The exact source from which _Amadis de Gaula_ emerged is buried in mystery. It bears the stamp of French influence; but, in the form it appeared in Spain during the fifteenth century, was a translation by Ordoñez de Montalvo of the work of a Portuguese Knight who fought at the battle of Aljubarrota. Gaula, the kingdom of Amadis’s birth is Wales;—the time—“not many years after the passion of Our Redeemer”; but neither geography nor chronology is of much importance to the romance that relates the wanderings of an imaginary Prince, his love for “Oriana, the true and peerless lady,” daughter of an imaginary King of England, and his encounters with other Knights and various magicians and giants; until at length a happy marriage brings his trials to a temporary conclusion. The immense popularity that this book enjoyed led to innumerable imitations; one of them, the story of “Esplandion” a supposed son of Amadis, by Montalvo himself; but all reproduced and exaggerated the faults of the earlier book, without achieving the charm of style that here and there illuminated its pages. The heroes of these romances are indeed a dreary company, differing only, as it has been said, “in the size of the giants they slay and in the degree of improbability of their colourless adventures and loves.” A variation of this type of literature were the “Visionary Romances,” of which the _Carcel de Amor_ or _Prison of Love_ is perhaps the best example. This was the work of a fifteenth-century poet, Diego de San Pedro, who describes how in a vision he saw “savage Desire” lead an unhappy Knight in chains to torture him in the Castle of Love. This victim’s release brings allegory to an end, and introduces a wearisome round of adventures much in the style of the ordinary romance. The _Carcel de Amor_ was printed in 1492, and delighted the Court of Ferdinand and Isabel; but Cervantes’s Priest and Barber, had they found it, would have undoubtedly pitched it through the library window to increase the bonfire in the courtyard below.