In 1505 King Manuel and his Court in his Lisbon palace had witnessed the first of those _farsas_ in which Gil Vicente has sketched for all time Portuguese life in the first third of the sixteenth century. It rapidly became popular and went from hand to hand as a _folha volante_, receiving from the people the name of _Quem tem farelos?_ i.e. the first three words of the play. The plots of the twelve _farsas_ written from 1505 to 1531 are so slight that only one calls for detailed notice, the _Farsa de Inés Pereira_[250] (1523), which in its carefully defined characters and developed story more closely resembles a modern comedy. It tells how the hapless Inés, having rejected a plain suitor for a more romantic lover, a poor but deceptive _escudeiro_ presented to her by two Jewish marriage agents, learns by bitter experience the truth of the old proverb that ‘an ass that carries me is better than a horse that throws me’. But the types and persons in all these farces are etched with so much realism and humour that they bite into the memory and rank with the living malicious sketches of _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Who can forget the famished escudeiro Aires Rosado with his book of songs (_cancioneiro_) and guitar, continuing to sing beneath the window of his love while the curses of her mother fall thick as snowflakes on his head,[251] or the lady of his affections, vain and idle Isabel, or his servant (_moço_) Apariço who draws so cruel a picture of his master, or that other penniless _escudeiro_ who considers himself ‘the very palace’ and calls up his _moço_ Fernando at midnight to light the lamp and hold the inkstand while he writes down his latest verses?[252] Equally well sketched is the splendid poverty-plagued _fidalgo_ who walks abroad accompanied by six pages, but cannot pay his chaplain or his goldsmith; his ill-used, servile, ambitious chaplain[253]; the witch Genebra Pereira mixing the hanged man’s ear, the heart of a black cat, and other grim ingredients: _Alguidar, alguidar, que feito foste ao luar_[254]; the household of the Jewish tailor who delights in songs of battles-at-a-distance and is filled with pride when the _Regedor_ salutes him in the street[255]; M. Diafoirus’ lineal ancestors Mestres Anrique, Felipe, Fernando, and Torres[256]; the sporting priest[257]; the unfaithful wife of the Portuguese who has embarked for India with Tristão da Cunha; the vainglorious, grandiloquent Spaniard who takes the opportunity to pay his court to her.[258] They are all drawn from life with a master hand, even the more insignificant figures, the girl keeping ducks, the _moços_, the gipsy horse-dealers,[259] the old man amorous,[260] the carriers faring leisurely along with their mules, the braggart who disables six of his fourteen imaginary opponents, the Frenchman and Italian with their stock phrases _Par ma foi_, _la belle France_, _tutti quanti_,[261] the wily and impudent negro, the poor