Despite assertions to the contrary, his Gitanilla is no original conception, for the character of his gipsy, Preciosa, is developed from that of Tarsiana in the Apolonio; yet from Cervantes' rendering of her, which

and from his tale entitled La Fuerza de la Sangre, Middleton's Spanish Gipsy derives. From Cervantes, too, Weber takes his opera Preciosa, and from Cervantes comes Hugo's Esmeralda. In Las dos Doncellas Fletcher, who had already used Don Quixote in the Knight of the Burning Pestle, finds the root of Love's Pilgrimage; from El Casamiento Engañoso he takes his Rule a Wife and Have a Wife; and from La Señora Cornelia he borrows his Chances. And, as Fielding had rejoiced to own his debt to Cervantes, so Sir Walter has confessed that "the Novelas of that author had first inspired him with the ambition of excelling in fiction."

The next performance shows Cervantes tempting fate as a poet. His Viaje del Parnaso (1614) was suggested by the Viaggio di Parnaso (1582) of the Perugian, Cesare Caporali, and is, in effect, a rhymed review of contemporary poets. Verse is scarcely a lucky medium for Cervantic irony, and Cervantes was the least critical of men. His poem is interesting for its autobiographic touches, but it degenerates into a mere stream of eulogy, and when he ventures on an attack he rarely delivers it with force or point. He thought, perhaps, to put down bad poets as he had put down bad prose-writers. But there was this difference, that, though admirable in prose, he was not admirable in verse. In the use of the first weapon he is an expert; in the practice of the second he is a clever amateur. Cervantes satirising in prose and Cervantes satirising in verse are as distinct as Samson unshorn and Samson with his hair cut. Fortunately he appends a prose postscript, which reveals him in his finest manner. Nor is this surprising. Apollo's letter is dated July 22, 1614; and we know that, two days earlier, Sancho Panza had dictated his famous letter to his wife Teresa. The master had found himself once more. The sequel to Don Quixote, promised in the Preface to the Novelas, was on the road at last. Meanwhile he had busied himself with a sonnet to be published at Naples in Juan Domingo Roncallolo's Varias Aplicaciones, with quatrains for Barrio Ángulo, and stanzas in honour of Santa Teresa.

Moreover, the success of the Novelas induced him to try the theatre again. In 1615 he published his Ocho Comedias, y ocho Entremeses nuevos. The eight set pieces are failures; and when the writer tries to imitate Lope de Vega, as in the Laberinto de Amor, the failure is conspicuous. Nor does the introduction of a Saavedra among the personages of El Gallardo Español save a bad play. But Cervantes believed in his eight comedias, as he believed in the eight entremeses which are imitated from Lope de Rueda. These are sprightly, unpretentious farces, witty in intention and effect, interesting in themselves and as realistic pictures of low life seen and rendered at first hand. Of these farcical pieces one, Pedro de Urdemalas, is even brilliant.

While Cervantes was writing the fifty-ninth chapter of Don Quixote's Second Part, he learned that a spurious continuation had appeared (1614) at Tarragona under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This has given rise to much angry writing. Avellaneda is doubtless a pseudonym. The King's confessor, Aliaga, has been suspected, on the ground that he was once nicknamed Sancho Panza, and that he thus avenged himself: the idea is absurd, and the fact that Avellaneda makes Sancho more offensive and more vulgar than ever puts the theory out of court. Lope de Vega is also accused of being Avellaneda, and the charge is based on this: that (in a private letter) he once spoke slightingly of Don Quixote. The personal relations between the two greatest Spanish men of letters were not cordial. Cervantes had ridiculed Lope in the Prologue to Don Quixote, had belittled him as a playwright, and had shown hostility in other ways. Lope, secure in his high seat, made no reply, and in 1612 (in another private letter) he speaks kindly of Cervantes. "Cervantophils" insist upon being too clever by half. They first assert that the outward form of Avellaneda's book was an imitation of Don Quixote, and that the intention was "to pass off this spurious Second Part as the true one"; they then contend that Avellaneda's was "a deliberate attempt to spoil the work of Cervantes." These two statements are mutually destructive: one must necessarily be false. It is also argued, first, that Avellaneda's is a worthless book; next, that it was written by Lope, the greatest figure, save Cervantes, in Spanish literature. Lope had many jealous enemies, but no contemporary hints at such a charge, and no proof is offered in support of it now. Indeed the notion, first started by Máinez, is generally abandoned. Other ascriptions, involving Blanco de Paz, Ruiz de Alarcón, Andrés Pérez, are equally futile. The most plausible conjecture, due to D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, is that Avellaneda was a certain Aragonese, Alfonso Lamberto. Lamberto's very obscurity favours this surmise. Had Avellaneda been a figure of great importance, he had been unmasked by Cervantes himself, who assuredly was no coward.

