and as the pencil represents on a few feet of canvass remote distances, which cheat the eye with an appearance of reality, so must the same privilege be conceded to the pen; and so much the rather, as the latter is incomparably more energetic than the former, inasmuch as articulated syllables are more intelligible than silent images, which can explain thought by signs only. And if you object to me, that, under pain of being esteemed presumptuous and ungrateful, we must obey the precepts of the first inventors of the drama, I reply to you, that we owe them indeed reverence for having triumphed over the difficulties which belong to a beginning in any matter, but that we are bound to bring what they have discovered to perfection; so that, without impairing the substance, we may change the manner of proceeding, and improve it by the lessons of experience. "It were indeed a precious state of things if the musician, because the inventors of music studied harmony of sound from the blows of the hammer on the anvil, were at the present day to use the instruments of Vulcan, and incur censure because they introduced a harp with strings, and thus brought to perfection what originally was imperfect. Herein it is that art differs from nature, because what the one has established since the creation remains immutable--as the pear-tree always produces pears, and the oak its acorns (for we shall not now stop to consider the exceptions arising from soil and climate, and the skill and graftings of the gardener); while in art, the roots of which grow in the shifting qualities of men, use causes the most important changes and modifications. What reason is there for surprise, then, if comedy transgresses the rules of our forefathers, and, according to the analogy of nature and of art, grafts the comic on the tragic, while it combines these opposite kinds of poetry in a fascinating whole, in which sometimes the serious characters of the one, sometimes the ludicrous and playful characters of the other, make their appearance. Moreover, if the pre-eminence of Æschylus and Menander in Greece, and that of Terence and Seneca in Rome, were sufficient to make their rules immutable, the excellence of our Lope de Vega, the pearl of the Manzanares, the Tully of Castile, the phoenix of our nation, so far surpasses these in the quantity as well as the quality of his writings, that his authority is abundantly sufficient to weigh down the doctrine I have cited; and as he has brought comedy to the perfection and consummate refinement in which we now behold it, we must think ourselves fortunate in having such a teacher, and zealously defend his school of poetry against its passionate antagonists. For when he says, in many passages of his writings, that he has deviated from the rules of the ancients only out of condescension to the taste of the multitude, this is only said from the modesty of his nature, and in order that the malevolence of the ignorant should not ascribe that to