Of Faria y Sousa and his like, Góngora made small account: he fastened upon Lope as his victim, pursuing him with unsleeping vindictiveness. There is something pathetic in the Dictator's endeavours to soften his persecutor's heart. He courts Góngora with polite flatteries in print; he dedicates to Góngora the play, _Amor secreto_; he writes Góngora a private letter to remove a wrong impression given by one Mendoza; he repeats Góngora's witty sayings to his intimates; he makes personal overtures to Góngora at literary gatherings; and, if Góngora be not positively rude, Lope reports the fact to the Duque de Sessa as a personal triumph:—"_Está más humano conmigo, que le debo de haber pareçido más ombre de bien de lo que él me ymaginava_" ("He is gentler with me, and I must seem to him a better fellow than he thought"). Despite all his ingratiating arts, Lope failed to conciliate his foe, who rightly regarded him as the chief obstacle in _culteranismo's_ road. The relentless riddlemonger lost no opportunity of ridiculing Lope and his court in such a sonnet as the following, which Churton Englishes with undisguised gusto:— "_Dear Geese, whose haunt is where weak waters flow, From rude Castilian well-head, cheap supply, That keeps your flowery Vega never dry, True Vega, smooth, but somewhat flat and low; Go; dabble, play, and cackle as ye go Down that old stream of gray antiquity; And blame the waves of nobler harmony, Where birds, whose gentle grace you cannot know, Are sailing. Attic wit and Roman skill Are theirs; no swans that die in feeble song, But nursed to life by Heliconian rill, Where Wisdom breathes in Music. Cease your wrong, Flock of the troubled pool: your vain endeavour Will doom you else to duck and dive for ever._" The warfare was carried on with singular ferocity, the careless Lope offering openings at every turn. "Remove those nineteen castles from your shield," sang Góngora, deriding Lope's foible in blazoning his descent. The amour with Marta Nevares Santoyo was the subject of obscene lampoons innumerable. A passage in the _Filomena_ volume arabesques the story of Perseus and Andromeda with a complimentary allusion to an anonymous poet whose name Lope withheld: "so as not to cause annoyance." Góngora's copy of the _Filomena_ exists with this holograph annotation on the margin:—"If you mean yourself, Lopillo, then you are an idiot without art or judgment." Yet, despite a hundred brutal personalities, Lope went his way unheeding, and on Góngora's death he penned a most brilliant sonnet in praise of that "swan of Betis," for whom his affection had never changed.