We have no right to expect that those as richly endowed with the creative faculty as Lope indisputably was, should also have an equal share of the critical faculty. The analysis of the principles of their own special art by the poets and painters and playwrights who venture into the critical arena is always interesting but it is rarely philosophic and it is generally technical. And it is to technic that Lope devotes the most of his discourse. He trips lightly down the history of the new Spanish drama; and then he proceeds to bestow practical advice on aspiring young playwrights. He tells these novices that they must give the public what it wants, and he counsels them as to the best methods of tickling the taste of the uncritical playgoer. He descends to minute practical details; and, in short, his suggestions are those of a veteran of the craft supplying lessons in playwriting for a correspondence-school. In so far as Lope lays down any critical principles at all, these are but the codification of his own instinctive practise. His address is like "the speech of a carpenter standing on the peak of a building he has just erected"--to borrow Richter's sarcastic phrase. Lope had himself succeeded as a practical playwright; and his plays had certain characteristics and were put together in a certain fashion. As these plays had pleased the public, beginners would do well to consider these characteristics and to follow this fashion. He utters his shrewd recommendations most unpretentiously, with no hint of arrogance and with a friendly geniality of tone. Behind his modest precepts stand his own plays in which his ideal is more sharply made manifest. Lope's ideal is that of all his contemporaries, including Calderon (who followed in his footsteps and often borrowed his plots). It is that the stage is intended primarily for story-telling, for presenting in action a serial tale which shall excite the constant interest of curiosity.