Prolixity, artifice, ostentation, monotony, extravagance, are inherent in the pastoral school; and the _Galatea_ savours of these defects. Yet, for all its weakness, it lacks neither imagination nor contrivance, and its embroidered rhetoric is a fine example of stately prose. Save, perhaps, in the _Persiles y Sigismunda_, Cervantes never wrote with a more conscious effort after excellence, and, in results of absolute style, the _Galatea_ may compare with all but exceptional passages in _Don Quixote_. Yet it failed to please, and the author turned to other fields of effort. His verses in Pedro de Padilla's _Jardín Espiritual_ (1585) and in López Maldonado's _Cancionero_ (1586) denote good-nature and a love of literature; and in both volumes Cervantes may have read companion-pieces written by a marvellous youth, Lope de Vega, whom he had already praised—as he praised everybody—in the _Canto de Calíope_. He could not foresee that in the person of this boy he was to meet his match and more. Meanwhile in 1587 he penned sonnets for Padilla's _Grandezas y Excelencias de la Virgen_, and for Alonso de Barros' _Filosofía cortesana_. Verse-making was his craze; and, in 1588, when the physician, Francisco Díaz, published a treatise on kidney disease—_Tratado nuevamente impreso acerca de las enfermedades de los riñones_—the unwearied poetaster was forthcoming with a sonnet pat to the strange occasion. Still, though he cultivated verse with as sedulous a passion as Don Quixote spent on Knight-Errantries, he recognised that man does not live by sonneteering alone, and he tried his fate upon the boards. He died with the happy conviction that he was a dramatist of genius; his contemporaries ruled the point against him, and posterity has upheld the decision. He tells us that at this time he wrote between twenty and thirty plays. We only know the titles of a few among them—the _Gran Turquesca_, the _Jerusalén_, the _Batalla Naval_ (attributed by Moratín to the year 1584), the _Amaranta_ and the _Bosque Amoroso_ (referred to 1586), the _Arsinda_ and the _Confusa_ (to 1587). It is like enough that the _Batalla Naval_ was concerned with Lepanto, a subject of which Cervantes never tired; the _Arsinda_ existed so late as 1673, when Juan de Matos Fragoso mentioned it as "famous" in his _Corsaria Catalana_; and our author himself ranked the _Confusa_ as "good among the best." The touch of self-complacency is amusing, though one might desire a better security than Bardolph's.