An allied poet of the Salamancan school is Torre's friend, FRANCISCO DE FIGUEROA (1536-?1620), a native of Alcalá de Henares, whom his townsman Cervantes introduces in the pastoral _Galatea_ under the name of Tirsi. Little is recorded of his life save that he served as a soldier in Italy, that he studied at Rome, Bologna, Siena, and perhaps Naples, that the Italians called him the _Divino_ (the title was sometimes cheaply given), and that some even ranked him next to Petrarch. He returned to Alcalá, where he married "nobly," as we are told; and he is found travelling with the Duque de Terranova in the Low Countries about 1597. On his deathbed he bethought him of Virgil's example, and ordered that all his poems should be burned; those that escaped were published at Lisbon in 1626 by the historian Luis Tribaldos de Toledo, who reports what little we know concerning the writer. That he versified much in Italian appears from Juan Verzosa's evidence:— "_El lingua perges alterna pangere versus._" And a vestige of the youthful practice is preserved in the elegy to Juan de Mendoza y Luna, where one Spanish line and two Italian lines compose each tercet. One admirable sonnet is that written on the death of the poet's son, Garcilaso de la Vega _el Mozo_, who, like his famous father, fell in battle. Figueroa's bent is towards the pastoral; he sings of sweet repose, of love's costly glory, of Tirsi's pangs, of Fileno's passion realised, and of _ingrata_ Fili. His points of resemblance with Torre are many; but his talent is more original, his mood more melancholy, his taste finer, his diction more exquisite. He ranks so high among his country's singers, it is not incredible that he might take his stand with the greatest if we possessed all his poems, instead of a few numbers saved from fire. And, as it is, he deserves peculiar praise as the earliest poet who, following Boscán and Garcilaso, mastered the blank verse, whose secrets had eluded them. He avoids the subtle peril of the assonant; he varies the mechanical uniformity of beat or stress; and, by skilful alternations of his cæsura, diversifies his rhythm to such harmonic purpose as no earlier experimentalist approaches. At his hands the most formidable of Castilian metres is finally vanquished, and the _verso suelto_ is established on an equality with the sonnet. That alone ensures Figueroa's fame: he sets the standard by which successors are measured. Ariosto's vigorous epical manner is faintly suggested in twelve cantos of the _Angélica_, by a Seville doctor, LUIS BARAHONA DE SOTO (fl. 1586). Lope de Vega, in the _Laurel de Apolo_, praises "_The doctor admirable Whose page of gold The story of Medora told_,"