[518] The plays last mentioned are found scattered in different collections,--“The Devil’s Lawsuit” being in the volume just cited, and “The Devil’s Court” in the twenty-eighth volume of the Comedias Escogidas. My copy of the “Tres Portentos” is a pamphlet without date. Fifteen of the plays of Guevara are in the collection of Comedias Escogidas, to be noticed hereafter. The most strict, perhaps, of the followers of Lope de Vega was his biographer and eulogist, Juan Perez de Montalvan. He was a son of the king’s bookseller at Madrid, and was born in 1602.[519] At the age of seventeen he was already a licentiate in theology and a successful writer for the public stage, and at eighteen he contended with the principal poets of the time at the festival of San Isidro at Madrid, and gained, with Lope’s assent, one of the prizes that were there offered.[520] Soon after this, he took the degree of Doctor in Divinity, and, like his friend and master, joined a fraternity of priests in Madrid, and received an office in the Inquisition. In 1626, a princely merchant of Peru, with whom he was in no way connected, and who had never even seen him, sent him, from the opposite side of the world, a pension as his private chaplain to pray for him in Madrid; all out of admiration for his genius and writings.[521] [519] Baena, Hijos de Madrid, Tom. III. p. 157;--a good life of Montalvan. [520] Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, Tom. XI. pp. 501, 537, etc., and Tom. XII. p. 424. [521] Para Todos, Alcalá, 1661, 4to, p. 428. In 1627, he published a small work on “The Life and Purgatory of Saint Patrick”; a subject popular in his Church, and on which he now wrote, probably, to satisfy the demands of his ecclesiastical position. But his nature breaks forth, as it were, in spite of himself, and he has added to the common legends of Saint Patrick a wild tale, wholly of his own invention, and yet so interwoven with his principal subject as to seem to be a part of it, and even to make equal claims on the faith of the reader.[522] [522] It went through several editions as a book of devotion,--the last I have seen being of 1739, 18mo.