This predominance of the _Luca fa presto_ of literature may have been a misfortune, though when the conditions are remembered, and the innate indifference of the Spaniard to artistic finish is allowed for, an inevitable one. We must accept it and its consequences. One of them is this, that after Lope de Vega there could be no room for historical development on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different man writing the same drama. There is no such difference between these two as between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; and nowhere in Spanish dramatic literature is there anything answering to the contrast between the Elizabethan and the Restoration stages. The division often made between the school of Lope and the school of Calderon is very arbitrary. It is largely a matter of date. The earlier men are classed with the first, and the later with the second. To find a distinction between them it is necessary to insist on mere matters of detail, or on such purely personal differences of genius and character as must always be found where there is life among a large body of men. The rule of a literary as of a political despot may cramp as well as support. It is possible that if they had not been overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his contemporaries might have developed with more freedom. None of them may seem to have suffered more from the consecration of hasty writing than Gabriel Tellez (1570?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro Tirso de Molina, a churchman, who died as head of a religious house at Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said to live on the universal stage of the world as the first creator of Don Juan.[31] One of his plays, _The Vengeance of Tamar_, contains a scene of very high tragic power--that in which the outraged sister waits veiled outside the tent prepared by Absalom for the slaughter of his brother. She has a long double-edged dialogue with the offender, full of warnings of doom intelligible to the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when he has gone to his fate her soliloquy is a fine example of the legitimate dramatic use of the chorus. There is a certain quiet in this scene, a reserve, and an appeal not to the mere passion for seeing something going on, but to the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare indeed on the amusing, but too often noisy and shallow, Spanish stage. Calderon, using the freedom of a Spanish dramatist, conveyed the whole act into his _Hairs of Absalom_. One is inclined to think that the playwright who first rough-hewed the universally true character of Don Juan might, if he had felt called upon to finish as well as to imagine and sketch, have also given us the finished type of the debauchee whom the pursuit of his own pleasure has made a violator and brute, all the more odious because there is on him an outward show of gallantry and high-breeding. Tirso’s _Marta la Piadosa_--‘The Pious Martha’--has been most absurdly compared to Tartuffe. It is the story of a lively young lady who