A better man and a better writer is JUAN ÁLVAREZ GATO (?1433-96), the Madrid knight of whom Gómez Manrique says that he "spoke pearls and silver." It is difficult for us to judge him on his merits, for, though his _cancionero_ exists, it has not yet been printed; and we are forced to study him as he is represented in the _Cancionero General_, where his love-songs show a dignity of sentiment and an exquisiteness of expression not frequent in any epoch, and exceptional in his own time. His sacred lyrics, the work of his old age, lack unction: but even here his mastery of form saves his pious _villancicos_ from oblivion, and ranks him as the best of Encina's predecessors. His friend, Hernán Mexía, follows Pero Torrellas with a satire on the foibles of women, in which he easily outdoes his model in mischievous wit and in ingenious fancy. GÓMEZ MANRIQUE, Señor de Villazopeque (1412-91), is a poet of real distinction, whose entire works have been reprinted from two complementary _cancioneros_ discovered in 1885. Sprung from a family illustrious in Spanish history, Gómez Manrique was a foremost leader in the rebellion of the Castilian nobles against Enrique IV. In allegorical pieces like the _Batalla de amores_, he frankly imitates the Galician model, and in one instance he replies to a certain Don Álvaro in Portuguese. Then he joins himself to the rising Italian school, wherein his uncle, Santillana, had preceded him; and his experiments extend to adaptations of Sem Tob's sententious moralisings, to didactic poems in the manner of Mena, and to _coplas_ on Juan de Valladolid, in which he measures himself unsuccessfully with the rude tailor, Montoro. Humour was not Gómez Manrique's calling, and his attention to form is an obvious preoccupation which diminishes his vigour: but his chivalrous refinement and noble tenderness are manifest in his answer to Torrellas' invective. His pathos is nowhere more touching than in the elegiacs on Garcilaso de la Vega; while in the lines to his wife, Juana de Mendoza, Gómez Manrique portrays the fleetingness of life, the sting of death, with almost incomparable beauty.