Lope's 'New Art of Making Plays' is not a familiar epistle like Horace's 'Ars Poetica'; rather is it a familiar discourse having the playful ease of an afterdinner speech. It consists of a series of paragraphs of irregular length, varying from four to forty lines each. It is written in blank verse, hendecasyllabics, except that the last two lines of every paragraph are in rime. These terminal couplets recall the riming exit-speeches common in contemporary Elizabethan drama; and in both cases apparently the rimes serve to heighten the emphasis at the end of the rhetorical period. At the conclusion of his address, Lope drops into Latin and inserts ten lines in that tongue--ten lines of unidentified origin. These Latin verses may be his own composition or they may yet be traced to some overlooked poem. They are brought into harmony with the rest of the work by the ingenious device of riming the last Latin line with a line in Spanish, thus making a couplet half in the learned language and half in the vernacular. These two hybrid lines are immediately followed by the usual terminal couplet, so that there are only three lines in Spanish after the ten lines of Latin. In the translation which follows the Latin verse has been rendered into English rime by Professor Edward Delavan Perry. Professor Rennert in his authoritative biography of Lope (p. 179) declares that Lope's address "is written in a bantering spirit, and a vein of good humor pervades the whole poem. Lope evidently did not take the matter very seriously, nor reflect deeply on what he was about to say. It probably did not take him much longer to write the 'New Art of Making Plays' than it took him to write as many lines of a comedia. The versification, strangely enough, lacks Lope's habitual ease and fluency; it is careless and sometimes halting, while the sense is not always clear,--an additional sign that this treatise was hastily composed."