We owe to Avellaneda a clever, brutal, cynical, amusing book, which is still reprinted. Nor is this our only debt to him: he put an end to Cervantes' dawdling and procured the publication of the second Don Quixote. Cervantes left it doubtful if he meant to write the sequel; he even seems to invite another to undertake it. Nine years had passed, during which Cervantes made no sign. Avellaneda, with an eye to profit, wrote his continuation in good faith, and his insolent Preface is explained by his rage at seeing the bread taken out of his mouth when the true sequel was announced in the Preface to the Novelas. Had not his intrusion stung Cervantes to the quick, the second Don Quixote might have met the fate of the second Galatea—promised for thirty years and never finished. As it is, the hurried close of the Second Part is below the writer's common level, as when he rages at Avellaneda, and wishes that the latter's book be "cast into the lowest pit of hell." But this is its single fault, which, for the rest, is only found in the last fourteen chapters. The previous fifty-eight form an almost impeccable masterpiece. As an achievement in style, the Second excels the First Part. The parody of chivalresque books is less insistent, the interest is larger, the variety of episode is ampler, the spirit more subtly comic, the new characters are more convincing, the manner is more urbane, more assured. Cervantes' First Part was an experiment in which he himself but half believed; in the Second he shows the certainty of an accepted master, confident of his intention and his popularity. So his career closed in a blaze of triumph. He had other works in hand: a play to be called El Engaño á los Ojos, the Semanas del Jardín, the Famoso Bernardo, and the eternal second Galatea. These last three he promises in the Preface to Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617), a posthumous volume "that dares to vie with Heliodorus," and was to be "the best or worst book ever written in our tongue." Ambitious in aim and in manner, the Persiles has failed to interest, for all its adventures and scapes. Yet it contains perhaps the finest, and certainly the most pathetic passage that Cervantes ever penned—the noble dedication to his patron, the Conde de Lemos, signed upon April 19, 1616. In the last grip of dropsy, he gaily quotes from a romance remembered from long ago:—

"One foot already in the stirrup." With these words he smilingly confronts fate, and makes him ready for the last post down the Valley of the Shadow. He died on April 23, nominally on the same day as Shakespeare, whose death is dated by an unreformed calendar. They were brethren in their lives and afterwards. Montesquieu, in the Lettres Persanes, makes Rica say of the Spaniards that "le seul de leurs livres qui soit bon est celui qui a fait voir la ridicule de tous les autres." If he meant that Don Quixote was the one Spanish book which has found acceptance all the world over, he spoke with equal truth and point. A single author at once national and universal is as much as any literature can hope to boast.

In his own day Cervantes was shone down by the ample, varied, magnificent gifts of Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (1562-1635): a very "prodigy of nature," as his rival confesses. A prodigy he was from his cradle. At the age of five he lisped in numbers, and, unable to write, would bribe his schoolmates with a share of his breakfast to take down verses at his dictation. He came of noble highland blood, his father, Félix de Vega, and his mother, Francisca Fernández, being natives of Carriedo. Born in Madrid, he was there educated at the Jesuit Colegio Imperial, of which he was the wonder. All the accomplishments were his: still a child, he filled his copy-books with verses, sang, danced, handled the foil like a trained sworder. His father, a poet of some accomplishment, died early, and Lope forthwith determined to see the world. With his comrade, Hernando Muñoz, he ran away from school. The pair reached Astorga, and turned back to Segovia, where, being short of money, they tried to sell a chain to a jeweller, who, suspecting something to be wrong, informed the local Dogberry. The adventurous couple were sent home in charge of the police. Lope's earliest surviving play, El verdadero Amante, written in his thirteenth year, is included in the fourteenth volume of his theatre, printed in 1620. Nicolás de los Ríos, one of the best actor-managers of his time, was proud to play in it later; and, crude as it is in phrasing, it manifests an astonishing dramatic gift.

The chronology of Lope's youth is perplexing, and the events of this time are, as a rule, wrongly given by his biographers, even including that admirable scholar, Cayetano Alberto de la Barrera y Leirado, whose Nueva Biografía is almost above praise. In a poetic epistle to Luis de Haro, Lope asserts that he fought at Terceira against the Portuguese: "in my third lustre"—en tres lustros de mi edad primera: and Ticknor is puzzled to reconcile this with facts. It cannot be done. Lope was fifteen in 1577, and the expedition to the Azores occurred in 1582. The obvious explanation is that Lope was in his fourth lustre, but that, as cuatro would break the rhythm of the line, he wrote tres instead. Some little licence is admitted in verse, and literal interpreters are peculiarly liable to error. At the same time, it should be said that Lope is coquettish as regards his age. Thus, he says that he was a child at the time of the Armada, being really twenty-six; and that he wrote the Dragontea in early youth, when, in fact, he was thirty-five. This little vanity has led to endless confusion. It is commonly stated that, on Lope's return from the Azores, he entered the household of Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to Alcalá de Henares. That Lope studied at Alcalá is certain; but undergraduates then matriculated earlier than they do now. When Lope's first campaign ended he was twenty-one, and therefore too old for college. He was a Bachelor before ever he went to the wars. The love-affair, recounted in his Dorotea, is commonly said to have prevented his taking orders at Alcalá: in truth, he never saw the lady till he came back from the Azores! He became private secretary to Antonio Álvarez de Toledo y Beaumont, fifth Duque de Alba, and grandson of the great soldier; but the date cannot be given precisely. As far back as 1572 he had translated Claudian's Rape of Proserpine into Castilian verse, and we have already seen him joined with Cervantes in penning complimentary sonnets for Padilla and López Maldonado (1584). It may be that, while in Alba's service, he wrote the poems printed in Pedro de Moncayo's Flor de varios romances (1589).

