numerous.  So, if we take Lord Holland's statement
of the quantity actually printed, and
remembering that the printed portion is not half
of what Lope de Vega wrote altogether,——

But no.  We must refrain.  We are getting
once more into the high numbers, and we
begin already to feel giddy.  So we must let
Lord Holland, Bouterwek, Montalvan, and
the rest, say what they please; we cannot
possibly keep pace with them, but must needs
content ourselves with the very moderate
figure we commenced with, and say that Lope
de Vega, after all, wrote only fifteen hundred
plays.

For this quantity, however—marvellous,nay
incredible, as it may seem—pretty conclusive
evidence may be advanced.  It would be
tedious to enumerate all the facts which tend
to prove it.  Two will suffice.  In the first
place, that number was given by Doctor
Fernando Cardoso, the intimate friend of
Lope de Vega, in the funeral speech he made
over the poet's grave.  It is just possible, we
grant, that on so solemn, and yet so exciting,
an occasion as a funeral oration, the orator
may be induced to speak more highly of his
friend departed than, perhaps, strictest truth
would warrant.  Nay, we have heard it said,
that even sculptured epitaphs have been
known, ere now, in some slight manner to
exaggerate the merits of the dead.  But
figures will not stand this sort of thing.
There is a stern matter-of-fact principle about
figures—an absence of all poetry, sympathy,
or feeling—that at once suppresses anything
like trifling with them.  Orators may win
men to anything, but figures know that two
and two are four, and they will stick to it,
say what you will.  Therefore, however
anxious the doctor may have been to make
the most of his subject, he would hardly, we
should say, have ventured on the hazardous
experiment of "cooking the accounts," at a
time when his arithmetic could be
immediately set right by simple reference to the
files of play-bills.  Managers did keep some
accounts, we suppose, even in those days.

Still less safely could Lope de Vega himself
in his own lifetime have ventured on
exaggeration in this matter, and so we feel we
must, at least, place some reliance on the
statements he, from time to time, put out of
his own progress.  He was in the habit of
publishing at various periods, in the prefaces
to his new works, either a list or an account
of the number of his plays then written.
Accordingly, we find the figure regularly
advancing from the year sixteen hundred
and three, when, in the prologue to his
Pelegrino, he gives a catalogue of three hundred
and thirty-seven plays; to the list contained
in his Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias,
published in sixteen hundred and nine, when they
amounted to four hundred and eighty-three;
to that given with a new volume of his plays,
in sixteen hundred and eighteen, when they
had reached the number of eight hundred;
to a list of nine hundred plays, in the year
sixteen hundred and twenty; to one of
a thousand and seventy in the year sixteen
hundred and twenty-five; and, lastly, in his
Eclogue to Claudio (sixteen hundred and
thirty), he says: "But if I come now to tell
you of the infinite number of comic fables,
you will be astonished to hear that I have
composed fifteen hundred."

Pero si aliora el numero infinite
De las fabulas comicas intento
Mil y quinientas fabulas admira.

Is our account of Lope de Vega's labours
yet sufficiently miraculous?  Shall we now
leave him with his fifteen hundred plays,
and other works, content to let our readers
wonder that he did so much?  Or shall we
risk their incredulity by telling them that he
did more?  We feel half tempted to go on,
and in a brief sketch of some of his adventures
and occupations to show how much of his
life, of little more than threescore years and
ten, must have been taken up by other matters
than this mighty mass of literary work.  For
Lope de Vega was a soldier, a secretary, an
alchemist, a priest; he married twice, and
had a family; he studied and became
proficient in the Latin, Italian, French, and
Portuguese tongues, and yet found time to
write his fifteen hundred plays!

Our readers may suppose he was not long
about anything he took in hand.  In fact, if
we believe his friend, Montalvan, he began
at once as he intended to go on—almost we
may say from his cradle.  We are told that
he understood Latin at the ripe age of five;
and also, much about the same time
commenced composing Spanish verses, which he
dictated to his playfellows to write down for
him—for he became an author before he had
learned to write.   He sold his verses too (the
clever dog!) for toys and sweetmeats.  How
rarely do we find the genius and the man of
business thus combined!  Between eleven and
twelve years of age, he himself informs us,
in his New Art of Dramatic Writing (Arte
Nuevo de hacer Comedias), he had written
several petites comédies, in the antique
Spanish form of four short acts.  At fourteen
years of age (Anno Domini fifteen hundred
and seventy-six) he ran away from college
to see the world; and, in the following
year, entered the army, serving both in
Portugal and in Africa, under the Marquis of
Santa Cruz.  The next year he came home
again, and engaged himself as page and
secretary to the Bishop of Avila, working
away, of course, at his poetry all the while,
as none but Lope de Vega or a steam-engine
could work, and producing, amongst various
other things, a pastoral comedy in three acts,
called La Pastoral de Jacinto, the author-
soldier-secretary being then sixteen years of
age!  Sent by his patron, the bishop, to the
university of Alcalá, he went to work at the