addresses his fair retreat:-- "Dear solace of my weary sorrow, Unhappy garden, thou who slept, Foreseeing not the stormy morrow, The while the tears that night had wept, Morning drank up, and all the flowers awoke, And I the pen that told my thoughts up took." and he goes on bitterly to grieve over the desolation the storm had made. If there is a touch of melancholy, and a half-checked repining in any of these quotations, I do not see that he is to be reprehended. Covered with renown and gifted with riches--it is said, who can be happy, if Lope de Vega were not? But we must remember that neither wealth nor fame are in themselves happiness. Lope had through death lost the dearest objects of life; in a spirit of piety he had shut himself out from forming others. His heart was the source of his disquiet--but he had recourse to natural objects for its cure, and often found repose among them. That his disposition was amiable and his temper placid, there is ample proof. He says of himself, "I naturally love those who love me, and I cannot hate those who hate me:" and we may believe him: for this is a virtue a man never boasts of without possessing it; to a nature formed to hate and to revenge, hatred and revenge seem natural and noble. That he was vain is evident: his sort of character, vivacious, kindly and expansive, tends to vanity. He would have been more than man not to have been vain, flattered as he was. Lord Holland mentions his complaints of poverty, obscurity, and neglect, in the preface to the "Peregrino," but they do not amount to much. He certainly writes in a very ill temper, nettled, it would appear, by some plays having appeared with his name, which were not written by him. There is more of complaint in his poem of the "Huerto Deshecho," one of the most elegant and pleasing of his poems. Alluding to his love of study, he says, "Though that be a work of praise, it was but the fatal prelude of the unhappy result of my hopes, since, in conclusion, my verses were given to the winds. Strong philosophy, and retired, but contented old age animate me on my way. If I do not sing, it is enough that others sing what I deplore--devouring time destroys towers of vanity and mountains of gold; one only thing, divine grace, suffers no change." It is strange, indeed, that he should say that he had given his verses to the winds--but he says himself, "No he visto alegre de su bien ninguno--" I ne'er saw man content with what he had.