have been written within a short time of their appearance in print, and, as Ticknor suspected, expressly for the balladbooks. The first reference to his banishment is in the form of a dialogue, in which Lisardo-evidently his lifelong friend Claudio Conde, who was his comrade in the Armada, and accompanied him to Valencia-strives to console Belardo, 'Filis's shepherd that was,' with 'the kind of comfort the healthy always give the sick.' This, which was obviously written at Valencia very soon after he came there, was printed in 1591; and in that year, in a ballad by another hand, Rosanio says he is quitting Madrid of his own accord, 'lest they should banish him as they have banished Belardo.' In the 'Flor de Romances,' Part 6, 1593, there is a fanciful description of his garden at Valencia, and of the scarecrow he dressed up out of the finery of his dandy soldier days, which reminds him of how he passed along the street one day in all the bravery of this apparel, and how he was quizzed by a black-browed damsel' on a balcony, and how he married her, and how the dark lady who had been his queen 'in Troy,' as soon as she heard of his delinquency, made a bonfire of his letters in revenge. The dark lady was of course Filis, alias Dorotea, and she and her revenge, which it appears went farther than burning letters, are referred to in the ballads much oftener than Belisa and his marriage. Of that we learn more from a sonnet (one of the 200 in the 'Rimas' of 1602) on the death of his infant daughter Theodora, ' the consolation of his exile and the heavenly image of his Belisa'; which, by the way, misleads Ticknor still more strangely than the ballad above mentioned, for he takes Theodora to have been Belisa's mother. A disconsolate sonnet on the loss of a mother-in-law might be a curiosity, but that is hardly the word for a mother-in-law who died before completing her first year, which is the age given in the appended Latin epitaph. But, as a matter of fact, the name of Lope's motherin-law was Magdalena, and she died ten years after this sonnet was printed.

There may be some significance in Lope's comparative silence as regards his wife. Possibly the love he bore her was too real to be tricked out with conceits and euphuisms, and he could not bring himself to apply to her the language that came natural to him when gallivanting with Filis. There is, it is true, a good deal that is artificial in the eclogue upon her death, but artificiality was a condition of the sixteenth century eclogue, and in this case he could not well avoid it, being only joint author with his friend Pedro de Medinilla. A better measure of his feelings is to be found in his ballad on visiting

her

her grave a year after her death. Tears are abundant in Lope's verse, so much so that the reader after a while troubles himself as little about their reality as about the rosy wine quaffed from gilt pasteboard goblets at a stage banquet. But here, for once at least, they are real. It is one of those bright spring days when all nature seems to be exulting in the renewal of life and youth, and adds to sorrow the sense of being a thing excommunicated and out of place. The old theme is dealt with in a few simple touches,-the cheery songs of the birds overhead, the bees at work among the flowers, the fresh green of the trees bursting into leaf, and the lonely man weeping by the grave-side with the lambs frisking round him. For once Lope's hand forgets its cunning and avoids ornamental trickery.

In what year he lost his wife is uncertain, nor is there any clue to the exact date of this ballad. According to the 'Dorotea,' he was left a widower seven years after marriage, and the Eclogue to Claudio' mentions the same period, which would give 1596, or thereabouts. Nor is it easier to fix the date of his subsequent marriage with Doña Juana de Guardo. Ticknor gives 1597, but no authority; Barrera far more consistently places it about 1603, and from what he says it seems probable that money considerations had something to do with it. There is good reason for suspecting that Lope's second marriage was not as harmonious as his first. It is true that he applies tender epithets to his wife in two or three places, but there is a somewhat perfunctory, matter-of-course air about them, and the tone of his letters to the Duke of Sessa, quoted by Schack, is certainly not that of a loving husband, though possibly they do not bear the construction he and Ticknor put upon them, and may refer merely to an invalid's fretfulness, and not to family dissensions. But nothing can be clearer than that the poor lady had ample cause for unhappiness. At the very beginning of their married life he was carrying on-and without the grace to conceal it—an intrigue with one Maria de Luxan, by whom he had two children, the Marcela already mentioned, and a son, Lope. Among the 200 printed in 1602 there is a curious sonnet which has never been noticed by any biographer. In it he contrasts his lot with that of Jacob, who had only to endure Leah for seven years to secure his union with Rachel, while he was bound to a Leah that cut him off from Rachel for ever. Lope was not, like Browning, given to throwing imaginary sentiments into a dramatic form, and is here, apparently, speaking in his own person, and as a man married to a woman he was tired of and in hot pursuit of another. If the sonnet had been written after his second marriage, we could understand

it: as it is, it suggests that he was inconstant even to his beloved Belisa. Some amatory pursuit seems to have been almost a necessity to him. In 1596 we find him involved with a certain Doña Antonia Trillo, and for some years afterwards in the society of one 'Lucinda.' With each glimpse that we get of him the likeness to Fernando of the Dorotea' grows stronger and stronger.

