One of the scenes of this play is particularly in the spirit and faith of the age when it was written; and was afterwards imitated by Calderon in his “Wonder-working Magician.” The lady is represented as confined by her father in a tower, where, in solitude, she gives herself up to Christian meditations. Suddenly the arch-enemy of the human race presents himself before her, in the dress of a fashionable Spanish gallant. He gives an account of his adventures in a fanciful allegory, but does not so effectually conceal the truth that she fails to suspect who he is. In the mean time, her father and her lover enter. To her father the mysterious gallant is quite invisible, but he is plainly seen by the lover, whose jealousy is thus excited to the highest degree; and the first act ends with the confusion and reproaches which such a state of things necessarily brings on, and with the persuasion of the father that the lover may be fit for a mad-house, but would make a very poor husband for his gentle daughter.[507] [507] This _comedia de santo_ does not appear in the collection of Guillen’s plays; but my copy of it (Madrid, 1729) attributes it to him, and so does the Catalogue of Huerta; besides which, the internal evidence from its versification and manner is strong for its genuineness. The passages in which the lady speaks of Christ as her lover and spouse are, like all such passages in the old Spanish drama, offensive to Protestant ears. The most important of the plays of Guillen de Castro are two which he wrote on the subject of Rodrigo the Cid,--“Las Mocedades del Cid,” The Youth, or Youthful Adventures, of the Cid;--both founded on the old ballads of the country, which, as we know from Santos, as well as in other ways, continued long after the time of Castro to be sung in the streets.[508] The first of these two dramas embraces the earlier portion of the hero’s life. It opens with a solemn scene of his arming as a knight, and with the insult immediately afterwards offered to his aged father at the royal council-board; and then goes on with the trial of the spirit and courage of Rodrigo, and the death of the proud Count Lozano, who had outraged the venerable old man by a blow on the cheek;--all according to the traditions in the old chronicles. [508] Fr. Santos, “El Verdad en el Potro, y el Cid resuscitado,” (Madrid, 1686, 12mo), contains (pp. 9, 10, 51, 106, etc.) ballads on the Cid, as he says they were _then_ sung in the streets by the blind beggars. The same or similar statements are made by Sarmiento, nearly a century later.