His “Fílida,” in seven parts, was written while he was attached to the Duke of Infantado; for he announces himself on the title-page as “a gentleman and a courtier,” and, in his Dedication to one of the family, says that “his greatest labor is to live idle, contented, and honored as one of the servants of their house.” The romance contains, as was usual in such works, the adventures of living and known personages, among whom were Montalvo himself, Cervantes, and the nobleman to whom it is dedicated. But the tone of pastoral life is not better preserved than it is in the other fictions of the same class. Indeed, in the sixth part, there is a most inappropriate critical discussion on the merits of the two schools of Spanish poetry then contending for fashionable mastery; and in the seventh is a courtly festival, with running at the ring, in which the shepherds appear on horseback with lances and armorial bearings, like knights. The prose style of the whole is pure and good; and among the poems with which it abounds, a few in the old Spanish measure may be selected that are nearly, if not quite, equal to the similar poems of Montemayor. Cervantes, too, as we have already noticed, was led by the spirit of the times, rather, perhaps, than by his own taste, to begin--as an offering to the lady of his love--the “Galatea,” of which the first six books, published in 1584, were all that ever appeared.[73] This was followed, in 1586, by “Truth for the Jealous”; again a romance in six books, and, like the last, unfinished. It was written by Bartolomé Lopez de Enciso, of whom we know from himself that he was a young man when he wrote it, and that it was his purpose to publish a second part, of which, however, nothing more was heard. Nor can we regret that he failed to fulfil his promise. His fictions, which are occupied chiefly with the nymphs and shepherds of the Tagus, are among the most confused and unmeaning that have ever been attempted. His scene is laid, from its opening, in the days of the most ancient Greek mythology; but the Genius of Spain, in the fifth book, carries the same shepherds who thus figure in the first to a magnificent temple, and shows them the statues of Charles the Fifth, of Philip the Second, and even of Philip the Third, who was not yet on the throne;--thus confounding the earliest times of classical antiquity with an age which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was yet to come. Other inconsequences follow, in great numbers, as matters of course, while nothing in either the prose or the poetry is of value enough to compensate for the absurdities in the story. Indeed, few portions of Spanish literature show any thing more stiff and wearisome than the long declamations and discussions in this dull fiction.[74] [73] _Ante_, Vol. II, pp. 61-64.