from one another. When Fernández de Navarrete published in 1850 the letter of the Empress Isabella which definitely named the poet as a knight of Santiago,1 the evidence was available that the portrait of this gentleman of the Order of Alcántara was not the portrait of the Toledan poet. It remained however for the Marquis of Laurencín to establish with sound scholarship that the knight of Alcántara is actually a Garcilaso de la Vega, but another Garcilaso, namely his nephew, son of Pedro Laso, whose projected marriage with Doña Isabel de la Cueva was the source of his uncle's imprisonment.2 For this Garcilaso, in spite of the long continued disfavor of Charles V, became distinguished as an ambassador under Philip II and was Comendador de Belvis y Navarra in the Order of Alcántara. The researches of the Marquis of Laurencín have also demonstrated the futility of the efforts of Justi to identify a portrait in the Kassel Gallery as a likeness of the poet,3 for this work of the school of Bronzino also

shows a gentleman wearing the green cross of Alcántara. The statue in the chapel of San Pedro Mártir therefore remains the only work which was assuredly intended to represent Garcilaso de la Vega, "the Prince of Castilian poets."

Little as his contemporaries have to tell us of Garcilaso, his own works offer no more of a picture of his temperament. So large a portion of them is purely formal verse, impersonal as was so much of the Italian poetry of the Cinquecento, that we should try in vain to reconstruct from them a character. But in regretting this lack of precise information concerning the poet, we must remember that he died before he was thirty-five and that prior to his death the only work from his pen to be published was the letter included in the 1534 edition of Boscán's translation of Il cortegiano. Nor must it be overlooked that his literary production was not the leisurely expression of a pensioned laureate, but the hasty composition of a man of the world, stolen, as he himself says, from his