All these, and many more like them, were represented with the consent of the ecclesiastical powers,--sometimes even in convents and other religious houses, but oftener in public, and always under auspices no less obviously religious.[382] The favorite materials for such dramas, however, were found, at last, almost exclusively in the lives of popular saints; and the number of plays filled with such histories and miracles was so great, soon after the year 1600, that they came to be considered as a class by themselves, under the name of “Comedias de Santos,” or Saints’ Plays. Lope wrote many of them. Besides those already mentioned, we have from his pen dramatic compositions on the lives of Saint Francis, San Pedro de Nolasco, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Julian, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Santa Teresa, three on San Isidro de Madrid, and not a few others. Many of them, like Saint Nicholas of Tolentino,[383] are very strange and extravagant; but perhaps none will give a more true idea of the entire class than the first one he wrote, on the subject of the favored saint of his own city, San Isidro de Madrid.[384] [382] C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. I. p. 153. [383] “San Nicolas de Tolentino,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, ff. 167, etc. Each act, as is not uncommon in the old Spanish theatre, is a sort of separate play, with its separate list of personages prefixed. The first has twenty-one; among which are God, the Madonna, History, Mercy, Justice, Satan, etc. It opens with a masquerading scene in a public square, of no little spirit; immediately after which we have a scene in heaven, containing the Divine judgment on the soul of one who had died in mortal sin; then another spirited scene, in a public square, among loungers, with a sermon from a fervent, fanatical monk; and afterwards, successive scenes between Nicholas, who has been moved by this sermon to enter a convent, and his family, who consent to his purpose with reluctance; the whole ending with a dialogue of the rudest humor between Nicholas’s servant, who is the buffoon of the piece, and a servant-maid, to whom he was engaged to be married, but whom he now abandons, determined to follow his master into a religious seclusion, which, at the same time, he is making ridiculous by his jests and parodies. This is the first act. The other two acts are such as might be anticipated from it. [384] This is not either of the plays ordered by the city of Madrid, to be acted in the open air in 1622, in honor of the canonization of San Isidro, and found in the twelfth volume of Lope’s Obras Sueltas; though, on a comparison with these last, it will be seen that it was used in their composition. It, in fact, was printed five years earlier, in the seventh volume of Lope’s Comedias, Madrid, 1617, and continued long in favor, for it is reprinted in Parte XXVIII. of “Comedias Escogidas de los Mejores Ingenios,” Madrid, 1667, 4to.