National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the declared apple of discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, "like a corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence." That national art to which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with the spirit of Spain itself. By the time of the close of the great war, the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy--authors on the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the arbiter of taste in Europe. With the restoration of peace accordingly began isolated attempts to impose the French canons of dramatic theory, and to follow the example of French dramatic practice; and in the middle of the century these endeavours assumed more definite form. Montiano's bloodless tragedy of _Virginia_ (1750), which was never acted, was accompanied by a discourse endeavouring to reconcile the doctrines of the author with the practice of the old Spanish dramatists; the play itself was in blank verse (a metre never used by Calderon, though occasionally by Lope), instead of the old national ballad-measures (the romance-measure with assonance and the rhymed _redondilla_ quatrain) preferred by the old masters among the variety of metres employed by them. The earliest Spanish comedy in the French form (a translation only, though written in the national metre)[67] (1751), and the first original Spanish comedy on the same model, Nicolas Moratin's _Petimetra_ (_Petite-Maîtresse_), printed in 1726 with a critical dissertation, likewise remained unacted. In 1770, however, the same author's _Hormesinda_, an historic drama on a national theme and in the national metre, but adhering to the French rules, appeared on the stage; and similar attempts followed in tragedy by the same writer and others (including Ayala, who ventured in 1775 to compete with Cervantes on the theme of Numantia), and in comedy by Iriarte and Jovellanos (afterwards minister under Godoy), who produced a sentimental comedy in Diderot's manner.[68] But these endeavours failed to effect any change in the popular theatre, which was with more success raised from its deepest degradation by R. de la Cruz, a fertile author of light pieces of genuine humour, especially _saynetes_, depicting the manners of the middle and lower classes. In literary circles Garcia de la Huerta's voluminous collection of the old plays (1785) gave a new impulse to dramatic