But a more interesting proof of the care the Spaniards were giving to their language is to be found in the _Diálogo de la Lengua_[3]--_Talk about our Language_, as it may be freely but not inaccurately translated. [SN: _The_ Diálogo de la Lengua.] This little book appears to have been written about, and perhaps a little after, 1530, but was not printed till Mayans included it in his _Origenes de la Lengua Castillana_ in the last century. There is strong internal evidence to show that it was the work of one Juan de Váldes, a Spaniard belonging to the colony settled in Naples, a Castilian by birth, and a member of the doubtfully orthodox society collected round Vittoria Colonna. Juan de Váldes himself is included in the short list of Spanish Protestants, and his heterodoxy accounts for the length of time during which his work remained in manuscript. He smelt of the fagot, as the French phrase has it. All who possess even a slight acquaintance with the literary habits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are aware that we must not draw from the fact that work remained in manuscript the deduction that it was little known. The _Diálogo de la Lengua_ was never quite forgotten. It is in itself somewhat disappointing, being altogether narrower in scope and less ambitious in aim than Joachim du Bellay’s _Défense et Illustration de la Langue française_, published in 1549. Much of it is devoted to nice points in the use of words, while the scholarly, perhaps also the patriotic, leanings of Váldes led him to assume the untenable position that the few Greek colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Spain had spread the use of their language all over the country before it was displaced by the Latin. But though the _Diálogo_ is not, like the _Défense_, a great literary manifesto, and though its learning is at times fantastic, it has some intrinsic interest, and no small value as a piece of evidence. That exceedingly difficult literary form the dialogue is very fairly mastered. The four speakers--two Spaniards and two Italians--who take part in the conversation have a distinct dramatic reality, and the tone of talk, familiar, occasionally even witty in form, but serious in substance, is well maintained. The scheme is that three of a party of four gentlemen who are spending a day at a villa on the Bay of Naples join in a friendly conspiracy to draw the fourth, whose name, by the way, is Váldes, into expounding to them, before they take horse to return to the city, how a cultivated man ought to speak and write Castilian. The doctrine of Váldes differs significantly from the lesson enforced by Joachim du Bellay. He does not call upon his countrymen to go forth to the conquest of the haughty Greeks and Romans. On the contrary, it is his contention that although the vocabulary requires refining, and the grammar needs to be better fixed, the language is already as fit for every purpose of literature as the Italian, or even as the classic tongues.