The greatest rebel against the invasion was CRISTÓBAL DE CASTILLEJO (? 1494-1556), who passed thirty years abroad in the service of Ferdinand, King of Bohemia. Much of his life was actually spent in Italy, but he kept his national spirit almost absolutely free from the foreign influence. If he compromises at all, the furthest he can go is in adopting the mythological machinery favoured by all contemporaries, and even for this he could plead respectable Castilian precedent; but in the matter of form, Castillejo is cruelly intransigent. Boscán is his especial butt. "_Él mismo confesará Que no sabe donde va_"— "He himself will confess that he knows not whither he goes." That, indeed, appears to have been Castillejo's fixed idea on the subject, and he expends an infinite deal of sarcasm and ridicule upon the apostates who, as he thinks, hide their poverty of thought in tawdry motley. His own subjects are perfectly fitted to treatment in the _villancico_ form, and when he is not simply improper—as in _El Sermón de los Sermones_—his verses are remarkable for their sprightly grace and bitter-sweet wit, which can, at need, turn to rancorous invective or to devotional demureness. Had he lived in Spain, it is probable that Castillejo's mordant ridicule might have delayed the Italian supremacy. As it was, his flouts and jibes arrived too late, and the old patriot died, as he had lived, a brilliant, impenitent, futile Tory. In one of his sonnets, conceived in the most mischievous spirit of travesty, Castillejo singles out for reprobation a poet named Luis de Haro, as one of the Italian agitators. Unluckily Haro's verses have practically disappeared from the earth, and the few specimens preserved in Nájera's _Cancionero_ are banal exercises in the old Castilian manner. A practitioner more after Castillejo's heart was the ingenious Antonio de Villegas (fl. 1551), whose _Inventario_, apart from tedious paraphrases of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe in the style of Bottom the Weaver, contains many excellent society-verses, touched with conceits of extreme sublety, and a few more serious efforts in the form of _décimas_, not without a grave urbanity and a penetration of their own. Francisco de Castilla, a contemporary of Villegas, vies with him in essaying the hopeless task of bringing the old rhythms into new repute; but his _Teórica de virtudes_, dignified and elevated in style and thought, had merely a momentary vogue, and is now unjustly considered a mere bibliographical curiosity.