The morality and doctrine of this play need not concern us here, all the more because they are not unfamiliar. There is some virtue in a name, for if the Maestro Tirso de Molina had called his play ‘Justification by Faith,’ as he well might, he would have been in peril of ending at the stake. Head of a house of Nuestra Señora de la Merced Calzada at Soria, as he was, his play might pass for an illustration of Luther’s much-debated “pecca fortiter.” The purely literary interest of the piece is great. The scenes filled with the crimes and violence of Enrico are written with the greatest _brio_. Indeed this venerable churchman Gabriel Tellez excelled in drawing types, and more especially a type of woman, of the simple, sensuous, and passionate order. He appears to have had a strong sympathy with them, and a belief, less monastic than sound, that there was something better in their unfettered loyalty to nature than in the coward virtue of those who fly the battle. His Enrico is a better fellow from the first than the hermit. There is a manfulness about him which is more hopeful than the self-seeking, conventional piety of Paulo. Whether Tirso de Molina meant so much or not, his lost hermit is a vigorous rough sketch of the stamp of man who is not essentially good, but only very much afraid of hell-fire, and abjectly eager to escape it by acting according to rule. The play, it will be seen, does not differ essentially from the accepted model of the Spanish drama. There is no development of character. The action is imposed on the personages, not produced by them. Enrico does not repent in any real sense of the word. He only makes a pious end, because his father, whom he loves, persuades him, and the act is sufficient. As Paulo is at the beginning so he remains to the end. [SN: _The plays on “honour.”_]