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— "_Where are the galleons of Spain?_" 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_.