years, and the better part of the life of his successor, Calderon, the drama held its place at Court. Plays were frequently first given before the Court (which at that time, and at all festivals, meant substantially every lady and gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the public theatre. This audience demanded a higher level of work, and the best _comedias_ were probably written for it. Yet the drama made its way to the palace, and was not originally directed to the king and courtiers. It came as Lope de Vega had shaped it, and so remained in all essentials. The metrical form was fixed by him: the _silvas_ or _liras_--lyric verse in hendecasyllabic and seven-foot lines--for the passionate passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the _romance_ for narrative and dialogue, the _redondillas_ or roundelays of assonant and consonant verse, are all enumerated by him in the _Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias_. And what he did for the secular play he did for the religious. _The Voyage of the Soul_, given in his prose story, _El Peregrino en Su Patria_, is an _Auto Sacramental_ as complete as any of Calderon’s. Whatever the Spanish drama has to give us was either found undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape by him, or was his invention. Other men put their mark on their versions of his models, or showed qualities which he wanted, but nobody modified the Spanish drama as he had built it in any essential. He was, as far as any single man could be, the creator of the dramatic literature of his country; and even though Tirso de Molina was greater in this or that respect, Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a character, Calderon a deeper poetic genius,--though he might have cause to envy this man’s art or that man’s scope--yet he must remain the chief of one of the very few brilliant and thoroughly national dramatic literatures of the world. [SN: _Contemporaries and followers of Lope._]