[356] There is in these passages something of the euphuistical style then in favor, under the name of the _estilo culto_, with which Lope sometimes humored the more fashionable portions of his audience, though on other occasions he bore a decided testimony against it. [357] This play, I think, gave the hint to Calderon for his “Alcalde de Zalamea,” in which the character of Pedro Crespo, the peasant, is drawn with more than his accustomed distinctness. It is the last piece in the common collection of Calderon’s Comedias, and nearly all its characters are happily touched. Another of these more domestic pieces is called “The Damsel Theodora,” and shows how gladly and with what ingenuity Lope seized on the stories current in his time and turned them to dramatic account. The tale he now used, which bears the same name with the play, and is extremely simple in its structure, was written by an Aragonese, of whom we know only that his name was Alfonso.[358] The damsel Theodora, in this original fiction, is a slave in Tunis, and belongs to a Hungarian merchant living there, who has lost his whole fortune. At her suggestion, she is offered by her master to the king of Tunis, who is so much struck with her beauty and with the amount of her knowledge, that he purchases her at a price which reëstablishes her master’s condition. The point of the whole consists in the exhibition of this knowledge through discussions with learned men; but the subjects are most of them of the commonest kind, and the merit of the story is quite inconsiderable,--less, for instance, than that of “Friar Bacon,” in English, to which, in several respects, it may be compared.[359] [358] This is among the more curious of the old popular Spanish tales. N. Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 9) assigns no age to its author, and no date to the published story. Denis, in his “Chroniques de l’Espagne,” etc., (Paris, 1839, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 285) gives no additional light, but, in one of his notes, treats its ideas on natural history as those of the _moyen âge_. It seems, however, from internal evidence, to have been composed after the fall of Granada. Brunet (Table, No. 17,572) notices an edition of it in 1607. The copy I use is of 1726, showing that it was in favor in the eighteenth century; and I possess another printed for popular circulation about 1845. We find early allusions to the Donzella Teodor, as a well-known personage; for example, in the “Modest Man at Court” of Tirso de Molina, where one of the characters, speaking of a lady he admires, cries out, “Que Donzella Teodor!” Cigarrales de Toledo, Madrid, 1624, 4to, p. 158.