The extent to which, following this principle, Lope sacrificed dramatic probabilities and possibilities, geography, history, and a decent morality, can be properly understood only by reading a large number of his plays. But a few instances will partially illustrate it. In his “First King of Castile,” the events fill thirty-six years in the middle of the eleventh century, and a Gypsy is introduced four hundred years before Gypsies were known in Europe.[423] The whole romantic story of the Seven Infantes of Lara is put into the play of “Mudarra.”[424] In “Spotless Purity,” Job, David, Jeremiah, Saint John the Baptist, and the University of Salamanca figure together;[425] and in “The Birth of Christ” we have, for the two extremes, the creation of the world and the Nativity.[426] So much for history. Geography is treated no better, when Constantinople is declared to be four thousand leagues from Madrid,[427] and Spaniards are made to disembark from a ship in Hungary.[428] And as to morals, it is not easy to tell how Lope reconciled his opinions to his practice. In the Preface to the twentieth volume of his Theatre, he declares, in reference to his own “Wise Vengeance,” that “its title is absurd, because all revenge is unwise and unlawful”; and yet it seems as if one half of his plays go to justify it. It is made a merit in San Isidro, that he stole his master’s grain to give it to the starving birds.[429] The prayers of Nicolas de Tolentino are accounted sufficient for the salvation of a kinsman who, after a dissolute life, had died in an act of mortal sin;[430] and the cruel and atrocious conquest of Arauco is claimed as an honor to a noble family and a grace to the national escutcheon.[431] [423] “El Primer Rey de Castilla,” Comedias, Tom. XVII., Madrid, 1621, ff. 114, etc. [424] “El Bastardo Mudarra,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641. [425] “La Limpieza no Manchada,” Comedias, Tom. XIX., Madrid, 1623. [426] “El Nacimiento de Christo,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., _ut supra_. [427] It is the learned Theodora, a person represented as capable of confounding the knowing professors brought to try her, who declares Constantinople to be four thousand leagues from Madrid. La Donzella Teodor, end of Act II. [428] This extraordinary disembarkation takes place in the “Animal de Ungria” (Comedias, Tom. IX., Barcelona, 1618, ff. 137, 138). One is naturally reminded of Shakspeare’s “Winter’s Tale”; but it is curious that the Duke de Luynes, a favorite minister of state to Louis XIII., made precisely the same mistake, at about the same time, to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, then (1619-21) ambassador in France. But Lope certainly knew better, and I doubt not Shakspeare did, however ignorant the French statesman may have been. Herbert’s Life, by himself, London, 1809, 8vo, p. 217. [429] See “San Isidro Labrador,” in Comedias Escogidas, Tom. XXVIII., Madrid, 1667, f. 66.