Such were, probably, the unsteady attempts with which Lope began his career on the public stage during his exile at Valencia and immediately afterwards. They are certainly wild enough in their structure, and sometimes gross in sentiment, though hardly worse in either respect than the similar allegorical mysteries and farces which, till just about the same period, were performed in France and England, and much superior in their general tone and style. How long he continued to write them, or how many he wrote, we do not know. Few of them appear in the collection of his dramas, which does not begin till 1604, though an allegorical spirit is occasionally visible in some of his plays, which are, in other respects, quite in the temper of the secular theatre. But that he wrote such religious dramas early, and that he wrote great numbers of them, is unquestionable. In Madrid, if he found little to hinder, he also found little to help him, except two rude theatres, or rather court-yards, licensed for the representation of plays, and a dramatic taste formed or forming in the character of the people. But this was enough for a spirit like his. His success was immediate and complete; his popularity overwhelming. Cervantes, as we have seen, declared him to be a “prodigy of nature”; and, though himself seeking both the fame and the profit of a writer for the public stage, generously recognized his great rival as its sole monarch.[295] [295] See _ante_, p. 90, and Comedias, Madrid, 1615, 4to, Prólogo. The phrase _monstruo de naturaleza_, in this passage, has been sometimes supposed to imply a censure of Lope on the part of Cervantes. But this is a mistake. It is a phrase frequently used; and though sometimes understood _in malam partem_, as it is in D. Quixote, Part I. c. 46,--“Vete de mi presencia, monstruo de naturaleza,”--it is generally understood to be complimentary; as, for instance, in the “Hermosa Ester” of Lope, (Comedias, Tom. XV., Madrid, 1621), near the end of the first act, where Ahasuerus, in admiration of the fair Esther, says,-- Tanta belleza Monstruo será de la naturaleza. Cervantes, I have no doubt, used it in wonder at Lope’s prodigious fertility.