History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

CHAPTER XXIV.

Calderon, continued. — Comedias de Capa y Espada. — First of all my Lady. — Fairy Lady. — The Scarf and the Flower, and others. — His Disregard of History. — Origin of the Extravagant Ideas of Honor and Domestic Rights in the Spanish Drama. — Attacks on Calderon. — His Allusions to Passing Events. — His Brilliant Style. — His long Authority on the Stage. — And the Character of his Poetical and Idealized Drama.

We must now turn to some of Calderon’s plays which are more characteristic of his times, if not of his peculiar genius,—his comedias de capa y espada. He has left us many of this class, and not a few of them seem to have been the work of his early, but ripe, manhood, when his faculties were in all their strength, as well as in all their freshness. Nearly or quite thirty can be enumerated, and still more may be added, if we take into the account those which, with varying characteristics, yet belong to this particular division rather than to any other. Among the more prominent are two, entitled “It is Worse than it was” and “It is Better than it was,” which, probably, were translated by Lord Bristol in his lost plays, “Worse and Worse” and “Better and Better”;[647]—“The Pretended Astrologer,” which Dryden used in his “Mock Astrologer”;[648]—“Beware of Smooth Water”;—and “It is ill keeping a House with Two Doors”;—which all indicate by their names something of the spirit of the entire class to which they belong, and of which they are favorable examples.

Another of the same division of the drama is entitled “First of all my Lady.” A young cavalier from Granada arrives at Madrid, and immediately falls in love with a lady, whose father mistakes him for another person, who, though intended for his daughter, is already enamoured elsewhere. Strange confusions are ingeniously multiplied out of this mistake, and strange jealousies naturally follow. The two gentlemen are found in the houses of their respective ladies,—a mortal offence to Spanish dramatic honor,—and things are pushed to the most dangerous and confounding extremities. The principle on which so many Spanish dramas turn, that

A sword-thrust heals more quickly than a wound

Inflicted by a word,[649]

is abundantly exemplified. More than once the lady’s secret is protected rather than the friend of the lover, though the friend is in mortal danger at the moment;—the circumstance which gives its name to the drama. At last, the confusion is cleared up by a simple explanation of the original mistakes of all the parties, and a double marriage brings a happy ending to the troubled scene, which frequently seemed quite incapable of it.[650]

“The Fairy Lady”[651] is another of Calderon’s dramas that is full of life, spirit, and ingenuity. Its scene is laid on the day of the baptism of Prince Balthasar, heir-apparent of Philip the Fourth, which, as we know, occurred on the 4th of November, 1629; and the piece itself was, therefore, probably written and acted soon afterwards.[652] If we may judge by the number of times Calderon complacently refers to it, we cannot doubt that it was a favorite with him; and if we judge by its intrinsic merits, we may be sure it was a favorite with the public.[653]

Doña Angela, the heroine of the intrigue, a widow, young, beautiful, and rich, lives at Madrid, in the house of her two brothers; but, from circumstances connected with her affairs, her life there is so retired, that nothing is known of it abroad. Don Manuel, a friend, arrives in the city to visit one of these brothers; and, as he approaches the house, a lady strictly veiled stops him in the street, and conjures him, if he be a cavalier of honor, to prevent her from being further pursued by a gentleman already close behind. This lady is Doña Angela, and the gentleman is her brother, Don Luis, who is pursuing her only because he observes that she carefully conceals herself from him. The two cavaliers not being acquainted with each other,—for Don Manuel had come to visit the other brother,—a dispute is easily excited, and a duel follows, which is interrupted by the arrival of this other brother, and an explanation of his friendship for Don Manuel.

Don Manuel is now brought home, and established in the house of the two cavaliers, with all the courtesy due to a distinguished guest. His apartments, however, are connected with those of Doña Angela by a secret door, known only to herself and her confidential maid; and finding she is thus unexpectedly brought near a person who has risked his life to save her, she determines to put herself into a mysterious communication with him.

But Doña Angela is young and thoughtless. When she enters the stranger’s apartment, she is tempted to be mischievous, and leaves behind marks of her wild humor that are not to be mistaken. The servant of Don Manuel thinks it is an evil spirit, or at best a fairy, that plays such fantastic tricks; disturbing the private papers of his master, leaving notes on his table, throwing the furniture of the room into confusion, and—from an accident—once jostling its occupants in the dark. At last, the master himself is confounded; and though he once catches a glimpse of the mischievous lady, as she escapes to her own part of the house, he knows not what to make of the apparition. He says:—

She glided like a spirit, and her light

Did all fantastic seem. But still her form

Was human; I touched and felt its substance,

And she had mortal fears, and, woman-like,

Shrunk back again with dainty modesty.

