The hero of the play, designated in the Dramatis Personæ by the title of _primer galan_ (first gallant), is _Lucifer_, who, dressed in a suit of black velvet and scarlet stockings--the appropriate stage-dress of devils, of whatever rank and station--appears in the first scene mounted upon a griffin, summoning his confidant _Asmodeus_ out of a trap, to acquaint him with the danger to which the newly-established order of Saint Francis exposed the whole kingdom of darkness. Italy (according to the arch-demon) was overrun with mendicant friars; and even Lucca, the scene of the play, where they had met with a sturdy opposition, might, he feared, consent to the building of a Franciscan convent, the foundations of which were already laid. Lucifer, therefore, determines to assist the Lucchese in dislodging the cowled enemies from that town; and he sends Asmodeus to Spain upon a similar service. The chief engine he puts in motion is _Ludovico_, a wealthy and hard-hearted man, who had just married _Octavia_, a paragon of virtue and beauty, thus cruelly sacrificed by her father’s ambition. _Feliciano_, a cousin of Octavia, and the object of her early affection, availing himself of the husband’s ignorance of their now-broken engagement, makes his appearance at Lucca with the determination of seducing the bride and taking revenge on Ludovico. The _Guardian_ of the new convent of Saint Francis, being obliged by the rule of his order to support the friars by daily alms collected from the people, and finding the inhabitants of Lucca determined to starve them out of their city, applies to Ludovico for help. That wicked man thrusts the Guardian and his lay-brother _Antolín_--the _gracioso_ of the play--out of the house, to be hooted and pelted by the mob. Nothing, therefore, is left for the friars but to quit the town: and now, the poet considering Horace’s rule for supernatural interference as perfectly applicable to such a desperate state of things, the _Niño Dios_ (the Child God),[25] and _Michael the archangel_, come down in a cloud (you will readily conceive that the actors at our humble theatre dispensed with the machinery), and the last, addressing himself to Lucifer, gives him a peremptory order to assume the habit of Saint Francis, and under that disguise to stop all the mischief he had devised against Octavia; to obtain support from the people of Lucca for the Franciscans; and not to depart till he had built two convents instead of the one he was trying to nip in the bud. [25] See Note F.