The year 1526 found Boscan at Granada, where Andrea Navagiero, Ambassador from Venice to the Court of Charles the Fifth, was then in residence.  A common love of letters drew the two young men into closest intimacy with each other.  “Being with Navagiero there one day,” says Boscan in his ‘Letter to the Duquesa de Soma,’ “and discoursing with him about matters of wit and letters, and especially about the different forms they take in different languages, he asked me why I did not make an experiment in Castilian of sonnets and the other forms of verse used by good Italian authors; and not only spoke to me of it thus slightly, but urged me to do it....  And thus I began to try this kind of verse.  At first I found it somewhat difficult; for it is of a very artful construction, and in many particulars different from ours.  But afterwards it seemed to me—­perhaps from the love we naturally bear to what is our own—­that I began to succeed very well; and so I went on little by little with increasing zeal.”  Little dreamed the Venetian diplomat that, owing to his friendly advice, a school was destined to arise shortly in the poetry of Spain which would by no means have ceased to exist after the lapse of nearly four centuries.  From that day Boscan devoted himself to the exclusive composition of verses in the Italian measure, undeterred by the bitter opposition of the partisans of the old school.  The incomparable Garcilaso de la Vega, then scarcely past his majority, warmly supported the innovation of his beloved friend, and soon far surpassed Boscan himself as a writer of sonnets and canzones.

The Barcelonese poet spent the remainder of his life in comparative retirement, although he appeared occasionally at court, and at one time superintended the education of the young Duke of Alva, whose name afterwards became one of such terror in the annals of the Netherlands.  Boscan’s death took place at Perpignan about 1540.

An edition of Boscan’s poems, together with those of his friend Garcilaso, was published at Barcelona in 1543.  The collection is divided into four books, three of which are devoted to the productions of the elder poet.  The first consists of his early efforts in the old style, songs and ballads—­’Canciones y Coplas.’  The second and third books contain ninety-three sonnets and canzones; a long poem on Hero and Leander in blank verse; an elegy and two didactic epistles in terza rima, and a half-narrative, half-allegorical poem in one hundred and thirty-five octavo stanzas.  The sonnets and canzones are obvious imitations of Petrarch; yet at the same time they are stamped with a spirit essentially Spanish, and occasionally evince a deep passion and melody of their own, although they may lack the subtle fascination of their exquisite models.  The ‘Allegory,’ with its cleverly contrasted courts of Love and Jealousy, suggests the airy, graceful humor of Ariosto, and is perhaps the most agreeable and original of all Boscan’s works.  The ‘Epistle to Mendoza’ is conceived in the manner of Horace, and amidst a fund of genial philosophic comment, contains a charming picture of the poet’s domestic happiness.  He also left a number of translations from the classics.