and assuredly the famous quintillas beginning Aqui la envidia y mentira:  these compositions were probably composed during, or after, the writer’s imprisonment at Valladolid, that is to say between the spring of 1572 and the winter of 1576, when Luis de Leon was from forty-four or forty-five to forty-eight or forty-nine. Del mundo y su vanidad glances at

      la grave desventura
    del lusitano, por su mal valiente,
      la soberbia bravura
      de su animosa gente
      desbaratada miserablemente.

This passage obviously recalls the disastrous defeat of Sebastian I, King of Portugal, at Al-Kaor al-Kebir in August 1578, when Luis de Leon was more than fifty years of age.  If these inferences are valid, it would follow that many of his original poems were not composed till he was nearly forty or more.  It is difficult to reconcile these conclusions with the author’s categorical assertion that the poems were produced during his early years.  As Luis de Leon was the least vain, as well as the most truthful of men, an explanation must be found, and it is perhaps permissible to suggest that Luis de Leon wrote a prefatory note to Portocarrero intending it to be placed at the beginning of the Second Book which contains his poems translated from Roman and other authors.  By some mischance the poet’s intention was frustrated; perhaps a leaf was out of place in Sarmiento de Mendoza’s copy; perhaps Quevedo is directly responsible for what occurred.  At any rate, the letter dedicatory was bisected, the greater part of it being transferred to the beginning of the First Book, while a mere morsel came to be printed at the beginning of the Third Book.  This surmise may serve till a better explanation is forthcoming.

It is not to be inferred from the foregoing summary that all Luis de Leon’s original and graver compositions were written during his maturity, but there is some reason to think that his earlier efforts in verse took the form of translations.  Though it is undoubtedly true that his poems as a whole were not published till 1631, four isolated pieces of his strayed into print as early as 1574 when they were included by Francisco Sanchez, el Brocense, in the notes to his edition of the Obras del excelente poeta Garci-Lasso de la Vega.[269] At that date Luis de Leon was in the secret prison-cells of the Inquisition at Valladolid.  Sanchez had been a colleague of his at Salamanca for some six years, was on friendly terms with him, knew the exact turn things were taking, felt that no good, and possibly some harm, might be done by mentioning the prisoner’s name, and accordingly gave a version of an Horatian ode with the comment:  ’vn docto destos reynos la traduxo bi[e]’[270].  This needs interpretation.  There can be no doubt that Luis de Leon was a very competent Latin scholar; neither is there any doubt that he had a profound admiration for Horace.  At his best, his Horatian versions,