A poet of greater performance than any in the _Cancionero de Baena_ is the shifty politician, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de SANTILLANA (1398-1458), townsman of Rabbi Sem Tob, the Jew of Carrión. Oddly enough, Baena excludes Santillana from his collection, and Santillana, in reviewing the poets of his time, ignores Baena, whom he probably despised as a parasite. A remarkable letter to the Constable of Portugal shows Santillana as a pleasant prose-writer; in his rhetorical _Lamentaçion en Propheçia de la segunda Destruyçion de España_ he fails in the grand style, though he succeeds in the familiar with his collection of old wives' fireside proverbs, _Refranes que diçen las Viejas tras el Huego_. His _Centiloquio_, a hundred rhymed proverbs divided into fourteen chapters, is gracefully written and skilfully put together; his _Comedieta de Ponza_ is reminiscent of both Dante and Boccaccio, and its title, together with the fact that the dialogue is allotted to different personages, has led many into the error of taking it for a dramatic piece. Far more essentially dramatic in spirit is the _Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna_, which embodies a doctrinal argument upon the advantages of the philosophic mind in circumstances of adversity; and grouped with this goes the _Doctrinal de Privados_, a fierce philippic against Álvaro de Luna, Santillana's political foe, who is convicted of iniquities out of his own mouth. It is impossible to say of Santillana that he was an original genius: it is within bounds to class him as a highly gifted versifier with extraordinary imitative powers. He has no "message" to deliver, no wide range of ideas: his attraction lies not so much in what is said as in his trick of saying it. He is one of the few poets whom erudition has not hampered. He was familiar with writers as diverse as Dante and Petrarch and Alain Chartier, and he reproduces their characteristics with a fine exactness and felicity. But he was something more than an intelligent echo, for he filed and laboured till he acquired a final manner of his own. Doubtless to his own taste his forty-two sonnets—_fechos al itálico modo_, as he proudly tells you were his best titles to glory; and it is true that he acclimatised the sonnet in Spain, sharing with the Aragonese, Juan de Villapando, the honour of being Spain's only sonneteer before Boscán's time. Commonplace in thought, stiff in expression, the sonnets are only historically curious. It is in his lighter vein that Santillana reaches his full stature. The grace and gaiety of his _decires_, _serranillas_ and _vaqueiras_ are all his own. If he borrowed suggestions from Provençal poets, he is free of the Provençal artifice, and sings with the simplicity of Venus' doves. Here he revealed a peculiar aspect of his many-sided temperament, and by his tact made a living thing of primitive emotions, which were to be done to death in the pastorals of heavy-handed bunglers.