But Dante naturally has the foremost place in Santillana’s library. Boccaccio’s biography of the poet stands on the shelves with the _Divina Commedia_, the _Canzoni della vita nuova_, and the _Convivio_. Without Dante we should not have Santillana’s _Sueño_, nor _La Coronación de Mossén Jordi_, nor _La Comedieta de Ponza_, nor the _Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna_: at any rate, we should not have them in their actual forms. Nor should we have _El Infierno de los Enamorados_, in which Santillana invites a dangerous comparison by adapting to the circumstances of Macías _o Namorado_ the plaint of Francesca:— La mayor cuyta que aver puede ningun amador es membrarse del plaçer en el tiempo del dolor. It is not, however, as an imitator of Dante that Santillana interests us. He himself was perhaps most proud of his attempt to naturalise the sonnet form in Spain; but these forty-two sonnets, _fechos al itálico modo_ in Petrarch’s manner, are little more than curious, premature experiments. And, as I have already suggested, the passion of hate concentrated in the _Doctrinal de privados_ is incommunicative at a distance of some four centuries and a half. Santillana attains real excellence in a very different vein. His natural lyrism finds almost magical expression in the _serranillas_ of which _La Vaquera de la Finojosa_ is the most celebrated example, and in the airy _desires_ which show his relation to the Portuguese-Galician school. Indeed he has left us one song— Por amar non saybamente mays como louco sirvente— which Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo believes to be ‘one of the last composed in Galician by a Castilian _trovador_.’ In these popular or semi-pastoral lays, so apparently artless and so artfully ironical, Santillana has never been surpassed by any Spanish poet, though he is closely pressed by the anonymous writer of the striking _serranilla morisca_ beginning— ¡Si ganada es Antequera! ¡Oxalá Granada fuera! ¡Sí me levantara un dia por mirar bien Antequera! vy mora con ossadía passear por la rivera— and still more closely by the many-sided Lope de Vega in the famous barcarolle in _El Vaquero de Moraña_.