But his most poetic gift to the world was his love-child, Sister Marcela de Felix of the Convent of the Ladies of the Trinity at Alcala. Of all his children, legitimate or illegitimate, this daughter, by the lady who inspired the best of his sonnets, was to him dearest. He takes little Marcela to live with him as soon as ever his wife dies, and dedicates a drama to the little girl; so does another poet. She seems to be her father’s comrade, for when she is only eleven years old he uses her to get back some letters that he has written to one of his various mistresses; but when a relative of the husband of this mistress makes improper overtures to Little Marcela, Lope de Vega rises like a man “in spite of his age and holy orders,” and chastises the villain. At sixteen, to the little maid comes a craving for an exalted purity, a reaction of her beautiful soul from its coarse, immoral surroundings. Being a woman, her ideal also calls for a lover, but he must be pure and more beautiful than any one she has ever known, and he must love her as she will him, “better than life.” It is the Age of Faith. Her bridegroom awaits; she leaves her father to join him. Of course, there are braver, fuller, happier lives than a nun’s, and there always have been. But during the Age of Faith, in a religious house, there was always a haven of rest for the idealist, while now it sometimes seems he has not where to lay his head. It was not in the Middle Ages that the king said, “If poets will be poets, why, let them starve.” Then, on the contrary, the public fed a vagabond population of vagabond singers who sang a certain grace into the Romance languages; for the devotees of various abstractions there was the refuge of holy orders. After taking up the religious life, if they had force enough to arrange the conditions around them to fit their desires, they might safely follow their various bents, for good or ill, undisturbed by care for the future, their bodies being insured against want, their souls against punishment. In Spain, particularly, really great men and successful ones continued to take holy orders even up to the eighteenth century. In his prime, Calderon exchanged the position of superintendent of the royal theatre for royal chaplain, but after a few qualms on the point he continued to write plays on much the same order as before, only they were performed by priests. Since Calderon was really orthodox the arrangement seems natural enough; as a playwright he had baffled with the public till he was fifty-one years old; in the church at least he was relieved from the dictates of public tastes. There it was that he probably wrote his beautiful “Magic Magician.”