The history of these years is obscure. It is usually asserted that, while in Alba's service, about the year 1584-5, Lope married, and that he was soon afterwards exiled to Valencia, whence he set out for Lisbon to join the Invincible Armada. This does not square with Lope's statement in the Dedication of Querer la propia Desdicha to Claudio Conde. There he alleges that Conde helped him out of prison in Madrid, a service repaid by his helping Conde out of the Serranos prison at Valencia, and he goes on to say that "before the first down was on their cheeks" they went to Lisbon to embark on the Armada. He nowhere alleges that they started from Valencia, or that the journey followed the banishment. In an eclogue to the same Conde, Lope avers that he joined the Armada to escape from Filis (otherwise Dorotea), and he adds:—"Who could have thought that, returning from the war, I should find a sweet wife?" The question would be pointless if Lope were already married. Moreover, Barrera's theory that the intrigue with Dorotea ended in 1584 is disproved by the fact that the Dorotea contains allusions to the Conde de Melgar's marriage, which, as we know from Cabrera, took place in 1587. What is certain is that Lope went aboard the San Juan, and that during the Armada expedition he used his manuscript verses in Filis's praise for gun-wads.

He was a first-class fighting-man, and played his part in the combats up the Channel, where his brother was killed beside him during an encounter between the San Juan and eight Dutch vessels. Disaster never quenched his spirit nor stayed his pen; for, when what was left of the defeated Armada returned to Cádiz, he landed with the greater part of his Hermosura de Angélica—eleven thousand verses, written between storm and battle, in continuation of the Orlando Furioso. First published in 1602, the Angélica comes short of Ariosto's epic nobility, and is unrelieved by the Italian's touch of ironic fantasy. Nor can it be called successful even as a sequel: its very wealth of invention, its redundant episodes and innumerable digressions, contribute to its failure. But the verse is singularly brilliant and effective, while the skill with which the writer handles proper names is almost Miltonic.

Returned to Spain, Lope composed his pastoral novel, the Arcadia, which, however, remained unpublished till 1598. Ticknor believed it "to have been written almost immediately" after Cervantes' Galatea: this cannot be, for the Arcadia refers to the death of Santa Cruz, which occurred in 1588, and it discusses in the conventional manner Alba's love-affairs of 1589-90. The Arcadia, where Lope figures as Belardo, and Alba as Amfriso, makes no pretence to be a transcript of manners or life, and it is intolerably prolix withal. Yet it goes beyond its fellows by virtue of its vivid landscapes, its graceful, flowing verse, and a certain rich, poetic, Latinized prose, here used by Lope with as much artistry as he showed in his management of the more familiar kind in the Dorotea. Its popularity is proved by the publication of fifteen editions in its author's lifetime. About the year 1590 he married Isabel de Urbina, a distant connection of Cervantes' mother, and daughter of Felipe II.'s King-at-Arms. Hereupon followed a duel, wherein Lope wounded his adversary, and, earlier escapades being raked up, he was banished the capital. He spent some time in Valencia, a considerable literary centre; but in 1594 he signed the manuscript of his play, El Maestro de danzar, at Tormes, Alba's estate, whence it is inferred that he was once more in the Duke's service. A new love-affair with Antonia Trillo de Armenta brought legal troubles upon him in 1596. His wife apparently died in 1597.

The first considerable work printed with Lope's name upon the title-page was his Dragontea (1598), an epic poem in ten cantos on the last cruise and death of Francis Drake. We naturally love to think of the mighty seaman as the patriot, the chiefest of Britannia's bulwarks, as he figures in Mr. Newbolt's spirited ballad:—

Odd to say, though, Lope has been censured for not viewing Drake through English Protestant spectacles. Seeing that he was a good Catholic Spaniard whom Drake had drummed up the Channel, it had been curious if the Dragontea were other than it is: a savage denunciation of that Babylonian Dragon, that son of the devil whose piracies had tormented Spain during thirty years. The Dragontea fails not because of its national spirit, which is wholly admirable, but because of its excessive emphasis and its abuse of allegory. Its author scarcely intended it for great poetry; but, as a patriotic screed, it fulfilled its purpose, and, when reprinted, it drew an approving sonnet from Cervantes.

