Another volume, not unlike the last, followed in 1624. It contains three poems in the octave stanza: “Circe,” an unfortunate amplification of the well-known story found in the Odyssey; “The Morning of Saint John,” on the popular celebration of that graceful festival in the time of Lope; and a fable on the Origin of the White Rose. To these he added several epistles in prose and verse, and three more prose tales, which, with the one already mentioned, constitute all the short prose fictions he ever published.[263] [263] The three poems are in Tom. III.; the epistles in Tom. I. pp. 279, etc.; and the three tales in Tom. VIII. The best part of this volume is, no doubt, the three stories. Probably Lope was induced to write them by the success of those of Cervantes, which had now been published eleven years, and were already known throughout Europe. But Lope’s talent seems not to have been more adapted to this form of composition than that of the author of Don Quixote was to the drama. Of this he seems to have been partially aware himself; for he says of the first tale, that it was written to please a lady in a department of letters where he never thought to have adventured, and the other three are addressed to the same person, and seem to have been written with the same feelings.[264] None of them excited much attention at the time when they appeared. But, twenty years afterwards, they were reprinted with four others, torn, apparently, from some connected series of similar stories, and certainly not the work of Lope. The last of the eight is the best of the collection, though it ends awkwardly, with an intimation that another is to follow; and all are thrust together into the complete edition of Lope’s miscellaneous works, though there is no pretence for claiming any of them to be his, except the first four.[265] [264] Obras Sueltas, Tom. VIII. p. 2; also Tom. III. Preface. [265] There are editions of the eight at Saragossa, (1648), Barcelona, (1650), etc. There is some confusion about a part of the poems published originally with these tales, and which appear among the works of Fr. Lopez de Zarate, Alcalá, 1651, 4to. (See Lope, Obras, Tom. III. p. iii.) But such things are not very rare in Spanish literature, and will occur again in relation to Zarate.