[Page 26].—l. 4. señores, cf. [note to p. 6, l. 5], and see l. 11 below.
[RUY PÁEZ DE RIBERA]. The poems of Páez de Ribera, like those of Imperial, are contained in the Cancionero of Baena, and show similar tendencies toward the allegory. They are marked, furthermore, by a spirit of unrest which is somewhat socialistic in its expression.
[Page 27].—l. 7. veer lo caydo, i.e., verlo caído.
l. 25. mesurada, cf. [note to p. 25, l. 9].
[EL CONDESTABLE ÁLVARO DE LUNA]. Prominent among the two hundred or more poets of the reign of Juan II. was the courtier Álvaro de Luna. For a long time he enjoyed the favor of the monarch, who even raised him to one of the highest ranks to which a subject could attain, but, incurring the hatred of his fickle master, he was persecuted and finally executed in 1453. His tragic career has been several times treated in Spanish verse and prose. In his poems conventional gallantry borders on what the devout would call blasphemy.
[Page 28].—l. 26. E non ... vara, i.e., and I would not yield to thee.
[FERNÁN PÉREZ DE GUZMÁN]. The nephew of one poet, the Canciller López de Ayala, and the uncle of another, the Marqués de Santillana, Pérez de Guzmán has left us in the Cancioneros a few poems in the Provençal-Galician manner with traces of Italian influence. He is more important as a prose writer than as a poet, being one of the best of the early Spanish historians.
[Page 30].—l. 12. This is the reading of this line in the Cancionero of Baena (ed. 1860, II, p. 254), but the metre seems to require the conjunction é after prados.
l. 30. ryso: risa is needed for the rhyme.
[JUAN DE MENA]. Mena, the Latin secretary of King Juan II. and a leader of the stylistic poets of his court, became most noted as 350 the author of the allegorical poem El Laberinto (also known as the Trecientas, from the original number of its stanzas). Imitating the scheme of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and largely influenced also by Lucan, Mena here seeks to picture the vicissitudes of Fortune. Elaborate but cold, the work was a great favorite with his contemporaries. At times, as in these octaves celebrating the luckless Galician troubadour Macías, a martyr of love, Mena rises to a respectable lyric height. Other ambitious poetical works of his are the Coronación and the Coplas de los siete pecados mortales. Note the dactylic (—́ ‿ ‿) rhythm of the present versos de arte mayor. For accounts of Macías, and the plays and novels dealing with him, see F. Wolf, Studien, etc., p. 772, and Ticknor, History of Span. Literature, I, 329 f.