Note 211 — BOOK VI.

Gaspar Gil Polo published the Diana enamorada at Valencia in 1564. The Priest in Don Quixote decided that it should "be preserved as if it came from Apollo himself": see vol. iii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901), p. 51. It is unquestionably a work of unusual merit in its kind, but some deduction must be made from Cervantes's hyperbolical praise: he evidently succumbed to the temptation of playing on the words Polo and Apollo.

Gaspar Gil Polo is said by Ticknor to have been professor of Greek at Valencia. There was a Gil Polo who held the Greek chair in the University of that city between 1566 and 1574: but his name was not Gaspar. Nicolás Antonio and others maintain that the author of the Diana enamorada was the celebrated lawyer, Gaspar Gil Polo, who appeared to plead before the Cortes in 1626. This Gaspar Gil Polo was a mere boy when the Diana enamorada was issued sixty-two years earlier. He was probably the son of the author: see Justo Pastor Fuster, Biblioteca Valenciana de las escritores que florecieron hasta nuestros días (Valencia, 1827-1830), vol. i., pp. 150-155, and—more especially—Professor Hugo Albert Rennert, The Spanish Pastoral Romances (Baltimore, 1892), p. 31.

As already stated in note 91, Gil Polo contributed a sonnet to Girón y de Rebolledo's Pasión, which appeared a year before the Diana enamorada. Another of his sonnets is found in Sempere's Carolea (1560). In the Serao de Amor, Timoneda speaks of him as a celebrated poet; but, as we see from the Canto de Calíope itself, these flourishes and compliments often mean next to nothing. It is somewhat strange that Gil Polo, who is said to have died at Barcelona in 1591, did not issue a sequel to his Diana enamorada during the twenty-seven years of life which remained to him after the publication of the First Part in 1564. At the end of the Diana enamorada he promised a Second Part as clearly as Cervantes, after him, promised a Second Part of the Galatea: "Las quales (fiestas) ... y otras cosas de gusto y de provecho están tratadas en la otra parte deste libro, que antes de muchos días, placiendo á Dios, será impresa." Gil Polo is believed to have been absorbed by his official duties as Maestre Racional of the Royal Court in the Kingdom of Valencia. His Canto del Turia, inserted in the third book of the Diana enamorada, is one of the models—perhaps the chief model—of the present Canto de Calíope. Cervantes follows Gil Polo very closely.