A metrical form so natural and obvious became a favorite at once, and continued so. From the ballads it soon passed into other departments of the national poetry, especially the lyrical. At a later period, the great mass of the true Spanish drama came to rest upon it; and before the end of the seventeenth century more verses had probably been written in it than in all the other measures used by Spanish poets. Lope de Vega declared it to be fitted for all styles of composition, even the gravest; and his judgment was sanctioned in his own time, and has been justified in ours, by the application of this peculiar form of verse to long epic stories.[178] The eight-syllable _asonante_, therefore, may be considered as now known and used in every department of Spanish poetry; and since it has, from the first, been a chief element in that poetry, we may well believe it will continue such as long as what is most original in the national genius continues to be cultivated. [178] Speaking of the ballad verses, he says, (Prólogo á las Rimas Humanas, Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV., Madrid, 1776, 4to, p. 176,) “I regard them as capable, not only of expressing and setting forth any idea whatever with easy sweetness, but carrying through _any_ grave action in a versified poem.” His prediction was fulfilled in his own time by the “Fernando” of Vera y Figueroa, a long epic published in 1632, and in ours by the very attractive narrative poem of Don Ángel de Saavedra, Duke de Rivas, entitled “El Moro Exposito,” in two volumes, 1834. The example of Lope de Vega, in the latter part of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries, no doubt did much to give currency to the _asonantes_, which, from that time, have been more used than they were earlier.