Lope assumes a detached attitude and his tone is bantering, as Professor Rennert has suggested. He does not here display the intense personal interest in the analysis of his own work which glows and burns thru all Corneille's 'Examens,' in spite of the French dramatic poet's occasional confession of a lapse from the strict letter of the law. Lope has none of the prophetic fire of Hugo's famous preface in anticipatory defence of the plays he was going to write. In fact, it is difficult to deny that this poem is a pretty careless piece of work, tossed off in an idle hour, evoked by a special occasion when it behooved the speaker to assume a self-deprecatory attitude. But it is not the "lamentable palinode" that Menéndez y Pelayo called it; nor is it exactly what Mr. Ormsby termed it (in the _Quarterly Review_ for January, 1894) "virtually the manifesto of a triumphant dictator, a dramatic Napoleon who, while professing the profoundest respect for the sovereign will of the public, scarcely cared to hide his contempt for its intelligence or its taste, which foreign critics, he says, justly called barbarous; or to disguise the fact that he owed his power to his knowledge and adroit manipulation of its weaknesses." That scholars so well equipt for the consideration of Spanish literature and so well fitted for the interpretation of the Spanish character as Ormsby and Rennert, Morel-Fatio and Menéndez y Pelayo can take views as conflicting as those severally expressed by them,--this is proof positive that Lope has not taken the pains necessary to make his position clear.