was reading _Amadis_ in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the _Cancionero de Baena_ refers to _Amadis_ as written in three books. This is one of the most definite early references to _Amadis_, but of course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent Spanish references occur in the _Cancionero de Baena_, which was compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is, which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry, although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose rubrics of the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_ and the _Poetica_ of the _Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti_ are sufficient to dispel this delusion. Whether this _Poetica_ be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which it theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that _Amadis_ is contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets--_Bom Vasco de Lobeira_ and _Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando_--written by his father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco de Lobeira wrote _Amadis of Gaul_. We know that King Dinis encouraged not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth, not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the _Demanda do Santo Graall_, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the _Cancioneiros_, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse. The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s _Amadis_ identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier Prince Afonso (_c._ 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first Peninsular version of _Amadis_ was composed in Portuguese in the middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a novelty by López de Ayala.