Everything connected with the _Galatea_ is imitative—the impulse to write it, the matter, and the manner. The _Galatea_ is no spontaneous product of the author’s fancy; it owes its existence to Sannazaro’s _Arcadia_, and to the early Spanish imitations of the _Arcadia_ recorded in Professor Rennert’s exhaustive monograph. We shall not be far wrong in thinking that it might never have struggled into print, had not Cervantes been encouraged by the example of his friend Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, who had made a hit with _El Pastor de Fílida_. So, too, as regards the matter of the _Galatea_. The sixth book is a frank adaptation of the _Arcadia_; there are further reminiscences of Sannazaro’s pastoral in both the verse and the prose of the _Galatea_; other allusions are worked in without much regard to their appropriateness; León Hebreo is not too lofty, nor Alonso Pérez too lowly, to escape Cervantes’s depredations. Lastly, the manner is no less imitative: construction, arrangement, distribution, diction are all according to precedent. Martínez Marina, indeed, held the odd view that there was something new in the style of the _Galatea_, and that Cervantes and Mariana were the first to move down the steep slope that leads to _culteranismo_. During the hundred years that Martínez Marina’s theory has been before the world it has made no converts, and therefore it needs no refutation. But, though the theory is mistaken, some of the facts advanced to support it are indubitable: the _Galatea_ is deliberately latinised in imitation of Sannazaro who sought to reproduce the sustained and sonorous melody of the Ciceronian period. So intent is Cervantes upon the model that his own personality is overwhelmed. He probably never wrote with more scrupulous care than when at work on the _Galatea_, yet all his pains and all his elaborate finish are so much labour lost. Briefly, the _Galatea_ is little more than the echo of an echo, and the individual quality of Cervantes’s voice is lost amid the reverberations of exotic music.