Note 301 — III The Sixteenth Century [1502-80]

Bib. Nova, ii. 158. Elsewhere he speaks of him as poetae comoediarum suo tempore celebratissimi, and in the Appendix says: cuius comoedias Lusitani admodum celebrant. But after the sixteenth century Vicente was little more than a name. Faria e Sousa could say that his plays had been esteemed [con] poquísima causa (the accidental omission of the con led to the invention poquísima cosa); and a learned Coimbra professor, Frei Luis de Sotomaior, caught reading as semsaborias de Gil Vicente, que em seus tempos foi mui celebrado, felt bound to be apologetic: Aurum colligo ex stercore (Francisco Soares Toscano, Parallelos de Principes (Evora, 1623), f. 159).