He had a taste for the dignity as well as for the pomps of life. If he entertained the King and arranged tourneys, he was careful to surround himself with men of letters. His chaplain, Pedro Díaz de Toledo, translated the _Phaedo_; his secretary, Diego de Burgos, was a poet who imitated Santillana, and commemorated him in the _Triunfo del Marqués_. But Santillana was not a scholar, and made no pretension to be one. He knew no Greek, and he says that he never learned Latin. This is not mock-modesty, for his statement is corroborated by his contemporary, Juan de Lucena. He tried to make good his deficiencies, airs a Latin quotation now and then, and must have spelled his way through Horace, for he has left a pleasing version of the ode _Beatus ille_. Late in life, he is thought to have read part of Homer in a Spanish translation probably made (through a Latin rendering) by his son Pedro González de Mendoza, the ‘Gran Cardenal de España,’ the Tertius Rex who ruled almost on terms of equality with Ferdinand and Isabel. Whatever his shortcomings, Santillana’s admiration for classic authors was complete. He caused translations to be made of Virgil, Ovid and Seneca, and records his view that the word ‘sublime’ should be applied solely to ‘those who wrote their works in Greek or Latin metres.’ His interest in learning and his wide general culture are beyond dispute. His library contained the _Roman de la Rose_, the works of Guillaume de Machault, of Oton de Granson, and of Alain Chartier whom he singles out for special praise as the author of _La Belle dame sans merci_ and the _Reveil Matin_—‘por çierto cosas assaz fermosas é plaçientes de oyr.’ He appeals to the authority of Raimon Vidal, to Jaufré de Foixá’s continuation of Vidal, and to the rules laid down by the Consistory of the Gay Science; and, if we may believe the lively _Coplas de la Panadera_, he carried his liking for all things French so far as to appear on the battlefield of Olmedo armado como francés. He had a still deeper admiration for the great Italian masters. In the preface to his _Comedieta de Ponza_, which describes the rout of the allied fleets of Castile and Aragón by the Genoese in 1435, Boccaccio is one of the interlocutors. There is a patent resemblance between Santillana’s _Triunphete de Amor_ and the _Trionfi_ of Petrarch, who is mentioned in the first quatrain of the poem:— Vi lo que persona humana tengo que jamás non vió, nin Petrarcha qu’ escrivió de triunphal gloria mundana.