Thanks to M. Foulché-Delbosc, we are all of us at last able to read _El Laberinto de Fortuna_ in a critical edition, and to study the history of the text reconstructed for us by the most indefatigable and exact scholar now working in the field of Spanish literature. It has been denied that _El Laberinto de Fortuna_ owes anything to the _Divina Commedia_. The influence of Dante is plain in the adoption of the seven planetary circles, in the fording of the stream, in the vision of what was, and is, and is to be. The _Laberinto_ contains reminiscences of the _Roman de la Rose_, and passages freely translated from Mena’s fellow-townsman Lucan. It is derivative, and, though comparatively short, it is often tedious. But are not most allegorical poems tedious? Macaulay has been reproached for saying that few readers are ‘in at the death of the Blatant Beast’: the fact being that Macaulay’s wonderful memory failed for once. The Blatant Beast was never killed. But how many educated men, how many professional literary critics, can truthfully say that they have read the whole of the _Faerie Queene_? How many of these few are prepared to have their knowledge tested? I notice that, now as always, a significant silence follows these innocent questions; and, merely pausing to observe that there are two cantos on Mutability to read after the Blatant Beast breaks ‘his yron chaine’ in the Sixth Book, I pass on. The _Laberinto_, with its constant over-emphasis, is not to be compared with the _Faerie Queene_; but it has passages of stately beauty, it breathes a passionate pride in the glory of Castile, and, while the poet does all that metrical skill can do to lessen the monotonous throb of the _versos de arte mayor_, he also strives to endow Spain with a new poetic diction. Mena thought meanly of the vernacular—_el rudo y desierto romance_—as a vehicle of expression, and he was logically driven to innovate. He failed, partly because he latinised to excess; yet many of his novelties—_diáfano_ and _nítido_, for example—are now part and parcel of the language, and many more deserved a better fate than death by ridicule. Like Herrera, who attempted a similar reform in the next century, Mena was too far in advance of his contemporaries; but this is not necessarily a sign of unintelligence. Mena was too closely wedded to his classical idols to develop into a great poet; still, at his happiest, he is a poet of real impressiveness, and his command of exalted rhetoric and resonant music enable him to represent—better even than Góngora, a far more splendid artist—the characteristic tradition of the poetical school of Córdoba.