Having analysed the contents of the work, we are now in a better position to form a judgment on the conclusion implied by an incidental question in M. Alfred Jeanroy’s admirable book, _Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge_:—‘Mais qui ne sait que l’œuvre de Hita est une macédoine d’imitations françaises, qui témoignent du reste de la plus grande originalité d’esprit?’ The proposition may be too broadly put, but it is fundamentally true. The Archpriest borrows in all directions. The sources of between twenty and thirty of his fables have been pointed out by Wolf, and may be followed up a little higher in the works of M. Hervieux and Mr. Jacobs. Orientalists no doubt could tell us, if they chose, the origin of the story of King Alcarás and his doomed son:— Era vn Rey de moros, Alcarás nonbre avia; nasçiole vn fijo bello, mas de aquel non tenja, enbjo por sus sabios, dellos saber querria el signo e la planeta del fijo quel nasçia. Once at least the Archpriest hits on a subject which also attracted his contemporary the Infante Don Juan Manuel: the _Libro de buen amor_ and the _Conde Lucanor_ both relate the story of the thief who sold his soul to the devil. But the differences between the two men are more marked than the resemblances. The Archpriest has nothing of the Infante’s imposing gravity and cold disdain; his temperament is more exuberant, the note of his humour is more incorrigibly picaresque, and he seeks his subjects further afield. The tale of the pantomimic dispute between the learned Greek and the illiterate Roman is thought by Wolf to derive probably from some mediæval Latin source, and Sr. Puyol y Alonso particularises with the ingenious suggestion that the Archpriest took it from a commentary by Accursius on Pomponius’s text of the Digest (_De origine juris_, Tit. ii.). Perhaps: but this is just the sort of story that circulated orally in the Middle Ages from one country to another as smoking-room jests float across the Atlantic now, and Ruiz is quite as likely to have picked it up from a tramping tinker, or a tumbler at a booth, as from the famous juridical _glossator_ of the previous century. We cannot tell who his friends were nor where he went; but the _Libro de buen amor_ shows that he had acquaintances in all classes—especially in the least starched of them—and it would not surprise me to learn that he had wandered as far as Italy or France. Life was brighter, more full of opportunities, for a clerical picaroon in the fourteenth century than it is to-day. Now he would be suspended as a scandal: then the world was all before him where to choose. Of Italian I am not so sure: certainly the Archpriest knew French literature better than we should expect. Observe that the Treasurer of the Talavera Chapter mentions Blanchefleur, Floire and Tristan, and (of course) finds their trials less pathetic than his own and the worthy Teresa’s.