Two or three illustrations must suffice. Rotrou, as the handbooks tell us, has borrowed four—perhaps five—plays from Lope: we may now say five and perhaps six, for in _Cosroès_ Lope’s _Las Mudanzas de la fortuna y sucesos de don Beltrán de Aragón_ is combined with a Latin play by Louis Cellot. Every one remembers that Corneille borrowed _Don Sanche d’Aragon_ and the _Suite du Menteur_ from Lope. There are traces of Lope in Molière: in _Les Femmes savantes_, in _L’École des maris_, in _L’École des Femmes_, in _Le Médecin malgré lui_—and perhaps in _Tartufe_. And, even in the present incomplete state of our knowledge, it would be possible to draw up a long list of foreign debtors from Boisrobert and D’Ouville to Lesage. Of Lope’s Spanish imitators this is not the time to speak. He did not found a school, but every Spanish dramatist of the best period marches under Lope’s flag. There are still some who, in a spirit of chicane, would withhold from him the glory of being the architect of the Spanish theatre. So be it: but even they acknowledge that he found it brick, and left it marble. CHAPTER VIII CALDERÓN For some time before Lope de Vega’s death, it was evident that Calderón would succeed him as dictator of the stage. There was no serious competitor in sight. Tirso de Molina was becoming rusty; Vélez de Guevara and Ruiz de Alarcón, both on the wrong side of fifty when Lope died, had given the measure of what they could do, and Ruiz de Alarcón’s art was too individual to be popular. No possible rival to Calderón was to be found among the younger men. His path lay smooth before him. He developed the national drama which Lope had created; he accentuated its characteristics, but introduced no radical innovation. He found the most difficult part of the work already done; he inherited a vast intellectual estate, and it is the general opinion that the patronage of Philip IV. helped him to exploit it profitably. This point may stand over for the moment. Here and now, it is enough to say that Calderón’s career, so far as we can trace it, was one of uninterrupted success. Unfortunately, at present, we can only sketch his biography in outline. Within a year of his death, a short life of him was published by his admirer and editor, Juan de Vera Tassis y Villarroel; but, as Vera Tassis was thirty or forty years younger than Calderón, he naturally knew nothing of the dramatist’s early circumstances. He begins badly with a blunder as to the date of Calderón’s birth, shows himself untrustworthy in matters of fact, and indulges too freely in flatulent panegyric. For the present we are condemned to make bricks with only a few wisps of straw; but if, as seems likely, Dr. Pérez Pastor is as fortunate with Calderón as he was with Cervantes, many a blank will be filled in before long.