The third act is so arranged as partly to gratify the national vanity and partly to conciliate the influence of the Church, of which Lope, like his contemporaries, always stood in awe. Several devout Christians, therefore, are now introduced, and we have an edifying confession of faith, embracing the history of the world from the creation to the crucifixion, with an account of what the Spanish historians regard as the first of the twelve persecutions. The deaths of Seneca and Lucan follow; and then the conflagration of Rome, which, as it constitutes the show part of the play and is relied on for the stage effect it would produce, is brought in near the end, out of the proper order of the story, and after the building of Nero’s luxurious palace, the “aurea domus,” which was really constructed in the desert the fire had left. The audience, meantime, have been put in good humor by a scene in Spain, where a conspiracy is on foot to overthrow the Emperor’s power; and the drama concludes with the death of Poppæa,--again less gross than the account of it in the Chronicle,--with Nero’s own death, and with the proclamation of Galba as his successor; all of them crowded into a space disproportionately small for incidents so important. But it was not often that Lope wrote so ill or so grossly. On modern, and especially on national subjects, he is almost always more fortunate, and sometimes becomes powerful and imposing. Among these, as a characteristic, though not as a remarkably favorable, specimen of his success, is to be placed the “Príncipe Perfeto,”[329] in which he intends to give his idea of a perfect prince under the character of Don John of Portugal, son of Alfonso the Fifth and contemporary with Ferdinand and Isabella, a full-length portrait of whom, by his friend and confidant, is drawn in the opening of the second act, with a minuteness of detail that leaves no doubt as to the qualities for which princes were valued in the age of the Philips, if not those for which they would be valued now. [329] Comedias, Tom. XI., Barcelona, 1618, ff. 121, etc.