The Dragontea was written while Lope was in the household of the Marqués de Malpica, whence he passed as secretary to the lettered Marqués de Sarriá, best known as Conde de Lemos, and as Cervantes' patron. In 1599 he published his devout and graceful poem, San Isidro, in honour of Madrid's patron saint. Popular in subject and execution, the San Isidro enabled him to repeat in verse the triumph which he had achieved with the prose of the Arcadia. From this day forward he was the admitted pontiff of Spanish literature. His marriage with Juana de Guardo probably dates from the year 1600. An example of Lope's art in manipulating the sonnet-form is afforded by Longfellow's Englishing of The Brook:—

Two hundred sonnets in Lope's Rimas are thought to have been issued separately in 1602: in any case, they were published that year at the end of a reprint of the Angélica. They include much of the writer's sincerest work, earnest in feeling, skilful and even distinguished as art. One sonnet of great beauty—To the Tomb of Teodora Urbina—has led Ticknor into an amusing error often reproduced. He cites from it a line upon the "heavenly likeness of my Belisa," notes that this name is an anagram of Isabel (Lope's first wife), and pronounces the performance a lament for the poet's mother-in-law. The Latin epitaph which follows it contains a line,—

showing that the supposed mother-in-law died in her first year. Manifestly the sonnet refers to the writer's daughter, and, as always happens when Lope speaks from his paternal heart, is instinct with a passionate tenderness.

To 1604 belong the five prose books of the Peregrino en su patria, a prose romance of Pánfilo's adventures by sea and land, partly experienced and partly contrived; but it is most interesting for the four autos which it includes, and for its bibliographical list of two hundred and thirty plays already written by the author. His quenchless ambition had led him to rival Ariosto in the Angélica: in the twenty cantos of his Jerusalén Conquistada he dares no less greatly by challenging Tasso. Written in 1605, the Jerusalén was withheld till 1609. Styled a "tragic epic" by its creator, it is no more than a fluent historico-narrative poem, overlaid with embellishments of somewhat cheap and obvious design. In 1612 appeared the Four Soliloquies of Lope de Vega Carpio: his lament and tears while kneeling before a crucifix begging pardon for his sins. These four sets of redondillas with their prose commentaries were amplified to seven when republished (1626) under the pseudonym of Gabriel Padecopeo, an obvious anagram. The deaths of Lope's wife and of his son Carlos inspired the Pastores de Belén, a sacred pastoral of supreme simplicity, truth, and beauty—as Spanish as Spain herself—which contains one of the sweetest numbers in Castilian. The Virgin lulls the Divine Child with a song in Verstegan's manner, which Ticknor has rendered to this effect:—

Lope lived a life of gallantry, and troubled his wife's last years by his intrigue with María de Luján. This lady bore him the gifted son, Lope Félix, who was drowned at sea, and the daughter Marcela, whose admirable verses, written after her profession in the Convent of Barefoot Trinitarians, proclaim her kinship with the great enchanter. A relapsing, carnal sinner, Lope was more weak than bad: his rare intellectual gifts, his renown, his overwhelming temperament, his seductive address, his imperial presence, led him into temptation. Amid his follies and sins he preserved a touching faith in the invisible, and his devotion was always ardent. Upon the death of his wife in 1612 or later, he turned to religion with characteristic impetuosity, was ordained priest, and said his first mass in 1614 at the Carmelite Church in Madrid. It was an ill-advised move. Ticknor, indeed, speaks of a "Lope, no longer at an age to be deluded by his passions"; but no such Lope is known to history. While a Familiar of the Inquisition the true Lope wrote love-letters for the loose-living Duque de Sessa, till at last his confessor threatened to deny him absolution. Nor is this all: his intrigue with Marta de Nevares Santoyo, wife of Roque Hernández de Ayala, was notorious. The pious Cervantes publicly jeered at the fallen priest's "continuous and virtuous occupation," forgetting his own coarse pranks with Ana de Rojas; and Góngora hounded his master down with a copy of venomous verses passed from hand to hand. Those who wish to study the abasement of an august spirit may do so in the Últimos Amores de Lope de Vega Carpio, forty-eight letters published by José Ibero Ribas y Canfranc.[21] If they judge by the standard of Lope's time, they will deal gently with a miracle of genius, unchaste but not licentious; like that old Dumas, who, in the matters of gaiety, energy, and strength is his nearest modern compeer. His sin was yet to find him out. He vanquished every enemy: the child of his old age vanquished him.

Devotion and love-affairs served not to stay his pen. His Triunfo de la fe en el Japón (1618) is interesting as an example of Lope's practice in the school of historical prose, stately, devout, and elegant. In honour of Isidore, beatified and then canonised, he presided at the poetic jousts of 1620 and 1622, witnessing the triumph of his son, Félix Lope; standing literary god-father to the boyish Calderón; declaiming, in the character of Tomé Burguillos, the inimitable verse which hit between wind and water. Perhaps Lope was never happier than in this opportunity of speaking his own witty lines before the multitude. His noble person, his facility, his urbane condescension, his incomparable voice, which thrilled even clowns when he intoned his mass—all these gave him the stage as his own possession. Heretofore the common man had only read him: once seen and heard, Lope ruled Castilian literature as Napoleon ruled France.

