in corpore romano, quod orientali vestimento induitur; verum in intimo corde Christiana fides regnat, et per omnes se venas diffundit’? The same thought recurs in _The Nightingale in the Study_:— A bird is singing in my brain And bubbling o’er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the sap of old romances. I ask no ampler skies than those His magic music rears above me, No falser friends, no truer foes,— And does not Doña Clara love me? Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars, A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing, Then silence deep with breathless stars, And overhead a white hand flashing. O music of all moods and climes, Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly, Where still, between the Christian chimes, The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly! O life borne lightly in the hand, For friend or foe with grace Castilian! O valley safe in Fancy’s land, Not tramped to mud yet by the million! Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale To his, my singer of all weathers, My Calderon, my nightingale, My Arab soul in Spanish feathers! To most of us, as to Lowell, the Spain of romance is the Spain revealed to us by Calderón. Though not the greatest of Spanish authors, nor even the greatest of Spanish dramatists, he is perhaps the happiest in temperament, the most brilliant in colouring. He gives us a magnificent pageant in which the pride of patriotism and the charm of gallantry are blended with the dignity of art and ‘the fair humanities of old religion.’ And unquestionably he has imposed his enchanting vision upon the world. CHAPTER IX THE DRAMATIC SCHOOL OF CALDERÓN Lope de Vega, as I have tried to persuade you in a previous lecture, may fairly be regarded as the real founder of the national theatre in Spain. His victory was complete, and the old-fashioned Senecan drama was everywhere supplanted by the _comedia nueva_ in which the ‘unities’ were neglected. Playwrights who could no longer get their pieces produced took great pains to prove that Lope ought to have failed, and dwelt upon the enormity of his anachronisms and geographical blunders. These groans of the defeated are always with us. Just as the pedant clamours for Shakespeare’s head on a charger, because he chose to place a seaport in Bohemia, so Andrés Rey de Artieda, in his _Discursos, epístolas y epigramas_, published under the pseudonym of Artemidoro in 1605, is indignant at the triumph of ignorant incapacity:— Galeras vi una vez ir per el yermo, y correr seis caballos per la posta, de la isla del Gozo hasta Palermo. Poner dentro Vizcaya á Famagosta, y junto de los Alpes, Persia y Media, y Alemaña pintar, larga y angosta. Como estas cosas representa Heredia, á pedimiento de un amigo suyo, que en seis horas compone una comedia.