and fifteenth-century cancioneros, the name of Macfas, the Galician troubadour, stands forth pre-eminently as the symbol of a faithful lover. He has enjoyed a considerable vogue with Spanish and Portuguese writers of his own and succeeding ages. The details of his life are more a matter of legend than of historical fact. Shrouded in the obscurity of the late Middle Ages, the legend has been subject to many errors at the hands of literary historians. Furthermore, few of the writers on the subject have attempted to give even a reasonably complete list of the literary allusions to Macfas; 1 and those who have quoted or cited allusions have devoted practically no discussion or explanation to them. The present paper does not aim at exhausting the subject, but represents an attempt to give a more comprehensive picture than has yet been given of the r6le of Macfas and of the Macifas legend in Spanish literature, particularly up to the eighteenth century, and of the nature of the literary works and authors celebrating the fame of Macias.

There are three primary literary sources for the Macifas legend, all of which agree in the essential fact of the Galician troubadour's death for love but differ in the details. Don Pedro, Constable of Portugal, is responsible for the first of these sources. 2 It is in the form of a gloss to his Sdtira de felice 6 infelice vida, written between 1453 and 1455. It reads: