the manager to supply “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ... and so contagious, so irresistible was his sublime self-confidence, that he actually persuaded managers into a belief in him.” And, despite the modesty of his prefaces there is no grounds for challenging the truth of Mr. Kelly’s conclusion that Cervantes was immensely proud of his dramatic work. “No man,” says this writer, “was more sublimely confident of the sincerity of his own mission; no man more certain that he deserved success. Years afterwards, when he had found his true way, when the fame of the author of _Don Quixote_ was gone abroad in every land, he still turned his wistful eyes to the memory of the days when he had hoped to win immortality upon the stage. Nor does he ever seemed to have imagined that the cause of failure lay in himself. Even his hopeful spirit was a little staggered by the knowledge that his plays could get no hearing. That was a fact which no amount of self-delusion could blink; and Cervantes accounted for it by assuming, not that his plays were poor, but that he had fallen on evil days.” Cervantes, according to Mr. Watts’s computation, was writing for the stage two years before Lope de Vega made his appearance as a dramatist. But the younger man carried everything in the theatrical world before him from the first. He came, and saw, and conquered, and Cervantes was swept from the arena by his triumphant onrush. “I gave up the pen and comedies,” Cervantes admits, “and there entered presently that prodigy of nature, the great Lope de Vega, and assumed the dramatic throne. He subjected all the actors, and placed them under his jurisdiction. He filled the world with comedies--suitable, felicitous, and well-worded--and so many that those in writing exceeded 10,000 sheets, all of which have been represented.” Cervantes scarcely overstated the fecundity of his rival. Vega flooded the theatres of Spain with an unending stream of plays of every description, and Montalvon records of this prodigy that he could turn out a comedy of more than 2,400 lines, complete with plot, dialogue, and stage directions, in twenty-four hours. In forty years he wrote upwards of eighteen hundred three-act comedies, besides poems, stories, and other literary exercises, of which, outside the little circle of savants and students, not half-a-dozen are to-day remembered even by name. Unless he was really the author of the false second part of _Don Quixote_, it may be said that not a line of Lope de Vega’s prodigious output is now either read or discussed.