An honourable station, beside Calderon, belongs to Antonio de Solis, one of the most eminent authors of his age. He was ten years younger than Calderon, whom he survived a few years. His literary activity was not limited to the study of poetry; for morals, politics, and history, also occupied his attention, particularly in his maturer years. He wrote the preludes, (_loas_), to some of Calderon’s dramas, and appears to have been connected by the ties of friendship with that great poet. The fame of his political and historical knowledge obtained for him a place in the administration under Philip IV. and after the death of that monarch he was appointed to the lucrative post of _Coronista de las Indias_, or historiographer of the transactions of the Spaniards in both Indies. While he held this office, he wrote his celebrated History of the Conquest of Mexico, which will be more particularly noticed at the close of the present book. Finally, he entered into holy orders, and devoted himself almost exclusively to exercises of devotion; he died in 1686. His plays do not display so much boldness of imagination as Calderon’s; but they are ingeniously composed in the Spanish national style of intrigue, and exhibit an elegant vivacity of diction. With regard to pleasantries put into the mouths of servants, he does not exactly correspond with other Spanish dramatists. His dramatic compositions are more regular than Calderon’s, because he was less liable to be seduced by the force of his imagination. Among his comedies attributed to the heroic class, _El Alcazar del Secreto_, (the Castle of Mystery), is justly much valued. In his dramas of intrigue he has endeavoured to vary the characters more than his great contemporary. Thus gipseys figure in his piece, called, _La Gitanilla de Madrid_, which is partly founded on Cervantes’s novel of the same title.[552] Augustin Moreto possessed a higher degree of comic talent than Calderon. This able and industrious writer was also favoured by Philip IV. but he became an ecclesiastic and renounced writing for the theatre. Some of his pieces are comic from beginning to end, and are also comedies of character, though the form of the Spanish drama of intrigue is still preserved. In his piece, entitled, _De fuera vendra, quien de casa nos eschara_,[553] (He will come from without, Who will turn us out), he has introduced an old coquette, a military coxcomb, and a doctor of laws, who besides being cowardly and pedantic, is also amorous. These characters are drawn with a comic force which has seldom been surpassed, though it must be confessed that they partake too much of the caricature style. In general Moreto approximates more than Calderon to Terence, whose comedies became, in the sequel, models for the Spanish dramatists when the principles of the French drama were adopted. But his _gracioso_, who is always the fool of the piece in the character of a servant, repeats too often the same sort of wretched jests.