At last, like an illusion, all dissolved,

And, like a phantasm, melted quite away.

If, then, to my conjectures I give rein,

By heaven above, I neither know nor guess

What I must doubt or what I may believe.[654]

But the tricksy lady, who has fairly frolicked herself in love with the handsome young cavalier, is tempted too far by her brilliant successes, and, being at last detected in the presence of her astonished brothers, the intrigue, which is one of the most complicated and gay to be found on any theatre, ends with an explanation of her fairy humors and her marriage with Don Manuel.

“The Scarf and the Flower,”[655] which, from internal evidence, is to be placed in the year 1632, is another of the happy specimens of Calderon’s manner in this class of dramas; but, unlike the last, love-jealousies constitute the chief complication of its intrigue.[656] The scene is laid at the court of the Duke of Florence. Two ladies give the hero of the piece, one a scarf and the other a flower; but they are both so completely veiled when they do it, that he is unable to distinguish one of them from the other. The mistakes, which arise from attributing each of these marks of favor to the wrong lady, constitute the first series of troubles and suspicions. These are further aggravated by the conduct of the Grand Duke, who, for his own princely convenience, requires the hero to show marked attentions to a third lady; so that the relations of the lover are thrown into the greatest possible confusion, until a sudden danger to his life brings out an involuntary expression of the true lady’s attachment, which is answered with a delight so sincere on his part as to leave no doubt of his affection. This restores the confidence of the parties, and the dénouement is of course happy.

There are in this, as in most of the dramas of Calderon belonging to the same class, great freshness and life, and a tone truly Castilian, courtly, and graceful. Lisida, who loves Henry, the hero, and gave him the flower, finds him wearing her rival’s scarf, and, from this and other circumstances, naturally accuses him of being devoted to that rival;—an accusation which he denies, and explains the delusive appearance on the ground, that he approached one lady, as the only way to reach the other. The dialogue in which he defends himself is extremely characteristic of the gallant style of the Spanish drama, especially in that ingenious turn and repetition of the same idea in different figures of speech, which grows more and more condensed as it approaches its conclusion.

Lisida.

But how can you deny the very thing

Which, with my very eyes, I now behold?

Henry.

By full denial that you see such thing.

Lisida.

Were you not, like the shadow of her house,

Still ever in the street before it?

Henry.

I was.

Lisida.

At each returning dawn, were you not found

A statue on her terrace?

Henry.

I do confess it.

Lisida.

Did you not write to her?

Henry.

I can’t deny

I wrote.

Lisida.

Served not the murky cloak of night

To hide your stolen loves?

Henry.

That, under cover

Of the friendly night, I sometimes spoke to her,

I do confess.

Lisida.

And is not this her scarf?

Henry.

It was hers once, I think.

Lisida.

Then what means this?

If seeing, talking, writing, be not making love,—

If wearing on your neck her very scarf,

If following her and watching, be not love,

Pray tell me, Sir, what ’t is you call it?

And let me not in longer doubt be left

Of what can be with so much ease explained.

Henry.

A timely illustration will make clear

What seems so difficult. The cunning fowler,

As the bird glances by him, watches for

The feathery form he aims at, not where it is,

But on one side; for well he knows that he

Shall fail to reach his fleeting mark, unless

He cheat the wind to give its helpful tribute

To his shot. The careful, hardy sailor,—

He who hath laid a yoke and placed a rein

Upon the fierce and furious sea, curbing

Its wild and monstrous nature,—even he

Steers not right onward to the port he seeks,

But bears away, deludes the opposing waves,

And wins the wished-for haven by his skill.

The warrior, who a fortress would besiege,

First sounds the alarm before a neighbour fort,

Deceives, with military art, the place

He seeks to win, and takes it unawares,

Force yielding up its vantage-ground to craft.

The mine that works its central, winding way

Volcanic, and, built deep by artifice,

Like Mongibello, shows not its effect

In those abysses where its pregnant powers

Lie hid, concealing all their horrors dark

E’en from the fire itself; but there begins

The task which here in ruin ends and woe,—

Lightning beneath and thunderbolts above.—

Now, if my love, amidst the realms of air,

Aim, like the fowler, at its proper quarry;

Or sail a mariner upon the sea,

Tempting a doubtful fortune as it goes;

Or chieftainlike contends in arms,

Nor fails to conquer even baseless jealousy;

Or, like a mine sunk in the bosom’s depths,

Bursts forth above with fury uncontrolled;—

Can it seem strange that I should still conceal

My many loving feelings with false shows?

