If Tirso excelled in sombre force, he was likewise a master in the lighter comedy of _El Vergonzoso en Palacio_, where Mireno, the Shy Man at Court, is rendered with rare sympathetic delicacy, and in the farcical intrigue of _Don Gil de las Calzas verdes_ (Don Gil of the Green Breeches), where the changes of Juana to Elvira or to Don Gil are such examples of subtle, gay ingenuity as delight and bewilder the reader no less than the comic trio of the _Villana de Vallecas_, or the picture of unctuous hypocrisy in _Marta la piadosa_. Tirso's fate was to be forgotten, not merely by the public, but by the very dramatists who used his themes; and, as in Lope's case, the neglect is partly due to the rarity of his editions. Yet, even so, his eclipse is unaccountable, for his various gifts are hard to match in any literature. He has not the disconcerting cleverness of Lope, nor has he Lope's infinite variety of resource; moreover, his natural frankness has won him a name for indecency. Yet has he imagination, passion, individual vision, knowledge of dramatic effect. He could create character, and his women, if less noble, are more real than Lope's own in their frank emotion and seductive abandonment. At whiles his diction tends to Gongorism, as when—in _El Amor y la Amistad_—a personage, at sight of a mountain, babbles of "the lofty daring of the snow, the pyramid of diamond"; but this is exceptional, and his hostility to _culteranismo_ inspired Góngora to write more than one stinging epigram. Tirso had not Lope's matchless facility, and, considering the maturity of the Spanish genius, it is strange that he should have written no play before 1606 or 1608. Moreover, he composed by fits and starts in moments snatched from duty, and, beginning late, he ended early. Even in these circumstances he could boast in 1621 that he had produced three hundred plays—a number afterwards raised to four hundred. Only some eighty survive: in other words, four-fifths of his theatre has vanished, and the loss is surely great for those who would fain know every aspect of his genius. But enough remains to justify his high position, and his fame, like Lope's, grows from day to day.