As might have been foreseen, Lope failed. His very subject is unfortunate, for it is not the conquest of Jerusalem by the Christians, but the failure of Cœur de Lion to rescue it from the infidels in the end of the twelfth century;--a theme evidently unfit for a Christian epic. All the poet could do, therefore, was to take the series of events as he found them in history, and, adding such episodes and ornaments as his own genius could furnish, give to the whole as much as possible of epic form, dignity, and completeness. But Lope has not done even this. He has made merely a long narrative poem, of which Richard is the hero; and he relies for success, in no small degree, on the introduction of a sort of rival hero, in the person of Alfonso the Eighth of Castile, who, with his knights, is made, after the fourth book, to occupy a space in the foreground of the action quite disproportionate and absurd, since it is certain that Alfonso was never in Palestine at all.[247] What is equally inappropriate, the real subject of the poem is ended in the eighteenth book, by the return home of both Richard and Alfonso; the nineteenth being filled with the Spanish king’s subsequent history, and the twentieth with the imprisonment of Richard and the quiet death of Saladin, as master of Jerusalem,--a conclusion so abrupt and unsatisfactory, that it seems as if its author could hardly have originally foreseen it. [247] Lope insists, on all occasions, upon the fact of Alfonso’s having been in the Crusades. For instance, in “La Boba para los otros,” (Comedias, Tom. XXI., Madrid, 1635, f. 60), he says,-- To this crusade There went together France and England’s powers, And our own King Alfonso. But the whole is a mere fiction of the age succeeding that of Alfonso, for using which Lope is justly rebuked by Navarrete, in his acute essay on the part the Spaniards took in the Crusades. Memorias de la Academia de la Hist., Tom. V., 1817, 4to, p. 87.