Side by side with Gil Vicente must be mentioned Bernardim Ribeiro, the founder of the most national school of Portuguese poetry, that of the romantic-pastoral type. Though he showed the influence of the revival of classical learning in his style, he did not show it in his ideas, and the shepherds who converse in his eclogues, are as thoroughly Portuguese as those who appear in Gil Vicente’s Christmas “autos.” Ribeiro, like Gil Vicente, was a favourite at the Court of King Emmanuel, where he held the office of “Gentleman of the Chamber,” and it is said that the lady for whom he cherished a hopeless affection was the Donna Beatrice, daughter of the king. A modern writer on Portuguese literature, speaking of Ribeiro and his works, says: “The rivers and mountains of his native land are the natural framework of a poet’s fancy, and the revival of classical learning showed him in the Eclogues of Virgil a model, which he was not slow to imitate. His Eclogues, written in ‘redondilhas’ (octosyllabic nine or ten-lined stanzas), are the earliest in modern Europe, and while replete with the charms and conceits of versification of the troubadours, show a truly poetic love of nature.”[23] Ribeiro was the first true Portuguese poet, as Gil Vicente was the first Portuguese dramatist. While coming under the influence of the classical writers of Greece and Rome, he was not a slavish imitator of their master-pieces, and as the founder of the school of pastoral poetry, he holds an honourable place in the Portuguese literature of the heroic age.