6

It will be seen that the inconsistencies and confusion in the story of Lope's life as told by his biographers disappear under the light of his own writings, which, with a few necessary adjustments, serve to correct the well-meant falsifications of Montalvan. The common account of his parentage, boyhood, and education is probably true in the main. It is a mistake, no doubt, to speak of his family as noble, as some biographers do, nor indeed does he himself make any such claim for it. It was apparently a family de solar conocido, as a Spanish genealogist would have said, with a casa solar that had stood for several generations on the Vega de Carriedo near Santander, but it was nothing more. The escutcheon with the nineteen castles, engraved under his early portraits, which drew upon him the banter of Gongora, Cervantes and others, was the Carpio shield, as he himself admits in the Arcadia,' and his right to it is more than doubtful; and surely, if he had had the necessary qualification of hidalguia, he would have received the order of Santiago, an honour conferred on his successor Calderon almost at the very outset of his career. His own statements are, no doubt, sometimes a little contradictory. In one of his epistles he speaks of having been on the point of taking holy orders while he was at the University of Alcalá, but in the 'Dorotea' Fernando says he was sent to Alcalá at the age of ten and left it at seventeen, rather too young to have been on the verge of the priesthood. But then it should be borne in mind that, in order to fit Fernando for the role of the interesting lover, it was necessary to make him some years younger than the original of the portrait. The probability is that Lope was in reality sent to Alcalá when he was between fourteen and fifteen, and left it at about nineteen or twenty to join the expedition to the Azores. Fernando says several times that his liaison with Dorotea has lasted five years, that he has been for five years learning in the University of Love, and that he had been her lover from seventeen to twenty-two. There cannot be a doubt that these five years are the years between Lope's return from Terceira and his departure to join the Armada, 17 and 22 of Fernando's counting as 21 and 26 of Lope's. There is, in fact, no other explanation possible; and with this the other incidents in his life, the Alva

and

and Arcadia episode, his marriage, mysterious banishment, life at Valencia, connection with the ballad books, apparent nomad existence for a season, down to his second marriage, all fall into their places and fit together like the parts of a dissected map.

6

With Lope's second marriage his Wanderjahre come to a close, and his reign as king of the stage and Phoenix of Spain' begins. During his exile he had been an industrious playwright, as the list of plays in the Peregrino' shows, and, by carefully studying the tastes of the playgoing public, he had solved the problem of a popular drama. How complete and rapid his success had been is best shown by the address delivered in 1602, 'The new Art of writing Comedies,'—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. From this time onward his life was merely a succession of triumphs, won by his marvellous gifts and, as Cervantes adds, his unceasing industry, his life abroad, that is, for at home it was a succession of sorrows. His little son Carlos, whom he idolized, was taken from him at the age of seven; he lost his wife; his daughter Marcela against his wish persisted in taking the veil and became dead to him; and her brother Lope, who young as he was had given proof of having inherited something of his father's poetic faculty, became a soldier and was drowned at sea.

If we can believe Montalvan, his wife's death changed the whole course of his life. In a passage which is a choice specimen of culto fustian, he dilates upon Lope's meditations on the evanescence of beauty and the vanity of all things, which led to a resolution not to risk marriage again, but to renounce the world and all its allurements and devote himself for the future to the welfare of his soul, free from all mundane impediments. Lope's desolation is hardly in keeping with the tone of his letters written only a few months before, but Montalvan is so far borne out that very soon after this he took orders. The letters referred to are among the vast number he wrote to the Duke of Sessa, who was his staunch friend while he lived and gave him the funeral of a prince when he died. A not unnatural fear that the publication of confidential letters like these might be prejudicial to Lope's reputation kept them from the press, with the inevitable consequence of exaggerated reports of the revelations they contained. It was said, for instance, that Lope habitually acted as pimp in the amours

of

of his noble friend.

In 1876, however, 48 letters, tran

scribed some time before, were printed with the somewhat suggestive title of Ultimos Amores de Lope de Vega revelados por el mismo,' and these showed that the story rested simply upon the fact that the Duke in inditing his love-letters used to avail himself of the practised hand and fascinating style of his poetical friend, and that even this assistance was withdrawn. In an almost pathetic letter Lope entreats the Duke to excuse him from rendering this friendly service for the future, as his confessor has assured him it is a mortal sin. The Duke seems to have laughed at the confessor as over-nice, for Lope's next is firmer. With all his affection and respect for his friend, he cannot oblige him; his confessor tells him he is imperilling his soul, and refuses him absolution. The confessor, however, was a larger-minded man than the Duke took him to be, for at this time Lope, priest as he was, was living in adultery with another man's wife. It is almost amusing, in the light of these revelations, to read the reflections of his biographers. Ticknor, speaking of him a few years earlier, says, 'He was no longer at an age to be deluded by his passions'; and, according to M. Ernest Lafond, 'Son âge mûr et sa vieillesse ont racheté ce passé tumultueux.'

His withdrawal from the world did not secure him from the attractions, personal and mental, of a woman, the wife of a man from whom she was separated, into whose society Lope was thrown about three years after taking orders. He seems to have struggled; and indeed all through the letters, little as he deserves pity, it is impossible to withhold it from the exhibition of his sufferings under the stings of conscience; but the Fernando temperament proved too strong in the end. In 1617 a daughter was born to him, and the description of the solemn farce of the christening that followed is a veritable bonnebouche for readers of a cynical turn. In compliment to Lope, the Duke of Sessa was godfather, though shyness, excusable perhaps under the circumstances, made him send his son and heir to represent him; and with a gravity that strikes one as positively stupendous, the infant was formally baptized as the legitimate daughter of its mother's husband, a decorous reception into the Church which to Lope as a devout churchman was very gratifying. This daughter had, it is believed, no slight influence on her father's closing years. She grew up with the graces of mind and body of both her parents, and he was proud of her beauty and talents and loved her as the child of his old age. But it seems to have been a fatality with Lope's offspring to run counter to his wishes, and against his will

she