idea of excellence with his name, "He continued to publish plays and poems, and to receive every remuneration, that adulation and generosity could bestow, till the year 1635, when religious thoughts had rendered him so hypochondriac that he could hardly be considered as in full possession of his understanding. On the 22d of August, which was Friday, he felt himself more than usually oppressed in spirits and weak with age; but he was so much more anxious about the health of his soul than of his body, that he would not avail him self of the privilege to which his infirmities entitled him, of eating meat; and even resumed the flagellation *, to which he had accustomed himself, with more than usual severity. This discipline is supposed to have hastened his death. He fell ill on that night, and having passed the necessary ceremonies with excessive devotion, he expired on Monday the 25th of August 1635. "The sensation produced by his death, was, if possible, more astonishing than the reverence in which he was held while living. The splendour of his funeral, which was conducted at the charge of the most munificent of his patrons, the duke of Sese, the number and language of the sermons on that occasion, the competition of poets of all countries in celebrating his genius and lament ing his loss, are unparalleled in the annals of poetry, and perhaps scarcely equalled in those of roy alty itself. The ceremonies attending his interment continued for nine days. "The priests described him as a saint in his life, and represented his superiority over the classics in poetry as great as that of the religion which he professed was over the heathen. The writings which were selected from the multitude produced on the occasion fill more than two large volumes." Yet Lope de Vega was not contented either with his fame or his profits? and actually complained of neglect, envy and poverty! As an author he is most known, as indeed he is most wonderful, for the prodigious number of his writ ings. Montalvan. + See Funeral Sermons.-Sancha's edit. of Lope. VOL. XLVIII. "It is true that the Castilian language is copious; that the verses are often extremely short, and that the laws of metre and of rhyme + are by no means severe. Yet were we to give credit to such accounts, allowing him to begin his compositions at the age of thirteen, we must believe that upon an average he wrote more than nine hundred lines a day; a fertility of imagination, and a celerity of pen, which, when we consider the occupations of his life as a soldier, a secretary, a master of a family, and a priest; his acquirements in Latin, Italian and Portuguese; and his reputation for erudition, become not only improbable, but, absolutely, and, one may almost say, physically impossible. As the credibility however of miracles must depend upon the weight of evidence, it will not be foreign to the purpose to examine the testimonies we possess of this extraordinary facility and exube not now exist the fourth part of the works which he and his admirers mention, yet enough remains to render him one of the most voluminous authors that ever put pen to paper. Such was his facility, that he informs us in his Eclogue to Claudio, that more than a hundred times he composed a play and produced it on the stage in twenty-four hours. Montalvan declares that he latterly wrote in metre with as much rapi. dity as in prose, and in confirmation of it he relates the following story:* "His pen was unable to keep pace with his mind, as he invented even more than his hand was capa ble of transcribing. He wrote a comedy in two days, which it would not be very easy for the most expeditious amanuensis to copy out in the time. At Toledo he wrote fifteen acts in fifteen days, which made five comedies. These he read at a pri vate house, where Maestro Joseph de Valdebieso was present and was witness of the whole; but because this is variously related, I will mention what I myself know from my own knowledge. Roque de Figu croa, the writer for the theatre at Madrid, was at such a loss for comedies that the doors of the theatre de la Cruz were shut; but as it was in the Carnival, he was so anxious upon the subject that Lope and my. self 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 * Parnaso Espanol. + Appendix, N‹. III. Montalvan's Eulogium. the 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 frost-bitten 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." One of his admirers told an Italian, he was so good a poet, that in order to oblige a friend, he wrote a whole comedy, with a Loa and Entremesis, in one night. That, sir, replied the Italian, proves him to be a good friend, but not a good poct. As Lope had rivalled Ariosto in his Angelica, so he thought to rival Tasso in his Jerusalem. This poem like the former consists of twenty cantos, it is equally irregular and extravagant in story, and does not contain parts of such beauty, yet it is not one of those books over which the reader feels disposed to fall asleep. Among other odd things it contains a long string of riddles. There is in the first canto, a picture, which walks out of the pannel, as in the Castle of Otranto. A Portuguese who wrote under the feign. ed name of Diogo Camacho, has alluded very neatly to this Jerusalem and the Arcadia, and their great inferiority to the epic, and the pastoral of Tasso. Lope de Vega, as a dramatic wri ter, decided the character of the Spanish stage, and to his genius, therefore, are in some measure to be ascribed, the peculiarities which distinguish the modern drama from the ancient. "Whatever may be their com. parative merit, it is surely both absurd and pedantic to judge of the one by rules laid down for the other, a practice which had begun in the time of Lope, and is not altogether abandoned to this day. There are many excellencies to which all dramatic authors of every age must aspire, and their success in these forms the just points of comparison: but to censure a modern author for not following the plan of Sophocles, is as absurd as to object to a fresco that it is not painted in oil colours; or, as Tiraboschi, in his parallel of Ariosto and Tasso, happily observes, to blame Livy for not writing a poem instead of a history. The Greek tragedians are probably superior to all moderns, if we except Racine, in the correctness of their taste, and their equals at least in the sublimity of their poetry, and in the just and spirited delineation of those events and passions which they represent. These, however, are the merits of the execution rather than of the design; the talents of the disciple ra312 ther