The truth is, that Lope, in what have been called his miscellaneous works, was seldom in the path that leads to final success. He was turned aside by a spirit which, if not that of the whole people, was the spirit of the court and the higher classes of Castilian society. Boscan and Garcilasso, who preceded him by only half a century, had made themselves famous by giving currency to the lighter forms of Italian verse, especially those of the sonnet and the _canzone_; and Lope, who found these fortunate poets the idols of the period, when his own character was forming, thought that to follow their brilliant course would open to him the best chances for success. His aspirations, however, stretched very far beyond theirs. He felt other and higher powers within him, and entered boldly into rivalship, not only with Sannazaro and Bembo, as they had done, but with Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrarch. Eleven of his longer poems, epic, narrative, and descriptive, are in the stately _ottava rima_ of his great masters; besides which he has left us two long pastorals in the manner of the “Arcadia,” many adventurous attempts in the _terza rima_, and numberless specimens of all the varieties of Italian lyrics, including, among the rest, nearly seven hundred sonnets. But in all this there is little that is truly national,--little that is marked with the old Castilian spirit; and if this were all he had done, his fame would by no means stand where we now find it. His prose pastorals and his romances are, indeed, better than his epics; and his didactic poetry, his epistles, and his elegies are occasionally excellent; but it is only when he touches fairly and fully upon the soil of his country,--it is only in his _glosas_, his _letrillas_, his ballads, and his light songs and roundelays, that he has the richness and grace which should always have accompanied him. We feel at once, therefore, whenever we meet him in these paths, that he is on ground he should never have deserted, because it is ground on which, with his extraordinary gifts, he could easily have erected permanent monuments to his own fame. But he himself determined otherwise. Not that he entirely approved the innovations of Boscan and Garcilasso; for he tells us distinctly, in his “Philomena,” that their imitations of the Italian had unhappily supplanted the grace and the glory that belonged peculiarly to the old Spanish genius.[279] The theories and fashions of his time, therefore, misled, though they did not delude, a spirit that should have been above them; and the result is, that little of poetry such as marks the old Castilian genius is to be found in the great mass of his works we have thus far been called on to examine. In order to account for his permanent success, as well as marvellous popularity, we must, then, turn to another and wholly distinct department,--that of the drama,--in which he gave himself up to the leading of the national spirit as completely as if he had not elsewhere