Íñigo de Mendoza, a gallant and a Franciscan, appears as a disciple of Mena and Gómez Manrique in his _Vita Christi_, which halts at the Massacre of the Innocents. Fray Íñigo is too prone to digressions, and to misplaced satire mimicked from _Mingo Revulgo_, yet his verses have a pleasing, unconventional charm in their adaptation to devout purpose of such lyric forms as the _romance_ and the _villancico_. His fellow-monk, Ambrosio Montesino, Isabel's favourite poet, conveys to Spain the Italian realism of Jacopone da Todi in his _Visitación de Nuestra Señora_, and in hymns fitted to the popular airs preserved in Asenjo Barbieri's _Cancionero Musical de los siglos xv. y xvi_. This embarrassing condition, joined to the writer's passion for conciseness, results in hard effects; yet, at his best, he pipes "a simple song for thinking hearts," and, as Menéndez y Pelayo, the chief of Spanish critics, observes, Montesino's historic interest lies in his suffusing popular verse with the spirit of mysticism, and in his transmuting the popular forms of song into artistic forms. Space fails for contemporary authors of _esparsas_, _decires_, _resquestas_, more or less ingenious; but we cannot omit the name of the Carthusian, JUAN DE PADILLA (1468-?1522), who suffers from an admirer's indiscretion in calling him "the Spanish Homer." His _Retablo de la Vida de Cristo_ versifies the Saviour's life in the manner of Juvencus, and his more elaborate poem, _Los doce triunfos de los doce Apóstoles_, strives to fuse Dante's severity with Petrarch's grace. Rhetorical out of season, and tending to abuse his sonorous vocabulary, Padilla indulges in verbal eccentricities and in sudden drops from altisonance to familiarity; but in his best passages—his journey through hell and purgatory, guided by St. Paul—he excels by force of vision, by his realisation of the horror of the grave, and by his vigorous transcription of the agonies of the lost. The allegorical form is again found in the _Infierno del Amor_ of Garci Sánchez de Badajoz, who ended life in a madhouse. His presentation of Macías, Rodríguez del Padrón, Santillana, and Jorge Manrique in thrall to love's enchantments, was to the taste of his time, and a poem with the same title, _Infierno del Amor_, made the reputation of a certain Guevara, whose scattered songs are full of picaresque and biting wit. For the rest, Sánchez de Badajoz depends upon his daring, almost blasphemous humour, his facility in improvising, and his mastery of popular forms.