The other of his early performances above alluded to is the “Pastoral de Jacinto,” which Montalvan tells us was the first play Lope wrote in three acts, and that it was composed while he was attached to the person of the Bishop of Avila. This must have been about the year 1580; but as the Jacinto was not printed till thirty-seven years afterwards, it may perhaps have undergone large changes before it was offered to the public, whose requisitions had advanced in the interval no less than the condition of the theatre. He says in the Dedication, that it was “written in the years of his youth,” and it is founded on the somewhat artificial story of a shepherd fairly made jealous of himself by the management of another shepherd, who hopes thus to obtain the shepherdess they both love, and who passes himself off, for some time, as another Jacinto, and as the only one to whom the lady is really attached. It has the same flowing versification with the “True Lover,” but it is not superior in merit to that drama, which can hardly have preceded it by more than two or three years.[287] [287] Montalvan says, “Lope greatly pleased Manrique, the Bishop of Avila, by certain eclogues which he wrote for him, and by the drama of ‘The Pastoral of Jacinto,’ the earliest he wrote in three acts.” (Obras, Tom. XX. p. 30.) It was first printed at Madrid, in 1617, 4to, by Sanchez, in a volume entitled “Quatro Comedias Famosas de Don Luis de Góngora y Lope de Vega Carpio,” etc.; and afterwards in the eighteenth volume of the Comedias of Lope, Madrid, 1623. It was also printed separately, under the double title of “La Selva de Albania, y el Çeloso de sí mismo.” Moralities, too, written with no little spirit, and with strong internal evidence of having been publicly performed, occur here and there;--sometimes where we should least look for them. Four such are produced in his “Pilgrim in his own Country”; the romance, it may be remembered, which is not without allusions to its author’s exile, and which seems to contain some of his personal experiences at Valencia. One of these allegorical plays, “The Salvation of Man,” is declared to have been performed in front of the venerable cathedral at Saragossa, and is among the more curious specimens of such entertainments, since it is accompanied with explanations of the way in which the churches were used for theatrical purposes, and ends with an account of the exposition of the Host, as an appropriate conclusion for a drama so devout.[288] [288] It fills nearly fifty pages in the third book of the romance.