their taste for the trivial verses of the _Cancioneiro Geral_ nor could they see how a compliment could be turned more neatly than in the old _esparsas_ and _vilancetes_. During these years he wrote his first play, _Os Estranjeiros_, the eclogue _Alexo_ with _oitavas_ in Portuguese, and the _Fabula do Mondego_, perhaps in order to show his superiority over Gil Vicente. There was an obvious antagonism between the laughing and the weeping reformer (for both protested vigorously in their different ways against the growing materialism of the day), between the learned, philosophical and the natural, human poet, and Vicente’s humour probably appeared to Sá de Miranda as unintelligible and undignified as Miranda’s hendecasyllabic poems may have appeared melancholy-thin and artificial to Vicente: _et ce n’est point ainsi que parle la Nature_. But the line in the introduction of the _Fabula do Mondego_ in which Miranda speaks of the king’s condescension, Al canto pastoril ya hecho osado, probably refers to some previous effort of his own rather than to the work of Vicente, and Miranda was in Italy when Gil Vicente was taunted by certain _homems de bom saber_ and turned the tables on them in the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_. The _Fabula do Mondego_ is a cold, stilted production of 600 lines in Petrarcan stanzas, the subject of which was partly derived from Angelo Ambrogini (Poliziano). In 1532 the King gave Miranda a _commenda_ (benefice) of the Order of Christ on the banks of the Neiva in Minho, and having acquired the neighbouring estate of Tapada (_quinta da Tapada_) he left the Court and retired to it not many months later. Miranda’s love of Nature was very deep, from his boyhood at Coimbra he had preferred the country to life in cities, and probably no other incentive was required, although it is thought that he may have been too zealous in support of Bernardim Ribeiro and that a passage in _Alexo_ (1532?) offended the powerful favourite, the Conde da Castanheira. Whatever the cause of his withdrawal, literature must call it blessed, for his new life in the country suited his temperament; the independence of character shown in his fine letter (one of the most famous poems in the Portuguese language) addressed to King João III developed, and close contact with the country and the peasants gave his poetry that indigenous flavour and peculiar charm which have fascinated all readers of the eclogue _Basto_, that individual stamp in which the Court poetry was infallibly lacking. He had already written his best work--for this eclogue and the letters show the real Miranda, pointed, original, racy of the soil--and written it in _quintilhas_, when in 1536 he married Briolanja, the sister of his old friend, now his neighbour at Crasto, Manuel Machado de Azevedo. Some miles away, at the straggling little village of Cabeceiras de Basto, he had other intimate friends, the Pereiras, and the gift, by