the Carnival, he was so anxious upon the subject that Lope and myself agreed to compose a joint comedy as fast as possible. It was the Tercera Orden de San Francisco, and is the very one in which Arias acted the part of the saint more naturally than was ever witnessed on the stage. The first act fell to Lope's lot, and the second to mine; we dispatched these in two days, and the third was to be divided into eight leaves each. As it was bad weather, I remained in his house that night, and knowing that I could not equal him in the execution, I had a fancy to beat him in the dispatch of the business; for this purpose I got up at two o'clock, and at eleven had completed my share of the work. I immediately went out to look for him, and found him very deeply occupied with an orange-tree that had been frostbitten in the night. Upon my asking him how he had gone on with his task, he answered,' I set about it at five; but I finished the act an hour ago; took a bit of ham for breakfast; wrote an epistle of fifty triplets; and have watered the whole of the garden: which has not a little fatigued me.' Then taking out the papers, he read me the eight leaves and the triplets; a circumstance that would have astonished me, had I not known the fertility of his genius, and the dominion he had over the rhymes of our language." As to the number* of his plays, all contemporary authors concur in representing it as prodigious. "At last appeared," says Cervantes in his prologue, "that prodigy of nature, the great Lope, and established his monarchy on the stage. He conquered and reduced under his jurisdiction every actor and author in the kingdom. He filled the world * For the list of those now extant see Appendix, No. I. with plays written with purity, and the plot conducted with skill, in number so many that they exceed eighteen hundred sheets of paper; and what is the most wonderful of all that can be said upon the subject, every one of them have I seen acted, or heard of their being so from those that had seen them; and though there have been many who have attempted the same career, all their works together would not equal in quantity what this single man has composed *." Montalvan asserts that he wrote eighteen hundred plays, and four hundred autos sacramentales†; and asserts, that if the works of his literary idol were placed in one scale, and those of all antient and modern poets in the other, the weight of the former would decide the comparison in point of quantity, and * This was written near twenty years before Lope's death." + A species of dramatic composition resembling our old mysteries. G be a fair emblem of the superiority in point of merit of Lope's verses over those of all other poets together. What Lope himself says upon this subject will be most satisfactorily related in his own words, though the passages are far from poetical. Having given a list in his prologue to the Pelegrino, written in 1604, of three hundred and forty-three plays, in his Arte de hacer Comedias, published five years afterwards, he says: Mas ninguno de todos llamar puedo None than myself more barbarous or more wrong, Who hurried by the vulgar taste along, Dare give my precepts in despite of rule, Whence France and Italy pronounce me fool. But what am I to do? who now of plays, In the eclogue to Claudio, one of his last works, are the following curious though prosaic passages: Pero si ahora el numero infinito Tantas imitaciones, tantas flores Pues mas de ciento en horas viente quatro Passaron de las musas al teatro. Should I the titles now relate Of plays my endless labour bore, Plots, imitations, scenes, and all the rest, |