Rojas Zorrilla’s glorification of the King in _García del Castañar_ is inspired by Calderón’s example, and he follows the chief in other ways less defensible. Splendid as Calderón’s diction often is, it lapses into gongorism too easily. Rojas Zorrilla’s natural mode of expression is direct and energetic; his dialogue is both natural and brilliant in _Don Diego de Noche_ and _Lo que son mugeres_; he knew the difference between a good style and a bad one, and he pauses now and then to satirise Góngora and the _cultos_. But he must be in the fashion, and as Calderón has dabbled in _culteranismo_, he will do the same. And he bursts into gongorism with all the crude exaggeration of one who is deliberately sinning against the light. His little flings at the Gongorists are few and feeble as in _Sin honra no hay amistad_, where he describes the darkened sky:— Está hecho un Góngora el cielo, más obscuro que su libro. But a few pages later, in the second volume of his collected plays, he rivals the most extravagant of Góngora’s imitators when he describes the composition and dissolution of the horse in _Los Encantos de Medea_:— Era de tres elementos compuesto el bruto gallardo, de fuego, de nieve, y aire; ... fuese el aire á los palacios de su región, salió el fuego, nieve, aire y fuego, quedando agua lo que antes fue nieve, lo que fue antes fuego, rayo; exhalación lo que aire, nada lo que fue caballo. This is what Ben Jonson would call ‘clotted nonsense,’ and you find the same bombast in another play of Rojas Zorrilla’s—and an excellent play it is—entitled _No hay ser padre, siendo Rey_, upon which Rotrou’s _Venceslas_ is based. In such faults of taste Rojas Zorrilla leaves Calderón far behind. You have seen him at his strongest in _García del Castañar_: you will find him at his weakest—and it is execrably bad—if you turn to the thirty-second volume of the _Comedias Escogidas_, and read _La Vida en el atahud_. Here St. Boniface goes to Tarsus and is decapitated: in the ordinary course, you expect the curtain to fall at this point. But Rojas Zorrilla prepares a surprise for you. The trunk of the saint is presented on the stage, the martyr holding his head in his hand; and the head addresses Milene and Aglaes in such a startling way that both become Christians. It seems very likely that, if Ludovico Enio had not been converted by the sight of the skeleton in Calderón’s _Purgatorio de San Patricio_, Milene and Aglaes would not have been confronted with the severed head, talking, in _La Vida en el atahud_.