supposes it must have been _taliter qualiter_) after hearing it once, the other after hearing it two or three times, and the two gained a dishonourable livelihood by poaching for piratical managers. As many dramas reached the press by their exertions, the wretched state of the text is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory was at a loss he put in his own trash. Even in Calderon’s genial and peaceful old age this outrage moved him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his plays. His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published the first edition after his death, was unfortunately a partisan of the detestable _estilo culto_, and is suspected of having inserted some very bad examples of this vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the poet and the insufficiency of the editor the text has suffered greatly. Calderon’s high estimate, not perhaps so much of his own _autos_ as of the sanctity of work written for a religious purpose, is shown by the fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should suffer the same misuse as his plays. The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to that which has injured Lope’s. The Phœnix of Geniuses has been punished in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser. Calderon, on the other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence in praise of the Schlegels, who were determined to make another, and a better, Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers who had formed an idea of him at second hand have probably suffered a severe shock on becoming acquainted with his work.[34] [SN: _His limitations._] No reader should expect to find a world poet in Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards. No more intensely national poet ever wrote, and it is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was at its height, and when all life was permeated by a religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced the decalogue. His conception of honour (we shall come back to the point of honour as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time--thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment which nerves a man against fear of consequences, and enables him to resist the temptation to do what is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him incapable of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow the world the least excuse for saying that somebody has done something to you which renders you undignified or ridiculous. As has been already said, he added nothing to the formal part of Spanish dramatic literature, not even to the _auto_. He was too much affected by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most partial of editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in that style found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis. [SN: _His qualities._]