Very unlike them, though no less characteristic of the times, is his “Mercy and Justice”; the shocking story of a prince of Hungary condemned to death by his father for the most atrocious crimes, but rescued from punishment by the multitude, because his loyalty has survived the wreck of all his other principles, and led him to refuse the throne offered to him by rebellion. It is written in a greater variety of measures than either of the dramas just mentioned, and shows more freedom of style and movement; relying chiefly for success on the story, and on that sense of loyalty which, though originally a great virtue in the relations of the Spanish kings and their people, was now become so exaggerated, that it was undermining much of what was most valuable in the national character.[506] [506] It is in the second volume of Guillen’s plays; but it is also in the “Flor de las Mejores Doce Comedias,” etc., Madrid, 1652. “Santa Bárbara, or the Mountain Miracle and Heaven’s Martyr,” belongs, again, to another division of the popular drama as settled by Lope de Vega. It is one of those plays where human and Divine love, in tones too much resembling each other, are exhibited in their strongest light, and, like the rest of its class, was no doubt a result of the severe legislation in relation to the theatre at that period, and of the influence of the clergy on which that legislation was founded. The scene is laid in Nicomedia, in the third century, when it was still a crime to profess Christianity; and the story is that of Saint Barbara, according to the legend that represents her to have been a contemporary of Origen, who, in fact, appears on the stage as one of the principal personages. At the opening of the drama, the heroine declares that she is already, in her heart, attached to the new sect; and at the end, she is its triumphant martyr, carrying with her, in a public profession of its faith, not only her lover, but all the leading men of her native city.