In the Christmas plays and peasant scenes some of Gil Vicente’s poetry had lingered; the plays of more fashionable authors caught no gleam of his lyrism, but sketched types and satirized manners successfully, none more so than Mello’s _Auto do Fidalgo Aprendiz_, written, it must be remembered, before _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ (1670). Both kinds, consciously or unconsciously, were derived from Vicente’s genius as manifested in his plays for the Court and of the people. During Gil Vicente’s lifetime, perhaps, Sá de Miranda had written the two plays, _Os Estrangeiros_ (_c._ 1528) and _Os Vilhalpandos_ (1538?),[370] with which he introduced classical comedy into Portugal (nearly a quarter of a century before its introduction into France and England). _Os Estrangeiros_ was a novelty[371] in more ways than one, for it was written in prose. Both plays were, as the author admitted, imitated from Plautus and Terence and also from Ariosto, whose comedies were composed in the first third of the century. _Os Estrangeiros_ was, he further observed in a brief introductory letter to the Cardinal Henrique, rustic and clumsy.[372] Its only claim to be called rustic, in character as apart from treatment, consists in a few allusions to popular customs. We would have had it more indigenous. The scene is Palermo, the plot, _à la_ Plautus, consists of the difficulties and differences between father and son, and there is the _aio_, the vainglorious soldier Briobris, _nas armas um Roldão_, and the _truão_ who plays the part of _gracioso_. The action advances in long soliloquies to the final reconciliation between father and son. The character of _Os Vilhalpandos_, which Mello called ‘a mirror of courtly wit’, is similar, with the difference that Fame instead of Comedy speaks the prologue and the action between son, father, and courtesan is placed in Rome. Both the plays were acted before Cardinal Henrique and printed by his command. As if to mark his initiative in every field, Miranda also composed a classical tragedy entitled _Cleopatra_ (_c._ 1550), the title of which is of interest as preceding the plays of Shakespeare and Samuel Daniel (1562-1619). The twelve octosyllabic lines (_abcabcdefdef_) that survive (from a chorus?) give no idea of its character, but it probably followed closely the _Sofonisba_ (1515) of Gian Giorgio Trissino (1478-1550). A Spanish version of Sophocles’ _Electra_ by Hernan Perez de Oliva appeared in 1528, and in 1536 Anrique Ayres Victoria had translated this into Portuguese octosyllabic verse: _A Vingança de Agamemnon_. The date of the first edition is unknown; the second appeared in 1555. Nor do we know when _Cleopatra_ was written,[373] although it must have been prior to Antonio Ferreira’s classical tragedy acted at Coimbra, _Inés de Castro_ (_c._ 1557), which has hitherto been considered the first of its kind in Portugal. Written when the author was about thirty, that is, about