Lope de Vega is the greatest of Spanish dramatists; Calderón is amongst those who most nearly approach him. Lope incarnates the genius of a nation; Calderón expresses the genius of an age. He is a Spaniard to the marrow, but a Spaniard of the seventeenth century—a courtier with a turn for _culteranismo_, averse from the picaresque contrasts which lend variety to Lope's scene and to Tirso's. His interpretation of existence is so idealised that his stage becomes in some sort the apotheosis of his century. His characters are not so much men and women, as allegorical types of men and women as Calderón conceived them. It is not real life that he reveals, for he regarded realism as ignoble and unclean: he offers in its place a brilliant pageant of abstract emotions. He is not a universal dramatist: he ranks with the greatest writers for the Spanish stage, inasmuch as he is the greatest poet using the dramatic form. And, leaving aside his anachronisms and jumblings of mythology, he is a scrupulous artist, careful of his literary form and of his construction. The finished execution of his best passages is so irresistible that FitzGerald declared Isabel's characteristic speech in the _Alcalde de Zalamea_ to be "worthy of the Greek Antigone":—"Oh, never, never might the light of day arise and show me to myself in my shame! O fleeting morning star, mightest thou never yield to the dawn that even now presses on thine azure skirts! And thou, great Orb of all, do thou stay down in the cold ocean foam; let Night for once advance her trembling empire into thine! For once assert thy voluntary power to hear and pity human misery and prayer, nor hasten up to proclaim the vilest deed that Heaven, in revenge on man, has written on his guilty annals. Alas! even as I speak, thou liftest thy bright, inexorable face above the hills." Contrast with this impassioned lament (a little toned down in FitzGerald's version) the aphoristic wisdom of Pedro Crespo's counsel to his son in the same play:—"Thou com'st of honourable if of humble stock; bear both in mind, so as neither to be daunted from trying to rise, nor puffed up so as to be sure to fall. How many have done away the memory of a defect by carrying themselves modestly, while others, again, have gotten a blemish only by being too proud of being born without one. There is a just humility that will maintain thine own dignity, and yet make thee insensible to many a rub that galls the proud spirit. Be courteous in thy manner, and liberal of thy purse; for 'tis the hand to the bonnet, and in the pocket, that makes friends in this world, of which to gain one good, all the gold the sun breeds in India, or the universal sea sucks down, were a cheap purchase. Speak no evil of women; I tell thee the meanest of them deserves our respect; for of women do we not all come? Quarrel with no one but with good cause.... I trust in God to live to see thee home again with honour and advancement on thy back."