What we know of Francisco de la Torre is based upon the researches of Quevedo's learned editor, Aureliano Fernández-Guerra y Orbe.[12] A native of Torrelaguna, he matriculated at Alcalá de Henares in 1556, fell in love with the "_Filis rigurosa_" whom he sings, served with Carlos Quinto in the Italian campaigns, returned to find Filis married to an elderly Toledan millionaire, remained constant to his (more or less) platonic flame, and ended by taking orders in his despair. The unadorned simplicity of his manner is at the remotest pole from Quevedo's frosty brilliancy. No small proportion of his sonnets is translated from the Italian. Thus, where Benedetto Varchi writes "_Questa e, Tirsi, quel fonte in cui solea_," Torre follows close with "_Ésta es, Tirsi, la fuente do solia_;" and when Giovanni Battista Amalteo celebrates "_La viva neve e le vermiglie rose_," the Spaniard echoes back "_La blanca nieve y la purpúrea rosa_." Schelling finds the light fantastic rapture of the Elizabethan lover expressed to perfection in the eighty-first of Spenser's _Amoretti_: line for line, and almost word for word, Torre's twenty-third sonnet is identical, and, when we at length possess a critical edition of Spenser, it will surely prove that both poems derive from a common Italian source. Such examples are numerous, and are worth noting as germane to the general question. No man in Europe was more original than Quevedo, none less disposed to lean on Italy. To conceive that he should seek to reform _culteranismo_ by translating from Italians of yesterday, or to suppose that he knowingly passed as original work imitations made by a man who—_ex hypothesi_—died before his models were born, is to believe Quevedo a clumsy trickster. That conclusion is untenable; and Torre deserves all credit for his graceful renderings, as for his more original poems—gallant, tender, and sentimental. He is one of the earliest Spanish poets to choose simple, natural themes—the ivy fallen to the ground, the widowed song-bird, the wounded hind, the charms of landscape and the enchantment of the spring. A smaller replica of Garcilaso, with a vision and personality of his own: so Francisco de la Torre appears in the perspective of Castilian song.