Quite different from this, however, is “The Unforeseen Fortune”; a play which, if it have only one action, has one whose scene is laid at Saragossa, at Valencia, and along the road between these two cities, while the events it relates fill up several years. The hero, just at the moment he is married by proxy in Valencia, is accidentally injured in the streets of Saragossa, and carried into the house of a stranger, where he falls in love with the fair sister of the owner, and is threatened with instant death by her brother, if he does not marry her. He yields to the threat. They are married and set out for Valencia. On the way, he confesses his unhappy position to his bride, and very coolly proposes to adjust all his difficulties by putting her to death. From this, however, he is turned aside, and they arrive in Valencia, where she serves him, from blind affection, as a voluntary slave; even taking care of a child that is borne to him by his Valencian wife. Other absurdities follow. At last, she is driven to declare publicly who she is. Her ungrateful husband then attempts to kill her, and thinks he has succeeded. He is arrested for the supposed murder; but at the same instant her brother arrives, and claims his right to single combat with the offender. Nobody will serve as the base seducer’s second. At the last moment, the injured lady herself, supposed till then to be dead, appears in the lists, disguised in complete armour, not to protect her guilty husband, but to vindicate her own honor and prowess. Ferdinand, the king, who presides over the combat, interferes; and the strange show ends by her marriage to a former lover, who has hardly been seen at all on the stage,--a truly “Unforeseen Fortune,”--which gives its name to the ill-constructed drama. The poetry, though not absolutely good, is better than the action. It is generally in flowing _quintillas_, or stanzas of five short lines each, but not without long portions in the old ballad-measure. The scene of an entertainment on the sea-shore near Valencia, where all the parties meet for the first time, is good. So are portions of the last act. But, in general, the whole play abounds in conceits and puns, and is poor. It opens with a _loa_, whose object is to assert the universal empire of man; and it ends with an address to the audience from King Ferdinand, in which he declares that nothing can give him so much pleasure as the settlement of all these troubles of the lovers, except the conquest of Granada. Both are grotesquely inappropriate.[502] [502] The accounts of Aguilar are found in Rodriguez, pp. 148, 149, and in Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 255, who, as is often the case, has done little but arrange in better order the materials collected by Rodriguez. Aguilar’s nine plays are in collections printed at Valencia in 1614 and 1616, mingled with the plays of other poets. A copy of the “Suerte sin Esperanza” which I possess, without date or paging, seems older.