Some of Tirso’s secular dramas deal chiefly in recent events and well-settled history, like his trilogy on the achievements of the Pizarros in the New World, and their love-adventures at home. Others are founded on facts, but with a larger admixture of fiction, like the two on the election and pontificate of Sixtus Quintus. His religious dramas and _autos_ are as extravagant as those of the other poets of his time, and could hardly be more so. His mode of treating his subjects seems to be capricious. Sometimes he begins his dramas with great naturalness and life, as in one that opens with the accidents of a bull-fight,[547] and in another, with the confusion consequent on the upsetting of a coach;[548] while, at other times, he seems not to care how tedious he is, and once breaks ground in the first act with a speech above four hundred lines long.[549] Perhaps the most characteristic of his openings is in his “Love for Reasons of State,” where we have, at the outset, a scene before a lady’s balcony, a rope-ladder, and a duel, all full of Castilian spirit. His more obvious defects are the too great similarity of his characters and incidents; the too frequent introduction of disguised ladies to help on the intrigue; and the needless and shameless indelicacy of some of his stories,--a fault rendered more remarkable by the circumstance, that he himself was an ecclesiastic of rank, and honored in Madrid as a public preacher. His more uniform merits are a most happy power of gay narration; an extraordinary command of his native Castilian; and a rich and flowing versification in all the many varieties of metre demanded by the audiences of the capital, who were become more nice and exacting in this, perhaps, than in any other single accessory of the drama. [547] “Todo es dar en una Cosa.” [548] “Por el Sotano y el Torno.” [549] “Escarmientos para Cuerdos.” But however various and capricious were the forms of Tirso’s drama, he was, in substance, always a follower of Lope de Vega. This he himself distinctly announces, boasting of the school to which he belongs, and entering, at the same time, into an ingenious and elaborate defence of its principles and practice, as opposed to those of the classical school; a defence which, it is worthy of notice, was published twelve years before the appearance of Corneille’s “Cid,” and which, therefore, to a considerable extent, anticipated in Madrid the remarkable controversy about the unities occasioned by that tragedy in Paris after 1636[550] and subsequently made the foundation of the dramatic schools of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire. [550] Cigarrales de Toledo, 1624, pp. 183-188.