Even in this 19th century, confessors of families forbade the women and children’s even passing through the street where “a temple of Satan” was reared; mendicant monks placed themselves near the playhouse doors at night, to warn the headlong against the bottomless pit, just as our methodists on the day of the Derby distribute tracts at turnpikes against “sweeps” and racing. The monks at Cordova succeeded in 1823 in shutting up the theatre, because the nuns of an opposite convent observed the devil and his partners dancing fandangos on the roof. Although monks have in their turn been driven off the Spanish boards, the national drama has almost made its exit with them. The genuine old stage held up the mirror to Spanish nature, and exhibited real life and manners. Its object was rather to amuse than to instruct, and like literature, its sister exponent of existing nationality, it showed in action what the picaresque novels detailed in description. In both the haughty Hidalgo was the hero; cloaked and armed with long rapier and mustachios, he stalked on the scene, made love and fought as became an old Castilian whom Charles V. had rendered the terror and the model of Europe. Spain then, like a successful beauty, took a proud pleasure in looking at herself in the glass, but now that things are altered, she blushes at beholding a portrait of her grey hairs and wrinkles; her flag is tattered, her robes are torn, and she shrinks from the humiliation of truth. If she appears on the theatre at all, it is to revive long by-gone days--to raise the Cid, the great Captain, or Pizarro, from their graves; thus blinking the present, she forms hopes for a bright future by the revival and recollections of a glorious past. Accordingly plays representing modern Spanish life and things, are scouted by pit and boxes as vulgar and misplaced; nay, even Lope de Vega is now known merely by name; his comedies are banished from the boards to the shelves of book-cases, and those for the most part out of Spain. He has paid the certain penalty of his national localism, of his portraying men, as a Spanish variety, rather than a universal species. He has strutted his hour on the stage, is heard no more; while his contemporary, the bard of Avon, who drew mankind and human nature, the same in all times and places, lives in the human heart as immortal as the principle on which his influence is founded. [Sidenote: MODERN STAGE.]