[147] The Church prayers on the stage, in this play and especially in Jornada II., and the sort of legal contract used to transfer the merits of the healthy saint to the dying sinner, are among the revolting exhibitions of the Spanish drama which at first seem inexplicable, but which anyone who reads far in it easily understands. Cervantes, in many parts of this strange play, avers the truth of what he thus represents, saying, “Todo esto fué verdad”; “Todo esto fué así”; “Así se cuenta en su historia,” etc. The remaining four plays are no less various in their subjects and no less lawless in the modes of treating them; and all the eight are divided into three _jornadas_, which Cervantes uses as strictly synonymous with acts.[148] All preserve the character of the Fool, who in one instance is an ecclesiastic,[149] and all extend over any amount of time and space that is found convenient to the action; the “Rufian Dichoso,” for instance, beginning in Seville and Toledo, during the youth of the hero, and ending in Mexico in his old age. The personages represented are extravagant in their number,--once amounting to above thirty,--and among them, besides every variety of human existences, are Demons, Souls in Purgatory, Lucifer, Fear, Despair, Jealousy, and other similar phantasms. The truth is, Cervantes had renounced all the principles of the drama which his discreet canon had so gravely set forth ten years earlier in the First Part of Don Quixote; and now, whether with the consent of his will, or only with that of his poverty, we cannot tell, but, as may be seen, not merely in the plays themselves, but in a sort of induction to the second act of the Rufian Dichoso, he had fully and knowingly adopted the dramatic theories of Lope’s school. [148] He uses the words as convertible. Tom. I. pp. 21, 22; Tom. II. p. 25, etc. [149] In the “Baños de Argel,” where he is sometimes indecorous enough, as when, (Tom. I. p. 151), giving the Moors the reason why his old general, Don John of Austria, does not come to subdue Algiers, he says:-- Sin duda, que, en el cielo, Debia de haber gran guerra, Do el General faltaba, Y á Don Juan se llevaron para serlo.