another occasion, having undertaken to collaborate with two friends in a comedy, he finished his share of the work before breakfast, though it was one act out of three, and wrote some other verse into the bargain. Nor are these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether beyond belief. They could be accepted without hesitation if the writing of Lope de Vega were all imitative and bad. But that is far from being the case. Over and above the fact that he sometimes--as in the _Dorotea_, for example--wrote an admirable style, he was the creator of a literary form. Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish _comedia_, a word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some collaborated in the ending of the work, but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope there could have been no Calderon, who found the form ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much productiveness, and so little concentration, would have many faults will be easily understood. Finish was not to be expected from him, nor profundity. There would inevitably be much that was hasty and careless, much repetition, much taking of familiar situations, much use of stock characters, and a great deal of what the French call the _à peu pris_--the “that is good enough”--instead of the absolutely best, which is not to be attained except by thought and the labour of the file. He must have been prepared to do whatever would please an uncritical audience, as indeed Lope candidly avowed that he was. In short, he might be expected to have all the weaknesses of the class which Carlyle defined as “the shallow vehement,” and they would be the more conspicuous because he lived in a time of learning, but of no great criticism, because he was a beginner, and not least because he belonged to a people who have always been indifferent to finish of workmanship. But with all this, for which a narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau’s would have condemned him utterly, Lope had the one thing necessary, which is creative faculty. The quality of his plays will be best shown later on, when we treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the present it is enough to deal with the more mechanical side of his workmanship. Before his time Spanish play-writers had hesitated between the classic division into five acts and a tentative division into four. One early and forgotten writer, Avendaño, took three. Lope, not without the co-operation of others, but mainly by his example, established this last as the recognised number of _jornadas_--acts--for a Spanish play. The choice was made for a definite reason. In the _Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias_--a verse epistle written to a friend who had asked him to justify his works before the critics who held by the classic rules--Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce the characters and knit the intrigue; the second lead to the crisis, the