Contemporary with these events and discussions lived Antonio Mira de Mescua, well known from 1602 to 1635 as a writer for the stage, and much praised by Cervantes and Lope de Vega. He was a native of Guadix in the kingdom of Granada, and in his youth became archdeacon of its cathedral; but in 1610 he was at Naples, attached to the poetical court of the Count de Lemos, and in 1620 he gained a prize in Madrid, where he seems to have died while in the office of chaplain to Philip the Fourth. He wrote secular plays, _autos_, and lyrical poetry; but his works were never collected and are now found with difficulty, though not a few of his lighter compositions are in nearly all the respectable selections of the national poetry from his own time to the present. He, like Tirso de Molina, was an ecclesiastic of rank, but did not escape the troubles common to writers for the stage. One of his dramas, “The Unfortunate Rachel,” founded on the fable which represents Alfonso the Eighth as having nearly sacrificed his crown to his passion for a Jewess of Toledo, was much altered, by authority, before it could be acted, though Lope de Vega had been permitted to treat the same subject at large in the same way, in the nineteenth book of his “Jerusalem Conquered.” Mira de Mescua, too, was concerned in the drama of “The Curate of Madrilejos,” which, as we have seen, was forbidden to be read or acted even after it had been printed. Still, there is no reason to suppose he did not enjoy the consideration usually granted to successful writers for the theatre. At least, we know he was much imitated. His “Slave of the Devil” was not only remodelled and reproduced by Moreto in “Fall to rise again,” but was freely used by Calderon in two of his best-known dramas. His “Gallant both Brave and True” was employed by Alarcon in “The Trial of Husbands.” And his “Palace in Confusion” is the groundwork of Corneille’s “Don Sancho of Aragon.”[551]