He dabbles in astrology, notes (with something like a wink) that a man’s fate is ruled by the planet under which he is born, and cites Ptolemy and Plato to support a theory which is so comfortable an excuse for his own pleasant vices. We shall see that he knew much of what was best worth knowing in French literature, and that he knew something of colloquial Arabic appears from the Moorish girl’s replies to Trotaconventos. Probably enough his allusions to Plato and Aristotle imply nothing more solid in the way of learning than Chaucer’s allusion to Pythagoras in _The Book of the Duchesse_. Still he seems to have known Latin, French, Arabic, and perhaps Italian, besides his native language, and we cannot lay stress on his ignorance without appearing to reflect disagreeably on the clergy of to-day. The Archpriest was not, of course, a mediæval scholiast, much less an exact scholar in the modern sense; but, for a man whose lot was cast in an insignificant village, his reading and general culture were far above the average. A brief examination of the _Libro de buen amor_ will make this clear: it will also show that the Archpriest had qualities more enviable than all the learning in the world. He opens with forty lines invoking the blessing of God upon his work, and then he descends suddenly into prose, quoting copiously from Scripture, insisting on the purity of his motives, and asserting that his object is to warn men and women against foolish or unhallowed love. Having lulled the suspicions of uneasy readers with this unctuous preamble, he parenthetically observes: ‘Still, as it is human nature to sin, in case any should choose to indulge in foolish love (which I do not advise), various methods of the same will be found set out here.’ After thus disclosing his real intention, he announces his desire to show by example how every detail of poetry should be executed artistically—_segund que esta çiencia requiere_—and returns to verse. He again commends his work to God, celebrates the joys of Our Lady, and then proceeds to write a sort of picaresque novel in the metre known as the _mester de clerecía_—a quatrain of monorhymed alexandrines.