Vi lo que persona humana
tengo que jamás non vió,
nin Petrarcha qu’ escrivió
de triunphal gloria mundana.
But Dante naturally has the foremost place in Santillana’s library. Boccaccio’s biography of the poet stands on the shelves with the Divina Commedia, the Canzoni della vita nuova, and the Convivio. Without Dante we should not have Santillana’s Sueño, nor La Coronación de Mossén Jordi, nor La Comedieta de Ponza, nor the Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna: at any rate, we should not have them in their actual forms. Nor should we have El Infierno de los Enamorados, in which Santillana invites a dangerous comparison by adapting to the circumstances of Macías o Namorado the plaint of Francesca:—
La mayor cuyta que aver
puede ningun amador
es membrarse del plaçer
en el tiempo del dolor.
It is not, however, as an imitator of Dante that Santillana interests us. He himself was perhaps most proud of his attempt to naturalise the sonnet form in Spain; but these forty-two sonnets, fechos al itálico modo in Petrarch’s manner, are little more than curious, premature experiments. And, as I have already suggested, the passion of hate concentrated in the Doctrinal de privados is incommunicative at a distance of some four centuries and a half. Santillana attains real excellence in a very different vein. His natural lyrism finds almost magical expression in the serranillas of which La Vaquera de la Finojosa is the most celebrated example, and in the airy desires which show his relation to the Portuguese-Galician school. Indeed he has left us one song—