Thanks probably to the combination in its pages of the popular chivalric
tradition with the fashionable Italian pastoral, and also to certain
graces of style which it possesses, the _Diana_ held the field until the
picaresque romance developed into a recognized _genre_, and exercised a
very considerable influence on pastoral writers even beyond the frontiers
of Spain. Googe imitated passages from it in his eclogues; Sidney
translated some of its songs, and took it as the model of his own romance;
Shakespeare borrowed from it the plot of the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_. In
the land of its birth its popularity was shown by the number of
continuations and imitations to which it gave rise. Irresponsible
publishers swelled the bulk of their editions with matter purloined from
less popular authors. The year 1564 saw the appearance of two second
parts. One in eight books, by the physician Alonzo Pérez, only got so far
as disposing of Delio, and appears to exaggerate all the faults of the
original in compensation for the lack of its merits. The other, from the
pen of Gaspar Gil Polo, is in five books, and narrates, in a style
scarcely inferior to its model, the faithlessness and death of Delio, and
Sireno's marriage with Diana. Both alike promise continuations which never
appeared. A third part was, however, published so late as 1627, as the
work of Jerónimo de Texeda, but it is nothing more than a _rifacimento_
of Gil Polo's continuation, altered apparently with a view to its forming
a sequel to Pérez' work. Furthermore, in 1599 there appeared a religions
parody by Fra Bartolomé Ponce, and there are said to be no less than six
French, two English, and two German translations, not to mention a Latin
one of Gil Polo's portion at least.

Besides continuations, there are extant nearly a score of imitations of
varying interest and merit. In 1584 appeared the _Galatea_ of Cervantes,
imitated from Ribeiro and Montemayor; which in its turn is supposed to