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The Portuguese Marrano, João Pinto Delgado, has been all too little known to readers of Spanish poetry. References to him by Menéndez y Pelayo and other nineteenth-century literary historians fail to distinguish him clearly from a grandfather of the same name, and most of what we know of his life was only established in 1935, by Mr. Cecil Roth. The poems Pinto published in exile in Rouen in 1627 have up to now been accessible only in the rare first edition. Yet there are many splendid passages in the series of laments based on the first two chapters of Lamentations; and the two long narrative poems on Esther and Ruth, with their curious blend of literary elegance and rabbinic lore, contain much that is worth reading.

Menéndez y Pelayo was the first to suggest a comparison between Lope de Vega's play, La hermosa Ester, and the long poem on the same subject by the Marrano exile from Portugal, João Pinto Delgado. Don Marcelino did not however work out his comparison in any detail; and it is only recently that Monsieur I. S. Révah has provided the general reader with a very good and easily accessible edition of Pinto's works.