Commenting on Lope's strange prescription of the number of pages a comedy should have, Professor Rennert (p. 163, note) tells us that "this rule, as to the length of the _comedia_, which Lope here lays down, was carefully followed by all the other dramatists of the time, and deviations from it are rare. Four sheets--sixteen leaves for each act, that is forty-eight leaves to a _comedia_. An examination of Lope's autograph plays shows how strictly he adhered to this rule. Where slight variations are found they are due to the difference in the size of the leaves--the _comedia_ always consisting of about three thousand lines.... On the other hand, the comedies of Miguel Sanchez, a predecessor of Lope, contain about four thousand lines." Lope, like his fellow dramatists Calderon and Corneille, Moliére, Voltaire and Goldoni, had been a pupil of the Jesuits; and it was doubtless when he was a youthful student of the Jesuit school in Madrid that he became acquainted with the critical theories of the Italian commentators of Horace and Aristotle. 21. The rule forbidding the dramatist ever to leave the stage empty Morel-Fatio traces to a passage in Donatus dealing with the omission of the chorus from the New Comedy of the Greeks. Altho Corneille does not expressly discuss this rule, he obeyed it; and it was generally obeyed by all the French dramatists who accepted the Classicist theory, possibly because the leaving of the stage empty became the conventional signal of the end of the act. Even today at the Théâtre Français, the curtain does not always fall on the termination of an act; the stage is left unoccupied for a moment and then the three raps of the wooden hammer are heard, whereupon the characters enter who are to begin the next act. On the English-speaking stage this rule has never established itself; and our dramatic poets have now and again achieved an effect of expectancy by leaving the stage bare and letting the spectators wonder who is next to appear. 23. A part of this paragraph is turned into English couplets by Lord Holland: In ten line staves should wailing grief be shown; The sonnet suits a man who speaks alone; Let plain narration flow in ballad lines; Though much a tale in copious octaves shines; Grand weighty thoughts the triplet should contain But _redondillas_ suit the lover's strain.