Clearly the words to him are a sweet music.[292] From one point of view Gil Vicente’s position exactly tallied with Herculano’s description of the _bobo_. He was a Court jester, expected to render the idle courtiers _muy ledos_. To this purpose he was compelled to saddle his plays with passages which for us have lost their savour and significance but almost every line of which must have elicited a smile or a shout of laughter at the _serões_. We may instance _O Clerigo da Beira_, which ends with the signs and planets under which various courtiers were born, the _Tragicomedia da divisa da cidade de Coimbra_, with the origins of various noble families, the malicious _catalogue raisonné_ of courtiers in the _Cortes de Jupiter_, Branca Gil’s comical litany in _O Velho da Horta_, the sixty-four puzzle verses of the _Auto das Fadas_. But Vicente frequently had a deeper purpose than to enliven a fashionable gathering. The abuse of indulgences, the corruption of the clergy,[293] the subjection of married women, the danger of appointing ignorant men to the responsible position of pilot, the mingling of the classes--it was not so, he remarks, in Germany or Flanders, France or Venice--the increasing tendency to shun honest labour in order to occupy a position however humble at Court,[294] the ignorance and presumption of the peasants, the false display and false ambitions, the thousand new lies and deceits, the decay of piety, the growth of luxury and corresponding diminution in gaiety--these were matters which he sought not only to portray but to correct, with much earnestness in his _iocis levibus_. But to the end of his life he was never able to learn that religion and virtue must be melancholy. In the introduction to the _Triunfo do Inverno_ (1529) he complains of the loss of the joyous dances and songs of Portugal and the disappearance in the last twenty years of the _gaiteiro_ and his cheerful piping. He himself drew his inspiration from the people, from Nature, and from the Scriptures, with which he had no superficial acquaintance. In his love of Nature and his wide curiosity he studied children and birds, plants and flowers, astronomy and witchcraft--those myriad forms of sorcery in Portugal, some of which have fortunately survived in the prohibitory decrees of the Church. He included in his plays or alluded to many of the traditions, the songs and dances of old Portugal--the ancient _cossantes_, the _bailes de terreiro_, _bailos vilãos_,[295] _bailes da Beira_, _chacotas_, _folias_, _alvoradas_, _janeiras, lampas de S. João_.[296] For he stood at the parting of the ways. Desirous and capable of playing many parts, tinged unawares by the new spirit of the Renaissance, but at the same time keenly national, he linked the Middle Ages with the new learning and the old traditions of Portugal with her ever-widening dominions, for which he showed the wise enthusiasm of a true imperialist. But behind the new