It is the fashion of the present day to ransack every hidden corner of a man's life, and to bring to light all the errors and follies which he himself would have wished to consign to oblivion. A writer offers a fairer mark than any other for these inquiries, as we can always fancy at least that we trace something of the man himself in his works, and so form a tissue of some sort from these patchwork materials; Lope felt this, and in one of his epistles, laments that by publishing his verses, he has perpetuated the memory of his follies. "My love-verses," he says, "were the tender error of my youth; would I could cover them in oblivion! Those poets do well who write in enigmas, since they are not injured by the hidden." We do not know that we should have enlarged on this portion of his life, but for some conjectures given in the article before quoted in the eighteenth volume of the "Quarterly Review." The author of that article, in mentioning Lope's second marriage, says, "Lope speaks of this marriage as a happy one; yet among the sonnets there are two which may excite a suspicion that his heart was placed on another object. The inference from the first of these poems is, that he did not love the woman whom he married; and from the second that he had formed a miserable attachment to the wife of another man. This last inference will be much strengthened if there be any reason for supposing that he shadowed out his own character in the 'Dorotea;' one of the most singular, and, unless such a supposition be admitted, the most unaccountable of all his works." Taking it for granted that these sonnets and the 'Dorotea' refer to himself, we think there is every proof to show that they allude to his early life, his first marriage, and all those subsequent disasters, to fly from which he embarked on board the Armada. Certainly great obscurity hangs over the period of his first marriage, and the causes of his long exile at Valencia. His antagonist in the duel was a man of no consequence, and merely wounded; so, although that duel might have occasioned him to fly, it would not have forced so protracted an absence. He does not allude to any of these circumstances in his eclogue to Claudio. In his epistle to doctor Gregorio de Angulo he seems to imply that being married, he loved another woman, or that he was not happy in his first marriage.[84] Montalvan, in speaking of his flight to Valencia, mentions, in addition to the duel, youthful scrapes, which his enemies took that opportunity of bringing against him.[85] In a funeral eulogium, written on Lope by don Joseph Pellicer, there are these expressions:--"The excellent qualities of Lope excited the animosity of several powerful enemies, who forced him several times to become a wanderer. His pen was his faithful companion in his disasters and exile, and secured him shelter and welcome in distant provinces."[86]