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It would be idle to deny that the Galatea has many defects of the school to which it belongs, but it must always have a singular interest as being the first serious literary experiment made by a writer of consummate genius. Cervantes had the model, the sacred model, perpetually before his eyes, and he copied it (if not with conviction) with a grim determination which speaks for itself. He, too,—the ingenio lego—must be interpolating his learning, and referring to Virgil, Ovid, Propertius and the rest of them, with an air of intimate familiarity. Twenty years afterwards, when he had outgrown these little affectations, and was penning the amusing passage in which he banters Lope's childish pedantry,ssss1 the brilliant humorist must surely have smiled as he remembered his own performances in the same kind. He does honour to the grand tradition of prolixity by putting wiredrawn conceits into the mouths of shepherds who are much more like love-sick Abelards than like Comatas or Lacon, and, when his own stock of scholastic subtleties is ended, he has no scruple in allotting to Lenio and Tirsissss1 a short summary of the arguments which had been used long before by Filone and Sofía in his favourite book, León Hebreo's Dialoghi di Amore.ssss1 Had he taken far more material than he actually took, he would have been well within his rights, according to the prevailing ideas of literary morality. Whatever illiterate admirers may say, it is certain that Cervantes followed the fashion in borrowing freely from his predecessors. No careful reader of the Galatea can doubt that its author either had Sannazaro's Arcadia on his table, or that he knew it almost by heart.ssss1 His appreciation for the Arcadia was unbounded, and in the Viaje del Parnasossss1 the sight of Posilipo causes him to link together the names of Virgil and Sannazaro:—