_Ibid. Soneto_ XI.] [Footnote 89: "Postuma de mis Musas Dorotea, y por dicha de mi la mas querida, ultima de mi vida publica luz desea, desea el sol de rayos de oro lleno entre la niebla de Guzman el Bueno." _Ecloga á Claudio._] [Footnote 90: Prologo del Editor.] [Footnote 91: In his epistle to don Antonio de Mendoza, Lope alludes to his military life, but without assigning any cause for its assumption. "True it is," he says, "that in early life I left my country and friends to encounter the vicissitudes of war. I sailed on a wide sea towards foreign lands--where I served first with my sword, before I described events with my pen. My inclinations caused me to break off the career of arms, and the Muses gave me a more tranquil life."] [Footnote 92: There is a very obscure stanza following this, it runs thus:-- "¿ Quien te dixera che al exento labio, que apenas de un cabello se ofendia, amanciera dia de tan pesado agravio que cubierto de nieve agradecida? ¡ no separaos si fu e cometa ó vida!" In the Quarterly Review this is translated. "Who would have thought that this chin which had scarcely a hair upon it, should have sometimes been found in the morning so shagged with snow that it might have been mistaken for a comet?" This is obviously wrong. He alludes to his youth at the time of sailing with the Armada, and his age at the time of writing the eclogue to Claudio; and the swiftness with which the interval had passed. "Who could have told thee that there should come a day when the lip then scarcely deformed by a hair, should be so heavy covered with welcome snow (his beard turned white), [and that so swiftly that], we do not know whether it was a comet or life?" Nothing, however, can be so ill expressed and obscure.] [Footnote 93: Quarterly Review, vol. XVIII.] [Footnote 94: Ecloga á Claudio. Quarterly Review, XVIII.] [Footnote 95: Montalvan and the other biographers mention only one daughter, Feliciana, the child of his second wife. The reader will presently see that we derive our knowledge of the existence of Marcella from Lope himself. It seems probable that she was the offspring of his first marriage, since when he speaks of Feliciana as an infant, he mentions that Marcella was fifteen. She entered a convent and was perhaps dead when Montalvan wrote.]