Such dramas do not seem to have been favorites with Lope, and perhaps were not favorites with his audiences. At least, few of them appear among his printed works;--the one just noticed, and another, called “The Creation of the World and Man’s First Sin,” being the most prominent and curious;[373] and one on the atonement, entitled “The Pledge Redeemed,” being the most wild and gross. But to the proper stories of the Scriptures he somewhat oftener resorted, and with characteristic talent. Thus, we have full-length plays on the history of Tobias and the seven-times-wedded maid;[374] on the fair Esther and Ahasuerus;[375] and on the somewhat unsuitable subject of the Ravishment of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, as it is told in the book of Genesis.[376] In all these, and in the rest of the class to which they belong, Spanish manners and ideas, rather than Jewish, give their coloring to the scene; and the story, though substantially taken from the Hebrew records, is thus rendered much more attractive, for the purposes of its representation at Madrid, than it would have been in its original simplicity; as, for instance, in the case of the “Esther,” where a comic underplot between a coquettish shepherdess and her lover is much relied upon for the popular effect of the whole.[377] [373] It is in the twenty-fourth volume of the Comedias of Lope, Madrid, 1632, and is one of a very few of his religious plays that have been occasionally reprinted. [374] “Historia de Tobias,” Comedias, Tom. XV., Madrid, 1621, ff. 231, etc. [375] “La Hermosa Ester,” Ibid. ff. 151, etc. [376] “El Robo de Dina,” Comedias, Tom. XXIII., Madrid, 1638, ff. 118, etc. To this may be added a better one, in Tom. XXII., Madrid, 1635, “Los Trabajos de Jacob,” on the beautiful story of Joseph and his brethren. [377] The underplot is slightly connected with the main story of Esther, by a proclamation of King Ahasuerus, calling before him all the fair maidens of his empire, which, coming to the ears of Silena, the shepherdess, she insists upon leaving her lover, Selvagio, and trying the fortune of her beauty at court. She fails, and on her return is rejected by Selvagio, but still maintains her coquettish spirit to the last, and goes off saying or singing, as gayly as if it were part of an old ballad,-- For the vulture that flies apart, I left my little bird’s nest; But still I can soften his heart, And soothe down his pride to rest. The best parts of the play are the more religious; like Esther’s prayers in the first and last acts, and the ballad sung at the triumphant festival when Ahasuerus yields to her beauty; but the whole, like many other plays of the same sort, is intended, under the disguise of a sacred subject, to serve the purposes of the secular theatre.