Thus Lope in his bantering avowal of 1609. Yet what takes the form of an apology is in truth a vaunt; for it was Lope's task to tear off the academic swaddling-bands of his predecessors, and to enrich his country with a drama of her own. Nay, he did far more: by his single effort he dowered her with an entire dramatic literature. The very bulk of his production savours of the fabulous. In 1603 he had already written over two hundred plays; in 1609 the number was four hundred and eighty-three; in 1620 he confesses to nine hundred; in 1624 he reaches one thousand and seventy; and in 1632 the total amounted to one thousand five hundred. According to Montalbán, editor of the _Fama póstuma_, the grand total, omitting _entremeses_, should be one thousand eight hundred plays, and over four hundred _autos_. Of these about four hundred plays and forty _autos_ survive. If we take the figures as they stand, Lope de Vega wrote more than all the Elizabethan dramatists put together. Small wonder that Charles Fox was staggered when his nephew, Lord Holland, spoke of Lope's twenty million lines. Facility and excellence are rarely found together, yet Lope combined both qualities in such high degree that any one with enough Spanish to read him need never pass a dull moment so long as he lives. Hazlitt protests against the story which tells that Lope wrote a play before breakfast, and in truth it rests on no good authority. But it is history that, not once, but an hundred times, he wrote a whole piece within twenty-four hours. Working in these conditions, he must needs have the faults inseparable from haste. He repeats his thought with small variation; he utilises old solutions for a dramatic _impasse_; and his phrase is too often more vigorous than finished. But it is not as a master of artistic detail that Lope's countrymen place him beside Cervantes. First, and last, and always, he is a great creative genius. He incarnates the national spirit, adapts popular poetry to dramatic effects, substitutes characters for abstractions, and, in a word, expresses the genius of a people. It is true that he rarely finds a perfect form for his utterance, that he constantly approaches perfection without quite attaining unto it, that his dramatic instinct exceeds his literary execution. Yet he survives as the creator of an original form. His successors improved upon him in the matter of polish, yet not one of them made an essential departure of his own, not one invented a radical variant upon Lope's method. Tirso de Molina may exceed him in force of conception, as Ruiz de Alarcón outshines him in ethical significance, in exposition of character; yet Tirso and Alarcón are but developing the doctrine laid down by the master in _El Castigo sin Venganza_—the lesson of truth, realism, fidelity to the actual usages of the time. Tirso, Alarcón, and Calderón are a most brilliant progeny; but the father of them all is the unrivalled Lope. He seized