His Filomena (1621) contains a poetic defence of himself (the Nightingale) against Pedro de Torres Rámila (the Thrush), who, in 1617, had violently attacked Lope in his Spongia, which seems to have vanished, and is only known by extracts embodied in the Expostulatio Spongiæ, written by Francisco López de Aguilar Coutiño under the name of Julius Columbarius. Polemics apart, the chief interest of the Filomena volume lies in its short prose story, Las Fortunas de Diana, an experiment which the author repeated in the three tales—La Desdicha por la honra, La prudente Venganza, and Guzmán el Bravo—appended to his Circe (1624), a poem, in three cantos, on Ulysses' adventures. The five cantos of the Triunfos divinos are pious exercises in the Petrarchan manner, with forty-four sonnets given as a postscript. Five cantos go to make up the Corona Trágica (1627), a religious epic with Mary Stuart for heroine. Lope has been absurdly censured for styling Queen Elizabeth a Jezebel and an Athaliah, and for regarding Mary as a Catholic martyr. This criticism implies a strange intellectual confusion; as though a veteran of the Armada could be expected to write in the spirit of a Clapham Evangelical! Religious squabbles apart, he had an old score to settle; for—

was a question which troubled good Spaniards as much as it delighted Mr. Dobson. Dedicated to Pope Urban VIII., the poem won for its author the Cross of St. John and the title of Doctor of Divinity. Three years later he issued his Laurel de Apolo, a cloying eulogy on some three hundred poets, as remarkable for its omissions as for its flattering of nonentities. The Dorotea (1632), a prose play fashioned after the model of the Celestina, was one of Lope's favourites, and is interesting, not merely for its graceful, familiar style, retouched and polished for over thirty years, but as a piece of self-revelation. The Rimas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634) closes with the mock-heroic Gatomaquia, a vigorous and brilliant travesty of the Italian epics, replenished with such gay wit as suffices to keep it sweet for all time.

Lope de Vega's career was drawing to its end. The elopement, with a court gallant, of his daughter, Antonia Clara, broke him utterly.[22] He sank into melancholy, sought to expiate by lashing himself with the discipline till the walls of his room were flecked with his blood. Withal he wrote to the very end. On August 23, 1635, he composed his last poem, El Siglo de Oro. Four days later he was dead. Madrid followed him to his grave, and the long procession turned from the direct path to pass before the window of the convent where his daughter, Sor Marcela, was a nun. A hundred and fifty-three Spanish authors bewailed the Phœnix in the Fama póstuma, and fifty Italians published their laments at Venice under the title of Essequie poetiche.

Lope left no achievement unattempted: the epic, Homeric or Italian, the pastoral, the romantic novel, poems narrative and historical, countless eclogues, epistles, not to speak of short tales, of sonnets innumerable, of verses dashed off on the least occasion. His voluminous private letters, full of wit and malice and risky anecdote, are as brilliant and amusing as they are unedifying. It is sometimes alleged that he deliberately capped Cervantes' work; and, as instances in this sort, we are bid to note that the Galatea was followed by Dorotea, the Viaje del Parnaso by the Laurel de Apolo. In the first place, exclusive "spheres of influence" are not recognised in literature; in the second, the observation is pointless. The Galatea is a pastoral novel, the Dorotea is not; the first was published in 1585, the second in 1632. Again, the Viaje del Parnaso appeared in 1614, the Laurel de Apolo in 1630. The first model was the Canto del Turia of Gil Polo. It would be as reasonable—that is to say, it would be the height of unreason—to argue that Persiles y Sigismunda was an attempt to cap the Peregrino en su patria. The truth is, that Lope followed every one who made a hit: Heliodorus, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso. A frank success spurred him to rivalry, and the difficulty of repeating it was for him a fresh stimulus. Obstacles existed to be vanquished. He was ever ready to accept a challenge; hence such a dexterous tour de force as his famous Sonnet on a Sonnet, imitated in a well-known rondeau by Voiture, translated again and again, and by none more successfully than by Mr. Gibson:—

The foregoing list of Lope's exploits in literature, curtailed as it is, suffices for fame; but it would not suffice to explain that matchless popularity which led to the publication—suppressed by the Inquisition in 1647—of a creed beginning thus:—"I believe in Lope de Vega the Almighty, the Poet of heaven and earth." So far we have but reached the threshold of his temple. His unique renown is based upon the fact that he created a national theatre, that he did for Spain what Shakespeare did for England. Gómez Manrique and Encina led the way gropingly; Torres Naharro, though he bettered all that had been done, lived out of Spain; Lope de Rueda and Timoneda brought the drama to the people; Artieda, Virués, Argensola, and Cervantes tore their passions to tatters in conformity with their own strange precepts, which the last-named would have enforced by a literary dictatorship. Moreover, Argensola and the three veterans of Lepanto wrote to please themselves: Lope invented a new art to enchant mankind. And he succeeded beyond all ambition. Nor does he once take on the airs of philosopher or pedant: rather, in a spirit of self-mockery, he makes his confession in the Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias (New Mode of Playwriting), which his English biographer, Lord Holland, translates in this wise:—

