How many opportunities for scenes of the most painful interest such a story affords is obvious at the first glance. Jovellanos has used them skilfully, because he has done it in the simplest and most direct manner, with great warmth of kindly feeling, and in a style whose idiomatic purity is not the least of its attractions. “The Honored Culprit,” therefore, was at once successful, and when well acted, though its poetical power is small, it can hardly be listened to without tears. It was first produced in one of the royal theatres, without the knowledge of its author; then, spreading throughout Spain, it was acted at Cadiz at the same time both in French and Spanish, and, at last, became familiar on the stages of France and Germany. Such wide success had long been unknown to any thing in Spanish literature.[376] [376] I have the eighth edition of the “Delinquente Honrado,” 1803; still printed without its author’s name. It was so popular that it was several times published surreptitiously, from notes taken in the theatre, and was once turned into bad verse, before Jovellanos permitted it to appear from his own manuscript. (See Vol. VII. of his Works, edited by Cañedo.) It is somewhat singular, that, just about the time the “Delinquente Honrado” appeared in Spain, Fenouillet published in France a play, yet found in the “Théatre du Second Ordre,” with the exactly corresponding title of “L’Honnête Criminel.” But there is no resemblance in the plots of the two pieces. But from the time when the first attempt was made to introduce regular plays in the French manner upon the Spanish stage, an active contest had been going on, which, though the advantage had of late been on the side of the innovators, did not seem likely to be soon determined. In 1762, Moratin the elder published what he called “The Truth told about the Spanish Stage”;--three spirited pamphlets, in which he attacked the old drama generally, but above all the _autos sacramentales_, not denying the poetical merit of those by Calderon, but declaring that such wild, coarse, and blasphemous exhibitions, as they generally were, ought not to be tolerated in a civilized and religious community. So far as the _autos_ were concerned, Moratin was successful. They were prohibited by a royal edict, June 17, 1765; and though, even in the nineteenth century, it can hardly be said that they have been entirely driven out of the villages, where they have been the delight of the mass of the people from a period before that of Alfonso the Wise, yet in Madrid and the larger cities of Spain they have never been heard since they were first forbidden.[377]