This popular liking for the whole story without selection or omission is a survival from the middle ages when the mystery play began with Genesis and ended, if not with judgment day, at least with the casting of the wicked into Hell-Mouth. To the Classicists this prolongation of the action was always most offensive. Lord Holland turned into English the four lines in which Boileau denounces the custom: The Spanish bard, who no nice censure fears, In one short day includes a lapse of years. In those rude acts the hero lives so fast, Child in the first, he's greybeard in the last. And Sir Philip Sidney had earlier expressed his disgust for this license, blaming the English playwrights for their liberal allowance of time, "for ordinary it is that two young Princes fall in love. After many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth up a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours' space: which how absurd it is in sense even sense may imagine, and Art hath taught, and all ancient examples justified." With this may be compared Corneille's opinions in his 'Discourse on the Three Unities' and in his discussion of his own 'Mélite.' Lope's limitation of the duration of performance is exactly equivalent to Shakspere's "two hours traffic of the stage." But Shack, and after him Morel-Fatio, adduce evidence that the customary stay of the spectators in the Spanish theaters was two hours and a half. 20. Lope's advice, that a play should first be written in prose to be turned later into verse, Menendez y Pelayo believes to be borrowed from a passage in Vida's Latin poem on the poetic art,--a passage thus rendered in English in Pitt's translation: At first without the least restraint compose And mold the future poem with prose, A full and proper series to maintain And draw the just connection in a chain. By stated bounds your progress to control, To join the parts and regulate the whole. Morel-Fatio thinks this very likely, since Lope was familiar with Vida's work. Oddly enough, the principle Lope here lays down was not in accord with his own practise, since the state of the existing manuscripts seems to show that he composed originally in verse, altho on occasion he drew up a preliminary scenario in prose. It may be noted that the method here recommended by Lope was that actually adopted by Moliére, who (in his haste to meet the wishes of Louis XIV) had to call on Corneille to versify more than half of the 'Psyche' which he had completely constructed in prose and which he had not been able wholly to turn into verse within the limits of time set by the king. Lord Holland thus renders certain lines of this paragraph into English couplets: