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.