ther than the excellence of the school; and prove the skill of the workman, not the perfection of the system. Without dwelling on the expulsion of the chorus (a most unnatural and inconvenient machine), the moderns, by admitting a complication of plot, have introduced a greater variety of incidents and characters. The province of invention is enlarged; new passions, or at least new forms of the same passion, are brought within the scope of dramatic poetry. Fresh sources of interest are opened, and additional powers of imagination called into activity. Can we then deny what extends its jurisdiction, and enhances its interest, to be an improvement, in an art whose professed object is to stir the passions by the imitation of human actions? In saying this I do not mean to justify the breach of decorum, the ueglect of probability, the anachronisms and other extravagancies of the founders of the modern theatre. Because the first disciples of the school were not models of perfection, it does not follow that the fun. damental maxims were defective. defective. The rudeness of their workmanship is no proof of the inferiority of the material; nor does the want of skill deprive them of the merit of having discovered the mine. The faults objected to them form no necessary part of the system they introduced. Their followers in every country have either completely corrected or gradually reformed such abuses. Those who bow not implicitly to the authority of Aristotle, yet avoid such violent outrages as are common in our early plays. And those who pique themselves on the strict observance of his laws, betray in the conduct, the sentiments, the cha racters, and the dialogue of their pieces (especially of their comedies), more resemblance to the modern than the ancient theatre: their code may be Grecian, but their manners, in spite of themselves, are Spanish, English, or French :—they may renounce their pedigree, and even change their dress, but they cannot divest their features of a certain family likeness to their poe. tical progenitors." "Lope was contemporary with both Shakspeare and Fletcher. In the choice of their subjects, and in the conduct of their fables, a resem blance may often be found, which is no doubt to be attributed to the taste and opinions of the times, rather than to any knowledge of each other's writings. It is indeed in this point of view that the Spanish poet can be compared with the greatest advantage to himself, to the great founder of our theatre. It is true that his imagery may occa. sionally remind the English reader of Shakspeare; but his sentiments, especially in tragedy, are more like Dryden and his contemporaries than their predecessors. The feelings of Shakspeare's characters are the result of passions common to all men ; the extravagantsentiments of Lope's, as of Dryden's heroes, are derived from an artificial state of society, from notions suggested by chivalry, and exaggerated by romance. In his delineation of character he is yet more unlike, and it is scarce necessary to add, greatly inferior; but in the choice and conduct of his subjects, if he equals him in extravagance and improbability, he does not fall short of him in interest and variety. A rapid succession of events, and sudden changes in the situation of the personages, are the charms charms by which he interests us so forcibly in his plots. These are the only features of the Spanish stage which Corneille left unimproved; and to these some slight resemblance may be traced in the operas of Metastasio, whom the Spaniards represent as the admirer and imitator of their theatre. In his heroic plays there is a greater variety of plot than in his comedies, though it is not to be expected that in the many hundreds he composed, he should not often repeat the same situation and events. On the whole, however, the fertility of his genius, in the contrivance of interesting plots, is as surprising as in the composition of verse. Among the many I have read, I have not fallen on one which does not strongly fix the attention; and though many of his plats have been transferred to the French and English stage, and rendered more correct and more probable, they have seldom or never been improved in the great article of exciting curiosity and interest. This was the spell by which he enchanted the populace, to whose taste for wonders he is accused of having sacrificed so much solid reputation. True it is that his extraordinary and embarrassing situations are often as unprepared by previous events as they are unforeseen by the audience; they come upon one by surprise, and when we know them, we are as much at a loss to account for such strange occurrences as before; they are produced, not for the purpose of exhibiting the peculiarities of character, or the workings of nature, but with a view of astonishing the audience with strange, unexpected, ́unnatural, and often inconsistent conduct in some of the principal characters. Nor is this the only de. fect in his plots. The personages, like the author, are full of intrigue and invention; and while they lay schemes and devise plots, with as much ingenuity as Lope himself, they seem to be actuated by the same motives also; for it is difficult to discover any other than that of diverting and surprising the audience. Their efforts were generally attended with success. All contemporary authors bear testimony to the popularity of Lope's pieces; and for many years he continued the favourite of the public. Stories are related of the audience taking so lively an interest in his plays, as totally to give way to the illusion, and to interrupt the representation. A spectator on one occasion is said to have interfered with great anxiety for the protection of an unfortunate princess-' dando voces,' says my author, contra el cruel homicida que degollaba al parecer una dama inocente'--crying out against the cruel murderer, who to all appearance was slaying an innocent lady." 6 It has often appeared to me," says lord Holland, "that the frequent recurrence of antithesis on the Spanish stage was a natural consequence of the short verses, in which most of their old scenes are composed. As the public are extremely partial to that metre, which is nearly the same as that of the old ballads or romances, and as they think it peculiarly adapted to recitation, a stranger should speak with great diffidence in his own judgment, when it is at variance with the Spaniards on such a subject; but it is certain that such dialogues as contain most points, are those which are best received on their stage; and few couplets in that metre are 313 quoted |