[360] Barbosa, Bib. Lusitana, Lisboa, 1752, fol., Tom. III. p. 775, and the many authorities there cited, none of which, perhaps, is of much consequence except that of João de Barros, who, being a careful historian, born in 1496, and citing an older author than himself, adds something to the testimony in favor of Lobeira. [361] Gomez de Zurara, in the outset of his “Chronicle of the Conde Don Pedro de Meneses,” says that he wishes to write an account only of “the things that happened in his own times, or of those which happened so near to his own times that he could have true knowledge of them.” This strengthens what he says concerning Lobeira, in the passage cited in the text from the opening of Chap. 63 of the Chronicle. The Ferdinand to whom Zurara there refers was the father of John I. and died in 1383. The Chronicle of Zurara is published by the Academy of Lisbon, in their “Colecção de Libros Ineditos de Historia Portuguesa,” Lisboa, 1792, fol., Tom. II. I have a curious manuscript “Dissertation on the Authorship of the Amadis de Gaula,” by Father Sarmiento, who wrote the valuable fragment of a History of Spanish Poetry to which I have often referred. This learned Galician is much confused and vexed by the question;--first denying that there is any authority at all for saying Lobeira wrote the Amadis; then asserting, that, _if_ Lobeira wrote it, he was a Galician; then successively suggesting that it may have been written by Vasco Perez de Camões, by the Chancellor Ayala, by Montalvo, or by the Bishop of Cartagena;--all absurd conjectures, much connected with his prevailing passion to refer the origin of all Spanish poetry to Galicia. He does not seem to have been aware of the passage in Gomez de Zurara. Whether Lobeira had any older popular tradition or fancies about Amadis, to quicken his imagination and marshal him the way he should go, we cannot now tell. He certainly had a knowledge of some of the old French romances, such as that of the Saint Graal, or Holy Cup,--the crowning fiction of the Knights of the Round Table,[362]--and distinctly acknowledges himself to have been indebted to the Infante Alfonso, who was born in 1370, for an alteration made in the character of Amadis.[363] But that he was aided, as has been suggested, in any considerable degree, by fictions known to have been in Picardy in the eighteenth century, and claimed, without the slightest proof, to have been there in the twelfth, is an assumption made on too slight grounds to be seriously considered.[364] We must therefore conclude, from the few, but plain, facts known in the case, that the Amadis was originally a Portuguese fiction produced before the year 1400, and that Vasco de Lobeira was its author.