His own attempt survives chiefly because of the name on its title-page. Pastorals differ little in essentials, and the kind offers few openings to Cervantes' peculiar humoristic genius. Like his fellow-practitioners, he crowds his stage with figures: he presents his shepherds Elicio and Erastro warbling their love for Galatea on Tagus bank; he reveals Mirenio enamoured of Silveria, Leonarda love-sick for Salercio, Lenio in the toils of Gelasia. Hazlitt, in his harsh criticism of Sidney's _Arcadia_, hits the defects of the pastoral, and his censures may be justly applied to the _Galatea_. There, as in the English book, we find the "original sin of alliteration, antithesis, and metaphysical conceit"; there, too, is the "systematic interpolation of the wit, learning, ingenuity, wisdom, and everlasting impertinence of the writer." Worst of all are "the continual, uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering everything, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature." But if Cervantes sins in this wise, he sins of set purpose and in good company. In his Fourth Book, he interpolates a long disquisition on the Beautiful which he calmly annexes from Judas Abarbanel's _Dialoghi_. As Sannazaro opens his _Arcadia_ with Ergasto and Selvaggio, so Cervantes thrusts his Elicio and Erastro into the foreground of the _Galatea_; the funeral of Meliso is a deliberate imitation of the Feast of Pales; and, as the Italian introduced Carmosina Bonifacia under the name of Amaranta, the Spaniard perforce gives Catalina de Palacios Salazar as Galatea. Nor does he depart from the convention by placing himself upon the scene as Elicio, for Ribeiro and Montemôr had preceded him in the characters of Bimnardel and Sereno. Lastly, the idea and the form of the _Canto de Calíope_, wherein the uncritical poet celebrates whole tribes of contemporary singers, are borrowed from the _Canto del Turia_, which Gil Polo had interpolated in his _Diana_.