In most of his other plays, Guevara deviated less from the beaten track than he did in this deep tragedy. “The Diana of the Mountains,” for instance, is a poetical picture of the loyalty, dignity, and passionate force of character of the lower classes of the Spanish people, set forth in the person of a bold and independent peasant, who marries the beauty of his mountain region, but has the misfortune immediately afterwards to find her pursued by the love of a man of rank, from whose designs she is rescued by the frank and manly appeal of her husband to Queen Isabella, the royal mistress of the offender.[517] “The Potter of Ocaña,” too, which, like the last, is an intriguing drama, is quite within the limits of its class;--and so is “Empire after Death,” a tragedy full of a melancholy, idyl-like softness, which well harmonizes with the fate of Inez de Castro, on whose sad story it is founded. [517] The “Luna de la Sierra” is the first play in the “Flor de las Mejores Doce Comedias,” 1652. In Guevara’s religious dramas we have, as usual, the disturbing element of love adventures, mingled with what ought to be most spiritual and most separate from the dross of human passion. Thus, in his “Three Divine Prodigies” we have the whole history of Saint Paul, who yet first appears on the stage as a lover of Mary Magdalen; and in his “Satan’s Court” we have a similar history of Jonah, who is announced as a son of the widow of Sarepta, and lives at the court of Nineveh, during the reign of Ninus and Semiramis, in the midst of atrocities which it seems impossible could have been hinted at before any respectable audience in Christendom. Once, indeed, Guevara stepped beyond the wide privileges granted to the Spanish theatre; but his offence was not against the rules of the drama, but against the authority of the Inquisition. In “The Lawsuit of the Devil against the Curate of Madrilejos,” which he wrote with Roxas and Mira de Mescua, he gives an account of the case of a poor mad girl who was treated as a witch, and escaped death only by confessing that she was full of demons, who are driven out of her on the stage, before the audience, by conjurations and exorcisms. The story has every appearance of being founded in fact, and is curious on account of the strange details it involves. But the whole subject of witchcraft, its exhibition and punishment, belonged exclusively to the Holy Office. The drama of Guevara was, therefore, forbidden to be represented or read, and soon disappeared quietly from public notice. Such cases, however, are rare in the history of the Spanish theatre, at any period of its existence.[518]