sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the most complete moral laxity. He alternated between penance and relapses. After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke of Alva, the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low Countries. For him he wrote the pastoral _Arcadia_, which deals with the duke’s amours. He married, but marriage produced no effect on his habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years, in consequence of obscure troubles arising, he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his return to Madrid his wife died, but he continued to give cause for “jealousy,” and other troubles sent him off to join the Armada. From that campaign of failure and suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety, and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called _The Beauty of Angelica_, during the voyage. After his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he became a priest. During his later years he was attached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and then Duke of Sessa,--a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to the famous house which had produced the Great Captain, Gonsalvo de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635. [SN: _His influence on the drama._] A poet who could venture on so great an enterprise as a continuation of Ariosto amid all the distractions of the Armada cannot have wanted for confidence in himself, nor was he likely to have an idle pen. The productiveness of Lope was indeed enormous. He may be said to have tried every literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian model down to the romance. In bulk, the life-work of an industrious journalist might be about equal to his surviving writings. And Lope was no mere journalist. His execution of everything he touched has a certain interest. If space allowed, there would be something to say of his religious poem on _San Isidro_ and his sonnets, serious and burlesque. But space does not allow, and we must consider him here chiefly in his great and dominant character of dramatist, remembering always that he was a man of many-sided ability, and that the average cleverness of his non-dramatic work goes far to justify the admiration of his countrymen in his time, and the place they have never ceased to give him as, with the one exception of Cervantes, the chief of their literature. The number of his plays has remained a wonder and a legend. Eighteen hundred _comedias_ and four hundred _autos sacramentales_ is the figure given on fair authority as his total life-work for the stage. He himself confesses to two hundred and nineteen pieces as early as 1603, and in 1624 to one thousand and seventy. An eyewitness has recorded that he once wrote five plays in fifteen days; and that on