Thus Lope in his bantering avowal of 1609. Yet what takes the form of an apology is in truth a vaunt; for it was Lope's task to tear off the academic swaddling-bands of his predecessors, and to enrich his country with a drama of her own. Nay, he did far more: by his single effort he dowered her with an entire dramatic literature. The very bulk of his production savours of the fabulous. In 1603 he had already written over two hundred plays; in 1609 the number was four hundred and eighty-three; in 1620 he confesses to nine hundred; in 1624 he reaches one thousand and seventy; and in 1632 the total amounted to one thousand five hundred. According to Montalbán, editor of the Fama póstuma, the grand total, omitting entremeses, should be one thousand eight hundred plays, and over four hundred autos. Of these about four hundred plays and forty autos survive. If we take the figures as they stand, Lope de Vega wrote more than all the Elizabethan dramatists put together. Small wonder that Charles Fox was staggered when his nephew, Lord Holland, spoke of Lope's twenty million lines. Facility and excellence are rarely found together, yet Lope combined both qualities in such high degree that any one with enough Spanish to read him need never pass a dull moment so long as he lives.

Hazlitt protests against the story which tells that Lope wrote a play before breakfast, and in truth it rests on no good authority. But it is history that, not once, but an hundred times, he wrote a whole piece within twenty-four hours. Working in these conditions, he must needs have the faults inseparable from haste. He repeats his thought with small variation; he utilises old solutions for a dramatic impasse; and his phrase is too often more vigorous than finished. But it is not as a master of artistic detail that Lope's countrymen place him beside Cervantes. First, and last, and always, he is a great creative genius. He incarnates the national spirit, adapts popular poetry to dramatic effects, substitutes characters for abstractions, and, in a word, expresses the genius of a people. It is true that he rarely finds a perfect form for his utterance, that he constantly approaches perfection without quite attaining unto it, that his dramatic instinct exceeds his literary execution. Yet he survives as the creator of an original form. His successors improved upon him in the matter of polish, yet not one of them made an essential departure of his own, not one invented a radical variant upon Lope's method. Tirso de Molina may exceed him in force of conception, as Ruiz de Alarcón outshines him in ethical significance, in exposition of character; yet Tirso and Alarcón are but developing the doctrine laid down by the master in El Castigo sin Venganza—the lesson of truth, realism, fidelity to the actual usages of the time. Tirso, Alarcón, and Calderón are a most brilliant progeny; but the father of them all is the unrivalled Lope. He seized upon what germs of good existed in Torres Naharro, Rueda, and Cueva; but his debt to them was small, and he would have found his way without them. Without Lope we should have had no Tirso, no Calderón.[23]

Producing as he produced, much of his work may be considered as improvisation; even so, he takes place as the first improvisatore in the world, and compels recognition as, so to say, "a natural force let loose." He imagined on a Napoleonic scale; he contrived incident with such ease and force and persuasiveness as make the most of his followers seem poor indeed; and his ingenuity of diversion is miraculously fresh after nearly three hundred years. His gift never fails him, whether he deal with historical tragedy, with the heroic legend, with the presentation of picaresque life, or with the play of intrigue and manners—the comedia de capa y espada. This last, "the cloak and sword play" is as much his personal invention as is the gracioso—the comic character—as is the enredo—the maze of plot—as is the "point of honour," as is the feminine interest in his best work. Hitherto the woman had been allotted a secondary, an incidental part, ludicrous in the entremés, sentimental in the set piece. Lope, the expert in gallantry, in manners, in observation, placed her in her true setting, as an ideal, as the mainspring of dramatic motive and of chivalrous conduct. He professed an abstract approval of the classic models; but his natural impulse was too strong for him. An imitator he could not be, save in so far as he, in his own phrase, "imitated men's actions, and reproduced the manners of the age." He laid down rules which in practice he flouted; for he realised that the business of the scene is to hold an audience, is to interest, to surprise, to move. He could not thump a pulpit in an empty hall: he perceived that a play which fails to attract is—for the playwright's purpose—a bad play. He can be read with infinite pleasure; yet he rarely attempted drama for the closet. Emotion in action was his aim, and he achieved it with a certainty which places him among the greatest gods of the stage.

