In another and a less contested field, we owe to Valdés the admirable _Diálogo de la Lengua_, written at Naples in 1535-36. The personages are four: two Italians, named Marcio and Coriolano; and two Spaniards, Valdés himself, and a Spanish soldier, called indifferently Pacheco and Torres. For all purposes this dialogue is as important a monument of literary criticism as was the conversation in Don Quixote's library between the Priest and the Barber. In almost every case posterity has ratified the personal verdict of Valdés, who approves himself the earliest, as well as one of the most impartial and most penetrating among Spanish critics. Moreover, he conducts his dialogue with extraordinary dramatic skill in the true vein of highest comedy. The courtly grace of the two Italians, the military swagger of Pacheco, the unwearied sagacity, the patrician wit and disdainful coolness of Valdés himself, are given with incomparable lightness of touch and felicity of accent. For the first time in Castilian literature we have to do with a man of letters, urbane from study, and accomplished from commerce with a various world. Valdés overtops all the literary figures of Carlos Quinto's reign in natural gift and acquired accomplishment; nor in later times do we easily find his match. FOOTNOTES: [6] Garcilaso's forty-eight Latin stanzas, written after the Danubian imprisonment, are sufficiently unknown to justify a brief quotation here. They occur in Antonius Thylesius' _Opera_ (Naples, 1762), pp. 128-129: _Garcilassi di Vega Toletani ad Antonium Thylesium_:— "_Uxore, natis, fratribus et solo Exul relictis, frigida per loca Musarum alumnus, barbarorum Ferre superbiam, et insolentes Mores coactus jam didici, et invia Per saxa voce in geminantia Fletusque, sub rauco querelas Murmure Danubii levare._" [7] Boehmer gives thirty-nine _Consideraciones_ in the _Tratatidos_ (Bonn, 1880); for the sixty-fifth see Menéndez y Pelayo, _Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles_ (Madrid, 1880), vol. ii. p. 375. CHAPTER VIII THE AGE OF FELIPE II. 1556-1598