The two lines in which Lope declares that he locks up Plautus and Terence with six keys were quoted by Victor Hugo in the proclamation of his theories of dramatic art prefixt to his unactable 'Cromwell' (1827). But Souriau in his annotated edition of the 'Préface de Cromwell' thinks it possible that Hugo may have borrowed the quotation second-hand from a pamphlet by Scudery, 'La Preuve des Passages' put forth during the quarrel over Corneille's 'Cid.' It is amusing to note that M. Emile Faguet, quoting these lines in his 'Drame Ancien, Drame Moderne' (p. 122) inadvertently credits them to Cervantes. Fitzgerald, in the preface to his translations from Calderon, asserts that certain of the defects discoverable in these pieces do not represent "Calderon's own better self, but concession to private haste or public taste by one who so often relied upon some striking dramatic crisis for success with a not very accurate audience." It may be objected that this plea is dangerous in that it is based on the unwarrantable assumption that Calderon's private taste was different from that of the public to which he appealed; but it can be urged in behalf of Lope as potently as in behalf of Calderon. Lope's own plea that he must give the public what it wants is more effectively put by Molière, in the preface to the 'Précieuses Ridicules'; "I should needlessly offend all Paris, if I accused it of having applauded a piece of stupidity; as the public is the absolute judge of works of this sort, it would be impertinent in me to contradict it; and even if I had the worst possible opinion of my 'Précieuses' before the performance, I ought now to believe that it has some value, since so many persons together have spoken well of it." 6. Morel-Fatio points out that this paragraph is practically a literal translation from Robortello's 'Paraphrases in libram Horatii De Comedia.' It is mainly from Robortello that Lope derives all his parade of erudition. 8. In this paragraph, as Morel-Fatio informs us, Lope is again relying on Robortello and also on Donatus. 9. At the end of this paragraph Lope, following Donatus blindly, attributes to Terence the loftiness of style to which Plautus occasionally attained. As Damas-Hinard noted in his French translation of certain of Lope's plays, the Spanish poet is here sinning against light, since he had a first-hand knowledge of the comedies of both the Latin dramatists. 15. Professor Rennert (p. 180) points out that this distinction between tragedy and comedy is arbitrary and un-Aristotelian, altho it was "the one that obtained thruout the Renascence and down to the end of the period of Classicism." It was the doctrine of Robortello and of the later Italian theorists that it was "the rank of the characters, and this only, which distinguished a tragedy from a comedy." This is the distinction which Sir Philip Sidney maintains in his 'Defence of Poesy.'