It is difficult to fix upon the period when Lope's dramatic genius was accepted by his public: 1592 seems a likely date. He took no interest in publishing his plays, though El Perseguido was issued by a Lisbon pirate so early as 1603. Eight volumes of his theatre were in print before he was induced in 1617 to authorise an edition which was called the Ninth Part, and after 1625 he printed no more dramatic pieces, despite the fact that he produced them more abundantly than ever. We may, perhaps, assume that the best of his work has reached us. Among the finest of his earlier efforts is justly placed El Acero de Madrid (The Madrid Steel), from which Molière has borrowed the Médecin malgré lui, and the opening scene, as Ticknor renders it, admirably illustrates Lope's power of interesting his audience from the very outset by a situation which explains itself. Lisardo, with his friend Riselo, enamoured of Belisa, awaits the latter at the church-door, and, just as Riselo declares that he will wait no more, Belisa enters with her pious aunt, Teodora, as dueña:—

This is a fair specimen, even in its sober English dress, of Lope's gallant dialogue and of his consummate skill in gripping his subject. No playwright has ever shown a more infallible tact, a more assured confidence in his own resources. He never attempts to puzzle his audience with a dull acrostic: complicated as his plot may be (and he loves to introduce a double intrigue when the chance proffers), he exposes it at the outset with an obvious solution; but not one in twenty can guess precisely how the solution is to be attained. And, till the last moment, his contagious, reckless gaiety, his touches of perplexing irony, his vigilant invention, help to thrill and vivify the interest.

Yet has he all the defects of his facility. In an indifferent mood, besieged by managers for more and more plays, he would set forth upon a piece, not knowing what was to be its action, would indulge in a triple plot of baffling complexity eked out by incredible episodes. Even his ingenuity failed to find escape from such unprepared situations. Still it is fair to say that such instances are rare with him: time upon time his dramatic instinct saved him where a less notable inventor must have succumbed. He could create character; he was an artist in construction; he knew what could, and could not, be done upon the stage. Like Dumas, he needed but "four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion"; and, at his best, he rises to the greatest occasion. In a single scene, in an act entire, you shall read him with wonder and delight for his force and truth and certainty. Yet the trail of carelessness is upon his last acts, and his conscience sometimes sleeps ere his curtain falls. The fact that he thought more of a listener than of ten readers comes home to a constant student. Lope had few theories as to style, and he rarely aims at sheer beauty of expression, at simple felicity of phrase. Hence his very cleverness grows wearisome at last. But, after all, he must be judged by the true historic standard: his achievement must be compared with what preceded, not with what came after him. Tirso de Molina and Calderón and Moreto grew the flower from Lope's seed. He took the farce as Lope de Rueda left it, and transformed its hard fun by his humane and sparkling wit. He inherited the cold mediæval morality, and touched it into life by the breath of devout imagination. He re-shaped the crude collection of massacres which Virués mistook for tragedy, and produced effects of dread and horror with an artistry of his own devising, a selection, a conscience, a delicate vigour all unknown until he came. And for the comedia de capa y espada, it springs direct from his own cunning brain, unsuggested and even unimagined by any forerunner.

It were hopeless to analyse any part of the immense theatre which he bequeathed to the world. But among his best tragedies may be cited El Castigo sin Venganza, with its dramatic rendering of the Duke of Ferrara sentencing his adulterous wife and incestuous son to death. Among his historic dramas none surpasses El Mejor Alcalde el Rey, with its presentation of the model Spanish heroine, Elvira; of the feudal baron, Tello; and of the King as the buckler of his people, the strong man doing justice in high places: a most typical piece of character, congenial to the aristocratic democracy of Spain. A more morbid version of the same monarchical sentiment is given in La Estrella de Sevilla, the argument of which is brief enough for quotation. King Sancho el Bravo falls enamoured of Busto Tavera's sister, Estrella, betrothed to Sancho Ortiz de las Roelas. Having vainly striven to win over Busto, the King follows the advice of Arias, corrupts her slave, enters Estrella's room, is there discovered, is challenged by Busto, and escapes with a sound skin. The slave, confessing her share in the scheme, is killed by the innocent heroine's brother. Meanwhile, the King determines upon Busto's death, summons Sancho Ortiz, and bids him slay a certain criminal guilty of lèse-majesté. Herewith the King offers Sancho a guarantee against consequences. Sancho Ortiz destroys it, saying that he asks for nothing better than the King's word, and ends by begging the sovereign to grant him the hand of an unnamed lady. To this the King accedes, and he hands Sancho Ortiz a paper containing the name of the doomed man. After much hesitation and self-torment, Sancho Ortiz resolves to do his duty to his King, slays Busto, is seized, refuses to explain, undergoes sentence of death, and is finally pardoned by King Sancho, who avows his own guilt, and endeavours to promote the marriage between Sancho Ortiz and Estrella. For an obvious reason they refuse, and the curtain falls upon Estrella's determination to get herself to a nunnery.

