The romantic story of Macias had not been given literary form, but it exercised a wide influence over the Portuguese poets of the sixteenth century. Together perhaps with Diego de San Pedro’s _Carcel de Amor_, the Spanish version of Boccaccio’s _Fiammetta_, and especially Rodriguez de la Cámara’s _El siervo libre de Amor_ (containing the _Estoria de los dos amadores Ardanlier e Liesa_), it must have been in the mind of BERNARDIM RIBEIRO (1482-1552) when he wrote that ‘gentle tale of love and languishment’ the book of _Saudades_, which is always known (like the first farce of Gil Vicente) from its first three words as _Menina e moça_. Yet it is not really an imitative work, being, indeed, remarkable for its unaffected sincerity, as the expression of a personal experience. Its passionate truth continues to delight many readers.[302] Almost all our information about Ribeiro’s life is derived from his writings, which are in part evidently autobiographical, and it shrinks or expands according to the degree of the critic’s wariness or ingenuity. His birthplace is declared to have been the quaint Alentejan village of Torrão. A passage in the eclogue _Jano e Franco_ says that Jano fled thence at the time of the great famine. The unhappy frequency of famines makes the date doubtful, but if the year of Ribeiro’s birth be correctly stated in an official document of May 6, 1642, as 1482, we may suppose--since Jano was twenty-one--that he left his native Alentejo for Lisbon in 1503. It is possible that he studied law and took his degree at the University (at Lisbon) a few years later (1507-11?),[303] and became secretary to King João III in 1524. As a _cavalleiro fidalgo_ he had his place at Court, as poet he contributed to the _Cancioneiro Geral_ (1516). A hopeless passion drove him from the Court, drove him perhaps to Italy, and finally deprived him of his reason, so that his last years were spent in the Lisbon Hospital de Todos os Santos.[304] Successive generations have busied themselves over the object of his passion. The romantic tradition that it was the Princess Beatriz, twenty-two years his junior, the daughter of King Manuel for whose marriage to the Duke of Savoy in 1521 Gil Vicente wrote the _Cortes de Jupiter_, is now definitely discarded. That it was Queen Juana la Loca of Castille no one except Varnhagen has ever imagined. But literary critics continue to be tempted by the transparent anagrams of Ribeiro’s novel (adopted evidently in order to make the story unintelligible to all except the inner circle of the Court). Dr. Theophilo Braga has an ingeniously fabricated theory that Aonia was Ribeiro’s cousin, Joana Tavares Zagalo. Lamentor at least can scarcely have been King Manuel, since he sends his daughter to the king’s Court. The scenery appears to be a combination of that of the Serra de Sintra near Lisbon with that of Alentejo. The story opens with an introductory chapter in which a young