[515] Quintana, Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. I., Madrid, 1807, 12mo, p. 51, and the corresponding passage in the play. Martinez de la Rosa, in his “Isabel de Solís,” describing a real or an imaginary picture of the death of the young Guzman, gives a tender turn to the father’s conduct; but the hard old chronicle is more likely to tell the truth, and the play follows it. For thus sacrificing his other duties to his loyalty, in a way so well fitted to excite the imagination of the age in which he lived, Guzman received an appropriate addition to his armorial bearings, still seen in the escutcheon of his family, and the surname of “El Bueno,”--the Good, or the Faithful,--a title rarely forgotten in Spanish history, whenever he is mentioned. This is the subject, and, in fact, the substance, of Guevara’s play, “Mas pesa el Rey que la Sangre,” or King before Kin. A good deal of skill, however, is shown in putting it into a dramatic form. Thus, King Sancho, at the opening, is represented as treating his great vassal, Perez de Guzman, with harshness and injustice, in order that the faithful devotion of the vassal, at the end of the drama, may be brought out with so much the more brilliant effect. And again, the scene in which Guzman goes from the king in anger, but with perfect submission to the royal authority; the scene between the father and the son, in which they mutually sustain each other, by the persuasions of duty and honor, to submit to any thing rather than give up the city; and the closing scene, in which, after the siege has been abandoned, Guzman offers the dead body of his child as a proof of his fidelity and obedience to an unjust sovereign,--are worthy of a place in the best of the earlier English tragedies, and not unlike some passages in Greene and Webster. But it was as an expression of boundless loyalty--that great virtue of the heroic times of Spain--that this drama won universal admiration, and so became of consequence, not only in the history of the national stage, but as an illustration of the national character. Regarded in each of these points of view, it is one of the most striking and solemn exhibitions of the modern theatre.[516] [516] The copy I use of this play was printed in 1745. Like most of the other published dramas of Guevara, it has a good deal of bombast, and some _Gongorism_. But a lofty tone runs through it, that always found an echo in the Spanish character.