[302] In the “Índice de los Ingenios de Madrid,” appended to the “Para Todos” of Montalvan, printed in 1632, he says Lope had then published twenty volumes of plays, and that the number of those that had been acted, without reckoning _autos_, was fifteen hundred. Lope also himself puts it at fifteen hundred in the “Egloga á Claudio,” which, though not published till after his death, must have been written as early as 1632, since it speaks of the “Dorotea,” first published in that year, as still waiting for the light. [303] Fama Póstuma, Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. p. 49. [304] Art. _Lupus Felix de Vega_. [305] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XXI. pp. 3, 19. [306] “All studied out and written in five days.” Comedias, Tom. XXI., Madrid, 1635, f. 72. b. [307] Obras Sueltas, Tom. XX. pp. 51, 52. How eagerly his plays were sought by the actors and received by the audiences of Madrid may be understood from the fact Lope mentions in the poem to his friend Claudio, that above a hundred were acted within twenty-four hours of the time when their composition was completed. Obras Sueltas, Tom. IX. p. 368. Of this enormous mass, a little more than five hundred dramas appear to have been published at different times,--most of them in the twenty-five, or more properly twenty-eight, volumes which were printed in various places between 1604 and 1647, but of which it is now nearly impossible to form a complete collection. In these volumes, so far as any rules of the dramatic art are concerned, it is apparent that Lope took the theatre in the state in which he found it; and instead of attempting to adapt it to any previous theory, or to any existing models, whether ancient or recent, made it his great object to satisfy the popular audiences of his age;[308]--an object which he avows so distinctly in his “Art of Writing Plays,” and in the Preface to the twentieth volume of his Dramas, that there is no doubt it was the prevailing purpose with which he labored for the theatre. For such a purpose, he certainly appeared at a fortunate moment; and, possessing a genius no less fortunate, was enabled to become the founder of the national Spanish theatre, which, since his time, has rested substantially on the basis where he placed and left it. [308] As early as 1603, Lope maintains this doctrine in the Preface to his “Peregrino”;--it occurs frequently afterwards in different parts of his works, as, for instance, in the Prólogo to his “Castigo sin Venganza”; and he left it as a legacy in the “Egloga á Claudio,” printed after his death. The “Nueva Arte de Hacer Comedias,” however, is abundantly explicit on the subject in 1609, and, no doubt, expressed the deliberate purpose of its author, from which he seems never to have swerved during his whole dramatic career.