These are pleasing incidents in a career of sombre respectability, though one half fears that the second is fiction. In 1637 Calderón was promoted to the Order of Santiago, and in 1640 he served with his brother knights against the Catalan rebels, hastily finishing his _Certamen de Amor y Celos_ (Strife of Love and Jealousy) so as to share in the campaign. He was sent to Madrid on some military mission in 1641; received from the artillery fund a monthly pension of thirty gold crowns; was ordained priest in 1651; was made chaplain of the New Kings at Toledo in 1653; became honorary chaplain to Felipe IV. in 1663, when he joined the Congregation of St. Peter, which elected him its Superior in 1666. On taking orders, Calderón's intention was to forsake the secular stage, but he yielded to the King's command, and, so late as 1680, celebrated Carlos II.'s wedding with Marie Louise de Bourbon. "He died singing, as they say of the swan," wrote Solís to Alonso Carnero. When death took him he was busied with an _auto_, which was finished by Melchor de León—a fit ending to a happy, blameless life. Calderón's prose writings are small in volume and in importance. The description (written under the name of his colleague, Lorenzo Ramírez de Prado) of the entry into Madrid of Felipe IV.'s second queen is an official performance. More interest attaches to a treatise on the dignity of painting, first printed in the fourth volume of Francisco Mariano Nifo's _Cajón de Sastre literato_ (1781):—"Painting," says Calderón, "is the art of arts, dominating all others and using them as handmaids." He had an admirable gift of appreciation, and he proves it by rescuing from the oblivion of the _Cancionero General_ such a ballad as Escribá's, which he quotes in _Manos Blancas no ofenden_, and again in _El Mayor Monstruo de los Celos_. Churton's version of the song is not unhappy:— "_Come, death, ere step or sound I hear, Unknown the hour, unfelt the pain; Lest the wild joy to feel thee near, Should thrill me back to life again._ _Come, sudden as the lightning-ray, When skies are calm and air is still; E'en from the silence of its way, More sure to strike where'er it will._ _Such let thy secret coming be, Lest warning make thy summons vain, And joy to find myself with thee Call back life's ebbing tide again._"