_Rimado de Palacio_ (Court Rhymes) is a chance title that has attached itself to Ayala's poem without the author's sanction. It gives a false impression of his theme, which is the decadence of his age. Only within narrow limits does Ayala deal with courts and courtiers; he had a wider outlook, and he scourges society at large. What was a jest to Ruiz was a woe to the Chancellor. Ruiz had a natural sympathy for a loose-living cleric; Ayala lashes this sort with a thong steeped in vitriol. The one looks at life as a farce; the other sees it as a tragedy. Where the first finds matter for merriment, the second burns with the white indignation of the just. The deliberate mordancy of Ayala is impartial insomuch as it is universal. Courtiers, statesmen, bishops, lawyers, merchants—he brands them all with corruption, simony, embezzlement, and exposes them as venal sons of Belial. And, like Ruiz, he places himself in the pillory to heighten his effects. He spares not his superstitious belief in omens, dreams, and such-like fooleries; he discovers himself as a grinder of the poor man's face, a libidinous perjurer, a child of perdition. But not all Ayala's poem is given up to cursing. In his 705th stanza he closes what he calls his _sermón_ with the confession that he had written it, "being sore afflicted by many grievous sorrows," and in the remaining 904 stanzas Ayala breathes a serener air. In both existing codices—that of Campo-Alange and that of the Escorial—this huge postscript follows the _Rimado de Palacio_ with no apparent break of continuity; yet it differs in form and substance from what precedes. The _cuaderna vía_ alone is used in the satiric and autobiographical verses; the later hymns and songs are metrical experiments—echoes of Galician and Provençal measures, _redondillas_ of seven syllables, attempts to raise the Alexandrine from the dead, results derived from Alfonso's _Cantigas_ and Juan Ruiz' _loores_. In his seventy-third year Ayala was still working upon his _Rimado de Palacio_. It was too late for him to master the new methods creeping into vogue, and though in the _Cancionero de Baena_ (No. 518) Ayala answers Sánchez Talavera's challenge in the regulation octaves, he harks back to the _cuaderna vía_ of his youth in his paraphrase of St. Gregory's _Job_. If he be the writer of the _Proverbios en Rimo de Salomón_—a doubtful point—his preference for the old system is there undisguised. Could that system have been saved, Ayala had saved it: not even he could stay the world from moving.