great classical authors, but of the new school of Italian poets. He returned to his native country with a great reputation, and received an appointment at the Court of John III. He proved an accomplished courtier, but a quarrel with a Portuguese nobleman forced him to abandon his office, and he retired to his country seat at Tapada, near Ponte de Lima, where he died in 1558, while Camoens was still fighting in India. It was in Italy and not in Coimbra, that he learnt to study the great classical poets, and reverencing their works with the almost superstitious admiration of the Italians of the Renaissance, he dared not treat their ideas with the freedom of either Ribeiro or Camoens. Sá de Miranda devoted himself to the task of polishing the Portuguese language, and in doing this, he did more harm than good, for he introduced many Latin and Spanish forms of expression, which were not needed, and which helped to hinder the natural development of the national literature. He openly expressed his opinion that Spanish was a more dignified language than Portuguese, and many of his best poems are written in the former tongue, and are considered by authorities on Spanish literature to be excellent specimens of sixteenth-century work. Sá de Miranda's poems comprise imitations of many poets. He wrote eclogues in the style of Theocritus, epistles on the lines of those of Horace, plays based on Terence, and sonnets of which the form was borrowed from the Italian writers of the Renaissance. All are good and interesting in their way, but all are imitations, and the very best imitations of foreign styles can hardly rank a poet among the glories of his country's literature. Sá de Miranda's right to be included in any work on Portuguese literature is not due to the poems he wrote, or to his questionable improvements in his native language, but to the fact that he familiarized the people with the classic forms of poetry, of which a greater than he was to take advantage. Yet Sá de Miranda held a very high place in the estimation of his contemporaries, and the writers of the next century did not hesitate to rank him above Camoens, as being more "correct," a criticism, which irresistibly recalls Voltaire's avowed preference of Pope over Shakespeare.