The Isabela is better; but still is not to be praised. The story relates to one of the early Moorish kings of Saragossa, who exiles the Christians from his kingdom in a vain attempt to obtain possession of Isabela, a Christian maiden with whom he is desperately in love, but who is herself already attached to a noble Moor whom she has converted, and with whom, at last, she suffers a triumphant martyrdom. The incidents are numerous, and sometimes well imagined; but no dramatic skill is shown in their management and combination, and there is little easy or living dialogue to give them effect. Like the Alexandra, it is full of horrors. The nine most prominent personages it represents come to an untimely end, and the bodies, or at least the heads, of most of them are exhibited on the stage, though some reluctance is shown at the conclusion about committing a supernumerary suicide before the audience. Fame opens the piece with a prologue, in which complaints are made of the low state of the theatre; and the ghost of Isabela, who is hardly dead, comes back at the end, with an epilogue very flat and quite needless. With all this, however, a few passages of poetical eloquence, rather than of absolute poetry, are scattered through the long and tedious speeches of which the piece is principally composed; and once or twice there is a touch of passion truly tragic, as in the discussion between Isabela and her family on the threatened exile and ruin of their whole race, and in that between Adulce, her lover, and Aja, the king’s sister, who disinterestedly loves Adulce, notwithstanding she knows his passion for her fair Christian rival. But still it seems incomprehensible how such a piece should have produced the popular dramatic effect attributed to it, unless we suppose that the Spaniards had from the first a passion for theatrical exhibitions, which, down to this period, had been so imperfectly gratified, that any thing dramatic, produced under favorable circumstances, was run after and admired. The dramas of Argensola, by their date, though not by their character and spirit, bring us at once within the period which opens with the great and prevalent names of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. They, therefore, mark the extreme limits of the history of the early Spanish theatre; and if we now look back and consider its condition and character during the long period we have just gone over, we shall easily come to three conclusions of some consequence.[57] [57] It seems probable that a considerable number of dramas belonging to the period between Lope de Rueda and Lope de Vega, or between 1560 and 1590, could even now be collected, whose names have not yet been given to the public; but it is not likely that they would add any thing important to our knowledge of the real character or progress of the drama at that time. Aribau, Biblioteca, Tom. II. pp. 163, 225, notes.