All Spanish dramatists of this period came under Lope’s influence. He was even more supreme in Madrid than in Valencia, and other provincial centres. He set the fashion to men as considerable as Vélez de Guevara, Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón himself. Lope and Ruiz de Alarcón were at daggers drawn; but these were personal quarrels, and, original as was Alarcón’s talent, the torch of Lope flickers over some of his best scenes. These men were much more than imitators. If Lope ever had a devoted follower, it was the unfortunate Juan Pérez de Montalbán; but even Pérez de Montalbán was not a servile imitator, and it was precisely his effort to develop originality that affected his reason. Lope’s influence was general; he founded a national drama, but he founded nothing which we can justly call a school—a word which implies a certain exclusiveness and rigidity of doctrine foreign to Lope’s nature. So far was he from founding a school that, towards the end of his life, he was voted rather antiquated, and this view was still more widely held during Calderón’s supremacy. In the autograph of Lope’s unpublished play, _Quien más no puede_, there is a note by Cristóbal Gómez, who writes—‘This is a very good play, but not suitable for these times, though suitable in the past; for it contains many _endechas_ and many things which would not be endured nowadays; the plot is good, and should be versified in the prevailing fashion.’ This is dated April 19, 1669, less than forty years after Lope’s death; he was beginning to be forgotten by almost all, except the playwrights who stole from him. Calderón, on the other hand, did found a school. For one thing, his conventionality and mannerisms are infinitely easier to imitate than Lope’s broad effects. ‘Spanish Comedy,’ as Mr. George Meredith says, ‘is generally in sharp outline, as of skeletons; in quick movement, as of marionettes. The Comedy might be performed by a troupe of the _corps de ballet_; and in the recollection of the reading it resolves to an animated shuffle of feet.’ Whatever we may think of this as a judgment on Spanish comedy as a whole, it describes fairly enough the dramatic work produced by many of Calderón’s followers: with them, if not with their master, art degenerates into artifice—a clever trick. Calderón himself seems to have grown tired of the praises lavished on his ingenuity. He knew perfectly that neatness of construction was not the best part of his work, and, in _No hay burlas con el amor_, he laughs at himself and his more uncritical admirers:— ¿Es comedia de don Pedro Calderón, donde ha de haber por fuerza amante escondido, ó rebozada muger?