Despues fise muchas cantigas de dança e troteras, para judias e moras e para entenderas, para en jnstrumentos de comunales maneras: el cantar que non sabes, oylo acantaderas. Cantares fis algunos de los que disen los siegos e para escolares que andan nochernjegos e para muchos otros por puertas andariegos, caçurros e de bulrras, non cabrian en dyes priegos. Few men have anything to fear from their enemies, but most are in danger of being made ridiculous by their admirers. Puymaigre was no blind eulogist, and yet in an unwary moment he suggests a dangerous comparison when he quotes the passage describing the emotion of Doña Endrina’s lover on first meeting her:— Pero tal lugar non era para fablar en amores: amj luego me venjeron muchos mjedos e tenblores, los mis pies e las mjs manos non eran de si senores, perdi seso, perdi fuerça, mudaron se mjs colores. And he ventures to place these lines beside the evocation in the _Vita Nuova_:— Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare La donna mia quand’ ella altrui saluta, Ch’ ogni lingua divien tremando muta, E gli occhi non l’ardiscon di guardare. The suggested parallel does little credit to Puymaigre’s undoubted critical instinct. It is, moreover, damaging to the Archpriest who, in this particular passage, is simply translating from the First Act of _Pamphilus de Amore_ (sc. iii.):— Quantus adesset ei nunc locus inde loqui! Sed dubito. Tanti michi nunc venere dolores! Nec mea vox mecum, nec mea verba manent. Nec michi sunt vires, trepidantque manusque pedesque. Comparisons are odious, but, if they must be made, let us compare like to like. No breath of Dante’s hushed rapture plays round the libidinous Archpriest. The Spaniard never stirs in his reader a flicker of mystic ardour; he is of the world, of the flesh, and sometimes of the devil; his realism is irrepressible, his view of human nature is cynical, and his interpretation is pregnant with a constant irony. But he enjoys life, such as it is, while he can. He gives us to understand that people and things are what they are because they cannot be otherwise, and he makes the most of both by describing in a spirit of bacchantic pessimism the ludicrous spectacle of the world. Learning is most excellent, but the Archpriest finds as much wisdom in a _proverbio chico_ as in the patter of the schools; a _cantar de gesta_ has its place in the scheme of literature, for it lends itself to parody; soldiers slash their way to glory, but, though they fascinate the ordinary timorous literary man, the Archpriest sees through them, and humorously exhibits them as sharpers more punctual on pay-day than in the hour of battle. His whole book, and especially his catalogue—_De las propriedades que las dueñas chicas han_—bespeak an incurable susceptibility to feminine charm; but he leaves you under no delusion as to the seductiveness of the women on the hillsides:—