But this very system--if that may be called a system which was rather an instinct--almost necessarily supposes that he indulged his audiences in a great variety of dramatic forms; and accordingly we find, among his plays, a diversity, alike in spirit, tone, and structure, which was evidently intended to humor the uncertain cravings of the popular taste, and which we know was successful. Whether he himself ever took the trouble to consider what were the different classes into which his dramas might be divided does not appear. Certainly no attempt at any technical arrangement of them is made in the collection he printed, except that, in the first and third volumes, a few _entremeses_, or farces, generally in prose, are thrown in at the end of each, as a sort of appendix. All the rest of the plays contained in them are in verse, and are called _comedias_,--a word which is by no means to be translated “comedies,” but “dramas,” since no other name is comprehensive enough to include their manifold varieties,--and all of them are divided into three _jornadas_, or acts. But in every thing else there seems no end to their diversities,--whether we regard their subjects, running from the deepest tragedy to the broadest farce, and from the most solemn mysteries of religion down to the loosest frolics of common life, or their style, which embraces every change of tone and measure known to the poetical language of the country. And all these different masses of Lope’s drama, it should be further noted, run insensibly into each other,--the sacred and the secular; the tragic and the comic; the heroic action and that from vulgar life,--until sometimes it seems as if there were neither separate form nor distinctive attribute to any of them. This, however, is less the case than it at first appears to be. Lope, no doubt, did not always know or care into what peculiar form the story of his drama was cast; but still there were certain forms and attributes invented by his own genius, or indicated to him by the success of his predecessors or the demands of his time, to which each of his dramas more or less tended. A few, indeed, may be found so nearly on the limits that separate the different classes, that it is difficult to assign them strictly to either; but in all--even in those that are the freest and wildest--the distinctive elements of some class are apparent, while all, by the peculiarly national spirit that animates them, show the source from which they come, and the direction they are destined to follow.