[47] These two pieces are in “Obras de Joachim Romero de Zepeda, Vezino de Badajoz,” (Sevilla, 1582, 4to, ff. 130 and 118), and are reprinted by Ochoa. The opening of the second _jornada_ of the Metamorfosea may be cited for its pleasant and graceful tone of poetry,--lyrical, however, rather than dramatic,--and its air of the olden time. Other authors living in Seville at about the same period are mentioned by La Cueva in his “Exemplar Poético” (Sedano, Parnaso Español, Tom. VIII. p. 60):-- Los Sevillanos comicos, Guevara, Gutierre de Cetina, Cozar, Fuentes, El ingenioso Ortiz;-- who adds that there were _otros muchos_, many more;--but they are all lost. Some of them, from his account, wrote in the manner of the ancients; and perhaps Malara and Megia are the persons he refers to. During the same period, there was at Valencia, as well as at Seville, a poetical movement in which the drama shared, and in which, perhaps, Lope de Vega, an exile in Valencia for several years, about 1585, took part. At any rate, his friend Cristóval de Virues, of whom he often speaks, and who was born there in 1550, was among those who then gave an impulse to the theatrical taste of his native city. He claims to have first divided Spanish dramas into three _jornadas_ or acts, and Lope de Vega assents to the claim; but they were both mistaken, for we now know that such a division was made by Francisco de Avendaño, not later than 1553, when Virues was but three years old.[48] [48] See L. F. Moratin, Catálogo, No. 84. Only five of the plays of Virues, all in verse, are extant; and these, though supposed to have been written as early as 1579-1581, were not printed till 1609, when Lope de Vega had already given its full development and character to the popular theatre; so that it is not improbable some of the dramas of Virues, as printed, may have been more or less altered and accommodated to the standard then considered as settled by the genius of his friend. Two of them, the “Cassandra” and the “Marcela,” are on subjects apparently of the Valencian poet’s own invention, and are extremely wild and extravagant; in “El Átila Furioso” above fifty persons come to an untimely end, without reckoning the crew of a galley who perish in the flames for the diversion of the tyrant and his followers; and in the “Semíramis,” the action extends to twenty or thirty years. All four of them are absurd.