It follows, as the night the day, that the monotony which has been remarked in Calderón’s plays is still more pronounced in those of his followers. The incidents vary, but the conception of passion and of social obligation is identical. The dramatists of Calderón’s school adopt his method of presenting the conventional emotions of loyalty, devotion, and punctilio as to the point of honour; and, having enclosed themselves within these narrow bounds, they are almost necessarily driven to exaggeration. This tendency is found in so powerful a writer as Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, of whom we know scarcely anything except that he was born at Toledo in 1607, and that he was on friendly terms with both the devout José de Valdivielso and the waggish Jerónimo de Cáncer—who in his _Vejamen_, written in 1649, gives a comical picture of the dignified dramatist tearing along in an undignified hurry. In 1644 Rojas Zorrilla was proposed as a candidate for the Order of Santiago, but the nomination was objected to on the ground that he was of mixed Moorish and Jewish descent, and that some of his ancestors two or three generations earlier had been weavers and carpenters. These allegations were evidently not proved, for Rojas Zorrilla became a Knight of the Order of Santiago on October 19, 1645. The autograph of _La Ascensión del Cristo, nuestro bien_ states that this piece was written when the author was fifty-five: this brings us down to 1662. Rojas Zorrilla then disappears: the date of his death is unknown. The first volume of his plays was published in 1640, the second in 1645. In the preface to the second volume he makes the same complaint as Lope de Vega and Calderón—namely, that plays were fathered upon him with which he had nothing to do—and he promises a third volume which, however, was not issued.