Their very number, however, may have been one obstacle to their publication; for the most moderate and certain accounts on this point have almost a fabulous air about them; so extravagant do they seem. In 1603, he gives us the titles of three hundred and forty-one pieces that he had already written;[297] in 1609, he says their number had risen to four hundred and eighty-three;[298] in 1618, he says it was eight hundred;[299] in 1619, again in round numbers, he states it at nine hundred;[300] and in 1624, at one thousand and seventy.[301] After his death, in 1635, Perez de Montalvan, his intimate friend and executor, who three years before had declared the number to be fifteen hundred, without reckoning the shorter pieces,[302] puts it at eighteen hundred plays and four hundred _autos_;[303] numbers which are confidently repeated by Antonio in his notice of Lope,[304] and by Franchi, an Italian, who had been much with Lope at Madrid, and who wrote one of the multitudinous eulogies on him after his death.[305] The prodigious facility implied by this is further confirmed by the fact stated by himself in one of his plays, that it was written and acted in five days,[306] and by the anecdotes of Montalvan, that he wrote five full-length dramas at Toledo in fifteen days, and one act of another in a few hours of the early morning, without seeming to make any effort in either case.[307] [297] This curious list, with the Preface in which it stands, is worth reading over carefully, as affording indications of the history and progress of Lope’s genius. It is to Lope’s dramatic life what the list in Meres is to Shakspeare. It is found in the Obras Sueltas, Tom. V. [298] In his “New Art of Writing Plays,” he says, “I have now written, including one that I have finished this week, four hundred and eighty-three plays.” He printed this for the first time in 1609; and though it was probably written four or five years earlier, yet these lines near the end may have been added at the moment the whole poem went to the press. Obras Sueltas, Tom. IV. p. 417. [299] In the Prólogo to Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618;--a witty address of the theatre to the readers. [300] Comedias, Tom. XIV., Madrid, 1620, Dedication of “El Verdadero Amante” to his son. [301] Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629, Preface,--where he says, “Candid minds will hope, that, as I have lived long enough to write a thousand and seventy dramas, I may live long enough to print them.” The certificates of this volume are dated 1624-25.