affects a passion for good works and a vow of charity in order to escape a disagreeable marriage, and is in other respects the usual _comedia de capa y espada_. Yet there is a power of characterisation in it, a liveliness and a genial humanity, which need little to be the most accomplished comedy. But it misses of what it might have reached, and we may say that it failed because his audience, and the taste of his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than hasty work. In Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again, the friend of Lope at Valencia, we find the same contrast between a vigorous original force of imagination, with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop into what no doubt pleased the “musketeers,” but is now only worth looking at because it did. His _Youth of the Cid_, which up to a certain point supplied Corneille with more than a model, falls to puerile miracle and ends incoherently. Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reached very high comedy. His _Verdad Sospechosa_--‘The Doubted Truth’--has had a great progeny on the stage of the world. All the romancing liars--they who lie not for sordid ends but by imagination, and from a love of shining, or getting out of the immediate difficulty--who follow one another on all theatres, may claim descent from his hero. But Alarcon was not popular, and he also could be hasty. The list of names might easily be swollen in a country which counted its known dramatic writers at certain periods by sixties and seventies, but nothing would be gained for the understanding of the school by the repetition.[32] Although he cannot be said to have developed or even modified the form of dramatic literature in Spain, Calderon was too considerable a man to be allowed to pass with a school.[33] [SN: _Calderon._]