The artist discovers, with feelings which can be imagined, his wife asleep in the garden. She murmurs words which prove her innocence. But this cannot save her; she must be sacrificed to remove the stain on her husband’s honor. Don Juan expresses his feelings in a most powerful soliloquy, when Alvaro enters and embraces the sleeping Seraphine. At that instant two shots are heard, and the innocent and guilty fall bleeding to the ground. The _auto_ founded on the above play is, in the opinion of no less a critic than Wilhelm Val Schmidt, the first of its class, and withal much less technical than is usual with these plays. The _dramatis personæ_ include the Artist, the World, Love, Lucifer, Sin, Grace, Knowledge, Nature (_i.e._, human nature at first in a state of innocence), Innocence, and the Will (_i.e._, free-will). The first car represents a dragon, which opens and discloses Lucifer, whose first speech proves the trite remark about the devil quoting Scripture; for he immediately proceeds to cite Jeremias and David, who alluded to him as the dragon. He then summons Sin, and repeats to her his partly-known history, which contains some singular ideas. He was the favorite of the Father in his former home, where he saw, before the original existed, the portrait of so rare a beauty that, inflamed with love, and to prevent the Prince from marrying her, he rebelled, and, placing himself at the head of the other discontented spirits, was defeated and doomed to perpetual exile and darkness. So far Sin is acquainted with the story; but from this point all is new to her. The greatest of Lucifer’s sufferings arises from his envy of the Prince, who is all that is wise and lovely: a learned theologian, legislator, philosopher, physician, logician, astrologist, mathematician, architect--“witness the palace of the world”--geometrician, rhetorician, musician, and poet. But none of these qualities so enrages and astonishes Lucifer as the Prince’s talent for painting. He has already been engaged six days on a landscape. At the beginning the ground of the canvas was so bare and rough that he only drew on it the outline in shadowy figures. The first day he gave it light; the second day he introduced heaven and earth, dividing the waters and the firmament; the third day, seeing the earth so arid and bare, he painted flowers in it and fruits, and the fourth day the sun and moon. He filled, the fifth day, the air and waters with birds and fishes; and this sixth day he has covered the landscape with various animals. Nothing of all this astonishes Lucifer so much as the Prince’s intention to embody in a palpable form the ideal which was the cause of Lucifer’s fall. The divine Artist has himself chosen the colors and selected clay and occult minerals, which Lucifer fears a breath may animate: “Since if a breath can dissipate dust, I suspect, I lament, I fear, that dust may live by the inspiration of a breath.”