[221] Don Pedro Fernandez de Castro, Count of Lemos and Marquis of Sarria, who was born in Madrid about 1576, married a daughter of the Duke de Lerma, the reigning favorite and minister of the time, with whose fortunes he rose, and in whose fall he was ruined. The period of his highest honors was that following his appointment as Viceroy of Naples, in 1610, where he kept a literary court of no little splendor, that had for its chief directors the two Argensolas, and with which, at one time, Quevedo was connected. The Count died in 1622, at Madrid. Lope’s principal connections with him were when he was young, and before he had come to his title as Count de Lemos. He records himself as “Secretary of the Marquis of Sarria,” in a sonnet prefixed to the “Peregrino Indiano” of Saavedra, 1599, and on the title-page of the “San Isidro,” printed the same year; besides which, many years afterwards, when writing to the Count de Lemos, he says: “You know how I love and reverence you, and that, many a night, I have slept at your feet like a dog.” Obras Sueltas, Tom. XVII. p. 403. Clemencin, Don Quixote, Parte II., note to the Dedicatoria. Lope had now reached the age of thirty-five, and seems to have enjoyed a few years of happiness, to which he often alludes, and which, in two of his poetical epistles, he has described with much gentleness and grace.[222] But it did not last long. A son, Carlos, to whom he was tenderly attached, lived only to his seventh year;[223] and the mother, broken down by grief at his loss, soon died, giving birth, at the same time, to Feliciana,[224] who was afterwards married to Don Luis de Usategui, the editor of some of his father-in-law’s posthumous works. Lope seems to have felt bitterly his desolate estate after the death of his wife and son, and speaks of it with much feeling in a poem addressed to his faithful friend Conde.[225] But in 1605 an illegitimate daughter was born to him, whom he named Marcela,--the same to whom, in 1620, he dedicated one of his plays, with extraordinary expressions of affection and admiration,[226] and who, in 1621, took the veil and retired from the world, renewing griefs which, with his views of religion, he desired rather to bear with patience, and even with pride.[227] In 1606, the same lady--Doña María de Luxan--who was the mother of Marcela bore him a son, whom he named Lope, and who, at the age of fourteen, appears among the poets at the canonization of San Isidro.[228] But though his father had fondly destined him for a life of letters, he insisted on becoming a soldier, and, after serving under the Marquis of Santa Cruz against the Dutch and the Turks, perished, when only fifteen years old, in a vessel which was totally lost at sea with all on board.[229] Lope poured forth his sorrows in a piscatory eclogue, less full of feeling than the verses in which he describes Marcela taking the veil.[230]