_La Numancia_, a play dealing with the famous siege of Numantia by the Romans, was subsequently acted at Zaragoza, in 1808, to inspire the besieged inhabitants to a last desperate effort, a device which succeeded so well that the French were driven from the battlements in the very moment of victory, and the city was saved. _El Trato de Argel_, in which Cervantes stages episodes in his captivity in Algeria, is a poorly-constructed, ineffective, and tedious piece of work, which gives one furiously to think that if the plays of our author won favour, it could only have been at a time when competition was weak or non-existent. Matos Fragoso, a dramatist who flourished a century later, alludes to the “famous comedies of the ingenious Cervantes,” but of contemporary criticism we have none; and Cervantes, in his prologue to his _Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes_, published in 1614, claims for his plays, with characteristic reticence: “They all ran their course without hisses, cries, or disturbances. They were all repeated without receiving tribute of cucumbers or any other missiles.” Of the lost _La Confusa_ (The Perplexed Lady), the dramatist speaks with particular satisfaction as ranking “good among the best of the comedies of the Cloak and Sword, which had been, up to that time, acted.” Well, the Spaniards are a conservative people, and to-day one may witness in that country, performances of stage plays that are listened to without the disconcerting accompaniment of the hurtling cucumbers, but which in an English theatre would be received with all manner of unfriendly disapprobation. As a playwright, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly refuses to take Cervantes seriously, and he asserts that it “requires the eye of faith to see any high form of dramatic talent in the examples which have come down to us.” But even as Richilieu plumed himself more upon his small gift as a poet than his genius as a statesman, and as Napoleon turned from the planning of world conquests to revise the regulations of the Theâtre Française, so Cervantes appears to have been observed with an ambition to shine in the realms of theatrical art. He was, as his biographer points out, ready at the invitation of [Illustration]