The last of Lope’s plays to be noticed among those whose subjects are drawn from common life is a more direct appeal, perhaps, than any other of its class to the popular feeling. It is his “Captives in Algiers,”[361] and has been already alluded to as partly borrowed from a play of Cervantes. In its first scenes, a Morisco of Valencia leaves the land where his race had suffered so cruelly, and, after establishing himself among those of his own faith in Algiers, returns by night as a corsair, and, from his familiar knowledge of the Spanish coast, where he was born, easily succeeds in carrying off a number of Christian captives. The fate of these victims, and that of others whom they find in Algiers, including a lover and his mistress, form the subject of the drama. In the course of it, we have scenes in which Christian Spaniards are publicly sold in the slave-market; Christian children torn from their parents and cajoled out of their faith;[362] and a Christian gentleman made to suffer the most dreadful forms of martyrdom for his religion;--in short, we have set before us whatever could most painfully and powerfully excite the interest and sympathy of an audience in Spain at a moment when such multitudes of Spanish families were mourning the captivity of their children and friends.[363] It ends with an account of a play to be acted by the Christian slaves in one of their vast prison-houses, to celebrate the recent marriage of Philip the Third; from which, as well as from a reference to the magnificent festivities that followed it at Denia, in which Lope, as we know, took part, we may be sure that the “Cautivos de Argel” was written as late as 1598, and probably not much later.[364] [361] Comedias, Tom. XXV., Çaragoça, 1647, ff. 231, etc. [362] These passages are much indebted to the “Trato de Argel” of Cervantes. [363] See, _passim_, Haedo, “Historia de Argel” (Madrid, 1612, folio). He reckons the number of Christian captives, chiefly Spaniards, in Algiers, at twenty-five thousand. [364] Lope, Obras Sueltas, Tom. III. p. 377. I am much disposed to think the play referred to as acted in the prisons of Algiers is Lope’s own moral play of the “Marriage of the Soul to Divine Love,” in the second book of the “Peregrino en su Patria.”