There is a disquieting sentence in the preface to the fifth volume of Calderón’s plays: Vera Tassis says that the dramatist tried to draw up a list of pieces falsely ascribed to him, and adds that ‘his infirm condition did not allow of his forming a clear judgment about them.’ What does Vera Tassis mean? Are we to understand that Calderón’s intellect was slightly clouded towards the end, that he could not distinguish his own plays from those of other writers, and that perhaps he had become possessed with the notion (not uncommon in the aged) that he would die in want? Surely not. The financial statements of petitioners are often obscure. Calderón’s memory may naturally have begun to fail when he was close on eighty, but in other respects his mind was vigorous. His _Hado y divisa de Leonido y Marfisa_, composed to celebrate the wedding of Charles II. with Marie-Louise de Bourbon, was given at the Buen Retiro on March 3, 1680; it was produced later for the general public at the Príncipe and Cruz _corrales_, and altogether was played twenty-one times—a great ‘run’ for those days. For over thirty years Calderón had been commissioned to write the _autos_ for Madrid, and in 1681 he set to work as usual, but while engaged on _El Cordero de Isaías_ and _La divina Filotea_, his strength failed him. He could only finish one of these two _autos_, and left the other to be completed by Melchor Fernández de León. He signed his will on May 20, took to his bed and added a codicil on May 23, bequeathing his manuscripts to Juan Mateo Lozano, the parish priest of St. Michael’s at Madrid, who wrote the _Aprobación_ to the volume of _Autos Sacramentales, alegóricos y historiales_ published in 1677. Calderón died on Whitsunday, May 25, 1681. Almost all that we hear of him is eminently to his credit. Vera Tassis, who knew him intimately,—though perhaps less intimately than he implies,—dwells affectionately on Calderón’s open-handed charity, his modesty and courtesy, his kindliness in speaking of contemporaries, his gentleness and patience towards envious calumniators. Calderón was a gentleman as well as a great man of letters—a rare combination. Like Lope de Vega, he was apparently not inclined to rank his plays as literature, and, unlike Lope, he does not seem to have changed his opinion on this point. In his letter to the Patriarch of the Indies he speaks slightingly of poetry as a foible pardonable enough in an idle courtier, but one which he regarded with contempt as soon as he took orders; and his disdain for his own work is commemorated in a ponderous epitaph, written by those who knew him best:— CAMŒNIS OLIM DELICIARUM AMÆNISSIMUM FLUMEN QUÆ SUMMO PLAUSU VIVENS SCRIPSIT, MORIENS PRÆSCRIBENDO DESPEXIT.