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The Diana ends with the promise of a Second Part in which the shepherd Danteo and the shepherdess Duarda shall figure, but this Second Part was not forthcoming as Montemôr was killed in Piedmont on February 26, 1561.ssss1 His design was very badly executed in 1564 by his friend Alonso Pérez, a Salamancan physician, who had the assurance to boast that there was scarcely a scrap of original prose or verse in his volume, the whole (as he vaunts) being stolen and imitated from Latins and Italians. "Nor," adds this astonishing doctor, "do I deem that I am in any sort to blame therefor, since they did as much by the Greeks."ssss1 Another, and a far better, continuation of Montemôr's Diana was issued at Valencia in this same year of 1664 by Gaspar Gil Polo—a sequel which, after proving almost as successful as Montemôr's original, was destined to be plagiarized in the most shameless fashion by Hierónimo de Texeda.ssss1

That Cervantes was well acquainted with these early Spanish pastorals is proved by the discussion on the little books—contrasting with the hundred and more stately folios of the chivalresque romances—in Don Quixote's library. The niece of the Ingenious Gentleman thought that these slimmer volumes should "be burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping." The Priest agrees in principle, but in practice he is more mercifully disposed:—"To begin, then, with the Diana of Montemayor. I am of opinion it should not be burned, but that it should be cleared of all that about the sage Felicia and the magic water,ssss1 and of almost all the longer pieces of verse: let it keep, and welcome, its prose and the honour of being the first of books of the kind." And when questioned concerning the above-named sequels, the judicious Priest declares:—"As for that of the Salamancan, let it go to swell the number of the condemned in the yard, and let Gil Polo's be preserved as if it came from Apollo himself." With this jest on Gil Polo's name, the Priest passes over the next in order of the pastoral novels, Jerónimo de Arbolanche's Las Habidas (1566)ssss1—a very rare work which, though not on Don Quixote's shelves, was more or less vaguely known to Cervantesssss1—to pronounce judgment on Los diez Libros de Fortuna d'Amor, an amazingly foolish book published in 1573 by a Sardinian soldier named Antonio de lo Frasso. Cervantes was just the man to praise (if possible) the work of an old comrade-in-arms, and, in fact, he contrived (through the Priest) to express his opinion of lo Frasso's book in terms which proved misleading:—"By the orders I have received, since Apollo has been Apollo, and the Muses have been Muses, and poets have been poets, so droll and absurd a book as this has never been written, and in its way it is the best and the most singular of all of this species that have as yet appeared, and he who has not read it may be sure he has never read what is delightful. Give it here, gossip, for I make more account of having found it than if they had given me a cassock of Florence stuff." It might seem difficult to interpret this as praise, and impossible to misunderstand the Priest's delight at meeting with what had already become a bibliographical rarity; but, some hundred and thirty years later, the last words of the passage were taken seriously and led to a reprint of lo Frasso's book by Pedro de Pineda, one of the correctors of Tonson's Don Quixote, who had manifestly overlooked the ridicule of the Sardinian in the Viaje del Parnaso.ssss1