The Captain ANDRÉS REY DE ARTIEDA (1549-1613) is said to have been born at Valencia, and he certainly died there; yet Lope de Vega, once his friend, speaks of him as a native of Zaragoza. Artieda was a brilliant soldier, who received three wounds at Lepanto, and his conspicuous bravery was shown in the Low Countries, where he swam the Ems in mid-winter under the enemy's fire, with his sword between his teeth. He is known to have written plays entitled _Amadís de Gaula_ and _Los Encantos de Merlín_, but his one extant drama is _Los Amantes_: the first appearance on the stage of those lovers of Teruel who were destined to attract Tirso de Molina, Montalbán, and Hartzenbusch. Artieda is essentially a follower of Cueva's, and he has something of his model's clumsy manipulation; but his dramatic instinct, his pathos and tenderness, are his personal endowment. In his own day he was an innovator in his kind: his opposition to the methods of Lope made him unpopular, and condemned him to an unmerited neglect, which he bitterly resented in the miscellaneous _Discursos, epístolas y epigramas_, published by him (1605) under the name of Artemidoro. Another dramatist and friend of Lope de Vega's was the Valencian Captain CRISTÓBAL DE VIRUÉS (1550-1610), Artieda's comrade at Lepanto and in the Low Countries. Unfortunately for himself, Virués had his share of learning, and misused it in his _Semíramis_, an absurd medley of pedantry and horror. His _Átila Furioso_, involving more slaughter than many an outpost engagement, is the maddest caricature of romanticism. He appears to think that indecency is comedy, and that the way to terror lies through massacre. It is the eternal fault of Spain, this forcing of the note; and it would seem that Virués repented him in _Elisa Dido_, where he returns to the apparatus of the Senecan school. Yet, with all their defects, his earlier attempts were better, inasmuch as they presaged a new method, and a determination to have done with a sterile formula. He essayed the epic in his _Historia del Monserrate_, and once more courted disaster by his choice of subject: the outrage and murder of the Conde de Barcelona's daughter by the hermit Juan Garín, the Roman pilgrimage of the assassin, and the miraculous resurrection of his victim. As in his plays, so in his epic, Virués is an inventor without taste, brilliant in a single page and intolerable in twenty. His tactless fluency bade for applause at any cost, and his incessant care to startle and to terrify results in a monstrous monotony. Yet, if he failed himself, his exaggerated protest encouraged others to seek a more perfect way, and, though he had no direct influence on the stage, he is interesting as an embodied remonstrance.