[310] I know this play, “Dineros son Calidad,” only among the Comedias Sueltas of Lope; but it is no doubt his, as it is in Tom. XXIV. printed at Zaragoza in 1632, which contains different plays from a Tom. XXIV. printed at Zaragoza in 1641, which I have. There is yet a third Tom. XXIV., printed at Madrid in 1638. The internal evidence would, perhaps, be enough to prove its authorship. [311] Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618, f. 277, etc., but often reprinted since under the title of “La Melindrosa.” [312] Comedias, Tom. XXV., Çaragoça, 1647, f. 1, etc. [313] Comedias, Tom. XI, Barcelona, 1618, f. 1, etc. The Preface to this volume is curious, on account of Lope’s complaints of the booksellers. He calls it “Prólogo del Teatro,” and makes the surreptitious publication of his plays an offence against the drama itself. He intimates that it was not very uncommon for one of his plays to be acted seventy times. “El Azero de Madrid,” or The Madrid Steel, is one of them, and is among his earlier works for the stage.[314] It takes its name from the preparations of steel for medicinal purposes, which, in Lope’s time, had just come into fashionable use; but the main story is that of a light-hearted girl who deceives her father, and especially a hypocritical old aunt, by pretending to be ill and taking steel medicaments from a seeming doctor, who is a friend of her lover, and who prescribes walking abroad, and such other free modes of life as may best afford opportunities for her admirer’s attentions. [314] The “Azero de Madrid,” which was written as early as 1603, has often been printed separately, and is found in the regular collection, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, f. 27, etc. There can be little doubt that in this play we find some of the materials for the “Médecin Malgré Lui”; and though the full success of Molière’s original wit is not to be questioned, still the happiest portions of his comedy can do no more than come into fair competition with some passages in that of Lope. The character of the heroine, for instance, is drawn with more spirit in the Spanish than it is in the French play; and that of the devotee aunt, who acts as her duenna, and whose hypocrisy is exposed when she herself falls in love, is one which Molière might well have envied, though it was too exclusively Spanish to be brought within the courtly conventions by which he was restrained.