Thus baldly told, the story resembles a thousand others; under Lope's hand it throbs with life and movement and emotion. His dialogue is swift and strong and appropriate, whether he personifies the blind passion of the King, the incorruptibility of Busto, the feudal ideal of Sancho Ortiz, or the strength and sweetness of Estrella. Of dialogue he is the first and best master on the Spanish stage: more choice, if less powerful, than Tirso; more natural, if less altisonant, than Calderón. The dramatic use of certain metrical forms persisted as he sanctioned it: the décimas for laments, the romance for exposition, the lira for heroic declamation, the sonnet to mark time, the redondilla for love-passages. His lightness of touch, his gaiety and resourcefulness are exampled in La Dama Melindrosa (The Languishing Lady), as good a cloak-and-sword play as even Lope ever wrote. His gift of sombre conception is to be seen in Dineros son Calidad (Money is Rank), where his contrivance of the King of Naples' statue addressing Octavio is the nearest possible approach to Tirso's figures of the Commander and of Don Juan.

Whether or not Tirso took the idea from Lope cannot well be decided; but if he did so, he was no worse than the rest of the world. For ages dramatists of all nations have found Lope de Vega "good to steal from," and in many forms he has diverted other countries than the Spains. Alexandre Hardy is said by tradition to have exploited him vigorously, and probably we should find the imitations among Hardy's lost plays. Jean Mairet is reputed to have borrowed generously, and an undoubted follower is Jean Rotrou, many of whose pieces—from the early Occasions perdues and La belle Alfrède to his last effort, Don Lope de Cardonne—are boldly annexed from Lope. D'Ouville, in Les Morts vivants and in Aimer sans savoir qui, exploited Lope to the profit of French playgoers. It is a rash conjecture which identifies the Wild Gallant with the Galán escarmentado, inasmuch as the latter play is even still "inedited," and could scarcely have reached Dryden; but it cannot be doubted that when the sources of our Restoration drama are traced out, Lope will be found to rank with Calderón, and Moreto, and Rojas Zorrilla.

Yet his chief glory must, like Burns's, be ever local. Cervantes, for all his national savour, might conceivably belong to any country; but Lope de Vega is the incarnate Spains. His gaiety, his suppleness, his adroit construction, his affluence, his realism, are eminently Spanish in their strength; his heedless form, his journalistic emphasis, his inequality, his occasional incoherence, his anxiety to please at any cost, are eminently Spanish in their weakness. He lacks the universal note of Shakespeare, being chiefly for his own time and not for all the ages. Shakespeare, however, stands alone in literature. It is no small praise to say that Lope follows him on a lower plane. There are two great creators in the European drama: Shakespeare founds the English theatre, Lope de Vega the Spanish, each interpreting the genius of his people with unmatched supremacy. And unto both there came a period of eclipse. That very generation which Lope had bewildered, dominated, and charmed by his fantasy turned to the worship of Calderón. Nor did he profit by the romantic movement headed by the Schlegels and by Tieck. For them, as for Goethe, Spanish literature was incarnated by Cervantes and by Calderón. The immense bulk of Lope's production, the rarity of his editions, the absence of any representative translation, caused him to be overlooked. To two men—to Agustín Durán in Spain and to Grillparzer in Germany—he owes his revival;[24] and, in more modest degree, Lord Holland and George Henry Lewes have furthered his due recognition. The present tendency is, perhaps, to overrate him, and to substitute uncritical adoration for uncritical neglect. Yet he deserves the fame which grows from day to day; for if he have bequeathed us little that is exquisite in art—as Los Pastores de Belén—the world is his debtor for a new and singular form of dramatic utterance. In so much he is not only a great executant in the romantic drama, a virtuoso of unexcelled resource and brilliancy. He is something still greater: the typical representative of his race, the founder of a great and comprehensive genre. The genius of Cervantes was universal and unique; Lope's was unique but national. Cervantes had the rarer and more perfect endowment. But they are immortals both; and, paradox though it may seem, a second Cervantes is a likelier miracle than a second Lope de Vega.

In 1599, the year following upon the issue of Lope's Dragontea, the picaresque tradition of Lazarillo de Tormes was revived by the Sevillan Mateo Alemán (fl. ? 1550-1609) in the First Part of his Atalaya de la Vida humana: Vida del Pícaro Guzmán de Alfarache. The alternative title—the Watch-Tower of Human Life—was rejected by the reading public, which, to the author's annoyance, insisted on speaking of the Pícaro or Rogue. Little is known of Alemán's life, save that he took his Bachelor's degree at Seville in 1565. He is conjectured to have visited Italy, perhaps as a soldier, is found serving in the Treasury so early as 1568, and, after twenty years, left the King's service as poor as he entered it. A passage in his Ortografía Castellana, published at Mexico in 1609, is thought to show that he was a printer; but this is surmise. That he emigrated to America seems certain; but the date of his death is unknown.

His Guzmán de Alfarache is an amplified version of Lázaro's adventures; and, though he adds little to the first conception, his abundant episode and interminable moralisings hit the general taste. Twenty-six editions, amounting to some fifty thousand copies, appeared within six years of the first publication: not even Don Quixote had such a vogue. Nor was it less fortunate abroad. In 1623 it was admirably translated by James Mabbe in a version for which Ben Jonson wrote a copy of verses in praise of