_escudeiro_ on which Vicente dwells so fondly--we have the latter as Aires Rosado in _Quem tem farelos?_ and anonymous in the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_ and _O Juiz da Beira_[282]--is another instance of literary tradition combined with observation at first hand. Of the priest-satire Vicente was the last free exponent in Portugal. That of the poor gentleman was even older and survived him. It dates from Roman times. The _amethystinatus_ of Spanish Martial[283] reappears in the _Cancioneiro da Vaticana_, in the Archpriest of Hita’s Don Furon, in the _lindos fidalgos que viven lazerados_ of Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino, in the _Cancioneiro Geral_, and just before Vicente’s death is wittily described, as the _raphanophagus purpuratus_, by Clenardus,[284] and less urbanely in _Lazarillo de Tormes_. With no Inquisition to crush him he continued to starve in literature--for instance, in the anonymous later sixteenth-century play _Auto do Escudeiro Surdo_ he and his _moço_ come on the scene in thoroughly Vicentian guise: _a vossa fome de pam ... meio tostão gasto quinze dias ha_[285]--as he starves in the real life of the Peninsula to-day.[286] In a sense Gil Vicente no doubt borrowed widely; he was no sorcerer to make bricks without straw, and straw, like poets, is not manufactured: it has to be gathered in. But the _homens de bom saber_ who, as we know from the rubric to the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_, doubted his originality must have been very superficial as well as envious critics, for the bricks were essentially his own. Indeed, every page of his _autos_ is hall-marked as his, _ca non alheo_, and he could say with King Alfonso X: Mais se o m’eu melhoro faço ben E non sõo per aquesto ladron.