While Lope was willing at least to render lip-service to the code of the Classicists, one of his followers in the theater, Tirso de Molina, (best known as the author of the earliest dramatization of the Don Juan legend) in his 'Cigarrales de Toledo,' published in 1624, fifteen years after Lope's address, is bold in denying the validity of any rule limiting the duration of time or forbidding a change of scene, (See Breitinger's 'Unités d' Aristote' pp. 29 seq.) But Cervantes in the first part of 'Don Quixote,' published in 1605, four years before the delivery of the 'Arte Nuevo,' had revealed a plentiful lack of sympathy for the so-called Aristotelian rules. There is no disputing the irony in his portrait of the Canon of Toledo who demanded the appointment of "some intelligent and sensible person at the capital to examine all plays before they were acted, not only those produced in the capital itself, but all that were intended to be acted in Spain; without whose approval, seal and signature, no local magistracy should allow any play to be acted." (Ormsby's translation, ii, 387, chapter xlviii). Earlier remarks of the Canon show us that he was familiar with whole Classicist code; indeed, Ormsby (in a foot-note to his translation of this chapter) calls attention to the substantial identity of the Canon's opinions with those expressed by Sir Philip Sidney in the 'Apology for Poesy.' In another work of fiction written more than two centuries later, in the 'Nicholas Nickelby' of Dickens, we are introduced to a Mr. Murdle whose knowledge is obviously vaguer than the Canon's but who is quite as strenuous in his insistence upon "the preservation of the unities." Into the vext question of the personal relations of Cervantes and of Lope, it is not needful to enter here. It would be pleasant to believe that each really appreciated the genius of the other; but however pleasant this is not quite possible. Cervantes seems not to have suspected the greatness of his own masterpiece; and it is plain that he had a special fondness for his plays, which had not succeeded. Lope must have been conscious of his own position at the head of all Spanish poets; he might assume a humble attitude when he was the author of less than five hundred plays but by the time that he had more than a thousand pieces to his credit the garment of humility is no longer becoming. Martinenche in his 'Comedia Espagnole' (pp. 113-4) follows Morel-Fatio in pointing out Lope's later satisfaction with what he had accomplished, even to the extent of claiming for himself the invention of the new type of play which had established itself on the Spanish stage.