The death of his son Carlos Félix was quickly followed by the death of his wife, and his devotional mood deepened. He now made an irreparable mistake by entering holy orders. No man was less fitted to be a minister of religion, and his private correspondence discloses no sign of a religious spirit, or of anything resembling a religious vocation: on the contrary, it reveals him as frequenting loose company, and cracking unseemly jokes at a most solemn moment. The pendulum had already begun to swing before his ordination, and for some years afterwards he was prominent as an unscrupulous libertine. No one as successful as Lope could fail to make many enemies: he had now delivered himself into their hands, and assuredly they did not spare him. In the Preface to the Second Part of _Don Quixote_ Cervantes, though he does not mention Lope de Vega by name, indulges in an unmistakable allusion to him as a Familiar of the Inquisition notorious for his ‘virtuous occupation.’ Yes! a ‘virtuous occupation’ which was an intolerable public scandal. From 1605 onwards Lope had been on intimate terms with the Duke of Sesa, and his correspondence with the Duke is his condemnation. But his conscience was not dead. Among his letters to Sesa many are stained with tears of shame and of remorse. They reveal him in every mood. He protests against being made the intermediary of the Duke’s vulgar gallantries; he forms resolutions to amend, yet falls, and falls again. In his fifty-fifth year he conceived an insane passion for Marta de Nevares Santoyo. On the details of this lamentable intrigue nothing need be said here. Once more Samson was in the hands of the Philistines. Led on by Góngora, they showed him no mercy, but he survived their onset. His plays were acted on every stage in Spain; the people who flocked to the theatre were spell-bound by his dramatic creations, his dexterity, grace and wit; his name was used as a synonym for matchless excellence; and he strengthened his position with the more learned public by a mass of non-dramatic work. He seldom reaches such a height as in the _Pastores de Belén_—a perfect gem of devotion and of art—but the adaptability of his talent is amazing in prose and verse dealing with subjects as diverse as the triumphs of faith in Japan and the fate of Mary Queen of Scots. The short stories in the _Filomena_ and _Circe_ represent him at his weakest, but the _Dorotea_, a work that had lain by him for many years, is an absorbing fragment of autobiography which exhibits Lope as a master of graceful and colloquial diction.