glitter and luxury of Lisbon he constantly saw the growing misery of the people of Portugal for which all the splendour of King Manuel’s reign had been but a terrible storm[297]; and his latter sadness was perhaps less personal than patriotic. He had done what he could, far more than had been required of him. He had been expected to delight a Court audience, and had mingled warning and instruction with amusement; and when, having lived and laughed and loved, he went his way, he was not only spared by a crowning grace from the wrath that was to come but left to his countrymen an heirloom more enduring than brass, more precious than all the gold of India, with a breath of that true Portugal in its simplicity, its mirth and jollity, the disappearance of which he had deplored. Portuguese literature was never so national again. A period of splendid achievement followed, but alike in subject and language it was too often a honeyed sweetness containing in itself the seeds of decay, and if for the time it swept away all memory of Gil Vicente, for us it only emphasizes his qualities by the contrast. In his directness, his close contact with the people,[298] his humanity, his quick observation, keen satire, love of laughter and malicious humour, in his unsurpassed lyrical gift and his natural delight in words, to be used not at haphazard but weighed and set cunningly as precious stones in the hands of an _ourives_, this great lyrical poet and charmingly incorrect playwright clearly foreshadowed dramatists so different as Calderón, Lope de Vega, Shakespeare, and Molière. Yet we look in vain for a Vicentian school of great dramatists in Portugal. His fame had reached Brussels and thence Rome, and Erasmus is credited with having wished to learn Portuguese in order to read Vicente’s plays. Shakespeare, who was twenty-two when the second edition of Vicente’s plays appeared and who almost certainly read Spanish, may also have been tempted. It would have been strange if Erasmus had not heard of Vicente through his friend André de Resende, who in his Latin poem _Genethliacon_ declared that had not the comic poet Gil Vicente, actor and author, written in the vulgar tongue he would have rivalled Menander and excelled Plautus and Terence. In Portugal the number of plays written in the sixteenth century was large,[299] but none can be placed on a level with those of Vicente. One cannot say that he influenced Camões or Ferreira de Vasconcellos deeply, although they had evidently read him. In Spain Cervantes, who read everything, _aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles_, had read his plays (the _Farsa dos Fisicos_, _O Juiz da Beira_, the _Comedia de Rubena_ among others), Lope de Vega likewise, Calderón possibly. Lope de Rueda probably derived the idea of his _paso Las Aceitunas_ from the _Auto da Mofina Mendes_. Yet it is almost with amazement, if we forget the crowded history of Portugal and Portuguese literature in the sixteenth century,