The year 1526 found Boscan at Granada, where Andrea Navagiero, Ambassador from Venice to the Court of Charles the Fifth, was then in residence. A common love of letters drew the two young men into closest intimacy with each other. "Being with Navagiero there one day," says Boscan in his 'Letter to the Duquesa de Soma,' "and discoursing with him about matters of wit and letters, and especially about the different forms they take in different languages, he asked me why I did not make an experiment in Castilian of sonnets and the other forms of verse used by good Italian authors; and not only spoke to me of it thus slightly, but urged me to do it.... And thus I began to try this kind of verse. At first I found it somewhat difficult; for it is of a very artful construction, and in many particulars different from ours. But afterwards it seemed to me--perhaps from the love we naturally bear to what is our own--that I began to succeed very well; and so I went on little by little with increasing zeal." Little dreamed the Venetian diplomat that, owing to his friendly advice, a school was destined to arise shortly in the poetry of Spain which would by no means have ceased to exist after the lapse of nearly four centuries. From that day Boscan devoted himself to the exclusive composition of verses in the Italian measure, undeterred by the bitter opposition of the partisans of the old school. The incomparable Garcilaso de la Vega, then scarcely past his majority, warmly supported the innovation of his beloved friend, and soon far surpassed Boscan himself as a writer of sonnets and _canzones_. The Barcelonese poet spent the remainder of his life in comparative retirement, although he appeared occasionally at court, and at one time superintended the education of the young Duke of Alva, whose name afterwards became one of such terror in the annals of the Netherlands. Boscan's death took place at Perpignan about 1540.