His success at these two jubilees was, no doubt, very flattering to him. It had been of the most public kind; it had been on a very popular subject; and it had, perhaps, brought him more into the minds and thoughts of the great mass of the people, and into the active interests of the time, than even his success in the theatre. The caricatures of Tomé de Burguillos, in particular, though often rude, seem to have been received with extraordinary favor. Later, therefore, he was induced to write more verses in the same style; and, in 1634, he published a volume, consisting almost wholly of humorous and burlesque poems, under the same disguise. Most of the pieces it contains are sonnets and other short poems;--some very sharp and satirical, and nearly all fluent and happy. But one of them is of considerable length, and should be separately noticed. It is a mock-heroic, in irregular verse, divided into six _silvas_ or cantos, and is called “La Gatomachia,” or the Battle of the Cats; being a contest between two cats for the love of a third. Like nearly all the poems of the class to which it belongs, from the “Batrachomyomachia” downwards, it is too long. It contains about twenty-five hundred lines, in various measures. But if it is not the first in the Spanish language in the order of time, it is the first in the order of merit. The last two _silvas_, in particular, are written with great lightness and spirit; sometimes parodying Ariosto and the epic poets, and sometimes the old ballads, with the gayest success. From its first appearance, therefore, it has been a favorite in Spain; and it is now, probably, more read than any other of its author’s miscellaneous works. An edition printed in 1794 assumes, rather than attempts to prove, that Tomé de Burguillos was a real personage. But few persons have ever been of this opinion; for though, when it first appeared, Lope prefixed to it one of those accounts concerning its pretended author that deceive nobody, yet he had, as early as the first festival in honor of San Isidro, almost directly declared Master Burguillos to be merely a disguise for himself and a means of adding interest to the occasion,--a fact, indeed, plainly intimated by Quevedo in the Approbation prefixed to the volume, and by Coronel in the verses which immediately follow.[261]