Obeying the same principle, he sacrifices regularity and congruity in his stories, if he can but make them interesting. His longer plays, indeed, are regularly divided into three _jornadas_, or acts; but this, though he claims it as a merit, is not an arrangement of his own invention, and is, moreover, merely an arbitrary mode of producing the pauses necessary to the convenience of the actors and spectators; pauses which, in Lope’s theatre, have too often nothing to do with the structure and proportions of the piece itself.[420] As for the six plays which, as he intimates, were written according to the rules, Spanish criticism has sought for them in vain;[421] nor does any of them, probably, exist now, if any ever existed, unless “La Melindrosa”--The Prude--may have been one of them. But he avows very honestly that he regards rules of all kinds only as obstacles to his success. “When I am going to write a play,” he says, “I lock up all precepts, and cast Terence and Plautus out of my study, lest they should cry out against me, as truth is wont to do even from such dumb volumes; for I write according to the art invented by those who sought the applause of the multitude, whom it is but just to humor in their folly, since it is they who pay for it.”[422] [420] This division can be traced back to a play of Francisco de Avendaño, 1553. L. F. Moratin, Obras, 1830, Tom. I. Parte I. p. 182. [421] “Except six,” says Lope, at the end of his “Arte Nuevo,” “all my four hundred and eighty-three plays have offended gravely against the rules [el arte].” See Montiano y Luyando, “Discurso sobre las Tragedias Españolas,” (Madrid, 1750, 12mo, p. 47), and Huerta, in the Preface to his “Teatro Hespañol,” for the difficulty of finding even these six. [422] Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias, Obras, Tom. IV. p. 406.