Meantime the national theatre, neglected by the court and the higher classes, was given up to such writers as Francisco de Castro, an actor who sought the applause of the lowest part of his audience by vulgar farces,[369] and Thomas de Añorbe, the chaplain of a nunnery at Madrid, whose “Paolino,” announced as “in the French fashion,” provoked the just ridicule of Luzan, and whose “Virtue conquers Fate,” if no less extravagant, has the merit of being an attack on astrology and a belief in planetary influences.[370] With the success of such absurdities, however, scholars and men of taste seem to have grown desperate. Montiano, a Biscayan gentleman, high in office at court, and a member of the Academy of Good Taste, that met at the house of the Countess of Lemos, led the way in an attack upon them. He began, in 1750, with a tragedy on the Roman story of Virginia, which he intended should be a model for Spanish serious theatrical compositions, and which he accompanied with a long and well-written discourse, showing how far Bermudez, Cueva, Virues, and a few more of the old masters, had been willing to be governed by doctrines similar to his own. [369] “Alegría Cómica,” (Zaragoza, Tom. I., 1700, Tom. II., 1702,) and “Cómico Festejo,” (Madrid, 1742,) are three small volumes of _entremeses_, by Francisco de Castro; the last being published after the author’s death. They are not entirely without wit, regarded as caricatures; but they are coarse, and, in general, worthless. [370] Thomas de Añorbe y Corregel published his “Virtud vence al Destino” in Madrid, 1735, and his “Paolino” in 1740. He calls himself “Capellan del Real Monasterio de la Incarnacion” on the title of the first of these plays, and inserts two absurd _entremeses_ of his own composition between its acts. The tragedy itself, which comes like a sort of appendix to this discussion, and seems intended to illustrate and enforce its opinions, is entirely after the model of the French school, and especially after Racine;--all the rules, as they are technically called, including that which requires the stage never to be left vacant during the continuance of an act, being rigorously observed. But the “Virginia” is no less cold than it is regular, and, like the waters of the Alps, its very purity betrays the frozen region from which it has descended. Its versification, which consists of unrhymed iambics, is as far as possible removed from the warmth and freedom of the ballad style in the elder drama; its whole movement is languid; and the catastrophe, from the fear of shocking the spectator by a show of blood on the stage, turns out, in fact, to be no catastrophe at all. No effort, it is believed, was made to bring it upon the stage, and as a printed poem it produced no real effect on public opinion.