Mena had an almost superstitious reverence for the classics, and describes the _Iliad_ as ‘a holy and seraphic work.’ Unfortunately he is embarrassed by his learning, or rather by a deliberate pedantry which is even more offensive now than it was in his day. It takes a poet as great as Milton to carry off a burden of erudition, and Mena was no Milton. But he was a poet of high aims, and he produced a genuinely impressive allegorical poem in _El Laberinto de Fortuna_, more commonly known as _Las Trezientas_. The explanation of this popular title is simple. The poem in its original form consisted of nearly three hundred stanzas—297 to be precise—and another hand has added three more, no doubt to make the poem correspond exactly to its current title. Some of you may remember the story of Juan II.’s asking Mena to write sixty-five more stanzas so that there might be one for every day in the year; and the poet is said to have died leaving only twenty-four of these additional stanzas behind him. This is quite a respectable tradition as traditions go, for it is recorded by the celebrated commentator Hernán Núñez, who wrote within half a century of the poet’s death. We cannot, of course, know what Juan II. said, or did not say, to Mena; but the twenty-four stanzas are in existence, and the internal evidence goes to show that they were written after Mena’s time. They deal severely with the King—the ‘prepotente señor’ of whom Mena always speaks, as a court poet must speak, in terms of effusive compliment. Here, however, the question of character arises, and, as I have already noted, Spaniards and foreigners are at variance.