It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable, misfortune that the best poetic faculty in Spain during the sixteenth century neglected the native metre, and turned for inspiration “to the sweet and stately measures of the Italian poesie.” An Italian influence, as has been already pointed out, was no new thing in Spain, and as the sixteenth century drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed, was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the papal Court, and the wars for Naples brought them in greatly increased numbers. Until the close of the fifteenth century those who settled in the southern kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great change came with the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. He claimed Naples by right of his inherited crown of Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and the arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as queen of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous in fulfilling her wifely duty to comfort her husband. She supported him with her own subjects. After her death he was regent, except for the short period during which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law, Philip the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more directly in contact with Italy and Italian civilisation than they had ever done before. They abounded as soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and as administrators. Some among them were sure to feel the artistic and literary influences of that many-sided time. The way was prepared in Spain by the alliance between the crowns of Castile and Aragon, which could not give the country administrative unity, but did give an internal peace. It was a time of expansion and vigour. Isabel had favoured learning. Her favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija--better known by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis--drew up a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The language came rapidly to maturity, and was in fact full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the good of the language in the end, was natural. Castilian, in spite of a large admixture of Arabic words, is so thoroughly Latin that little was needed to fit it for literary purposes when once the study of classical models was seriously begun--much as the art of printing came quickly to perfection because the early typographers had beautifully executed manuscripts before them as models. The early sixteenth century in Spain was not barren in prose-writers, mostly didactic, and also for the most part imitators of the Italians. Francisco de Villalobos, of whom little is known except that he was doctor to Ferdinand the Catholic and the Emperor Charles V., and Fernan Perez de Oliva of Córdova (1492-1530), are the best remembered of the class. But the _Problems_ of the first, and the treatise on the _Dignity of Man_ of the second, are mainly notable as examples of the growing wish to write Castilian for serious purposes.[2] [SN: _The Spanish tongue._]