Let, then, this scarf bear witness to the truth,

That I, a hidden mine, a mariner,

A chieftain, fowler, still in fire and water,

Earth and air, would hit, would reach, would conquer,

And would crush, my game, my port, my fortress,

And my foe.

[Gives her the scarf.

Lisida.

You deem, perchance, that, flattered

With such shallow compliment, my injuries

May be passed over in your open folly.

But no, Sir, no!—you do mistake me quite.

I am a woman; I am proud,—so proud,

That I will neither have a love that comes

From pique, from fear of being first cast off,

Nor from contempt that galls the secret heart.

He who wins me must love me for myself,

And seek no other guerdon for his love

But what that love itself will give.[657]

As may be gathered, perhaps, from what has been said concerning the few dramas we have examined, the plots of Calderon are almost always marked with great ingenuity. Extraordinary adventures and unexpected turns of fortune, disguises, duels, and mistakes of all kinds, are put in constant requisition, and keep up an eager interest in the concerns of the personages whom he brings to the foreground of the scene. Yet many of his stories are not wholly invented by him. Several are taken from the books of the Old Testament, as is that on the rebellion of Absalom, which ends with an exhibition of the unhappy prince hanging by his hair and dying amidst reproaches on his personal beauty. A few are from Greek and Roman history, like “The Second Scipio” and “Contests of Love and Loyalty,”—the last being on the story of Alexander the Great. Still more are from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,”[658] like “Apollo and Climene” and “The Fortunes of Andromeda.” And occasionally, but rarely, he seems to have sought, with painstaking care, in obscure sources for his materials, as in “Zenobia the Great,” where he has used Trebellius Pollio and Flavius Vopiscus.[659]

But, as we have already noticed, Calderon makes every thing bend to his ideas of dramatic effect; so that what he has borrowed from history comes forth upon the stage with the brilliant attributes of a masque, almost as much as what is drawn from the rich resources of his own imagination. If the subject he has chosen falls naturally into the only forms he recognizes, he indeed takes the facts much as he finds them. This is the case with “The Siege of Breda,” which he has set forth with an approach to statistical accuracy, as it happened in 1624-1625;—all in honor of the commanding general, Spinola, who may well have furnished some of the curious details of the piece,[660] and who, no doubt, witnessed its representation. This is the case, too, with “The Last Duel in Spain,” founded on the last single combat held there under royal authority, which was fought at Valladolid, in the presence of Charles the Fifth, in 1522; and which, by its showy ceremonies and chivalrous spirit, was admirably adapted to Calderon’s purposes.[661]

But where the subject he selected was not thus fully fitted, by its own incidents, to his theory of the drama, he accommodated it to his end as freely as if it were of imagination all compact. “The Weapons of Beauty” and “Love the Most Powerful of Enchantments” are abundant proofs of this;[662] and so is “Hate and Love,” where he has altered the facts in the life of Christina of Sweden, his whimsical contemporary, till it is not easy to recognize her,—a remark which may be extended to the character of Peter of Aragon in his “Tres Justicias en Uno,” and to the personages in Portuguese history whom he has so strikingly idealized in his “Weal and Woe,”[663] and in his “Firm-hearted Prince.” To an English reader, however, the “Cisma de Inglaterra,” on the fortunes and fate of Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey, is probably the most obvious perversion of history; for the Cardinal, after his fall from power, comes on the stage begging his bread of Catherine of Aragon, while, at the same time, Henry, repenting of the religious schism he has countenanced, promises to marry his daughter Mary to Philip the Second of Spain.[664]

Nor is Calderon more careful in matters of morals than in matters of fact. Duels and homicides occur constantly in his plays, under the slightest pretences, as if there were no question about their propriety. The authority of a father or brother to put to death a daughter or sister who has been guilty of secreting her lover under her own roof is fully recognized.[665] It is made a ground of glory for the king, Don Pedro, that he justified Gutierre in the atrocious murder of his wife; and even the lady Leonore, who is to succeed to the blood-stained bed, desires, as we have seen, that no other measure of justice should be applied to herself than had been applied to the innocent and beautiful victim who lay dead before her. Indeed, it is impossible to read far in Calderon without perceiving that his object is mainly to excite a high and feverish interest by his plot and story; and that to do this, he relies almost constantly upon an exaggerated sense of honor, which, in its more refined attributes, certainly did not give its tone to the courts of Philip the Fourth and Charles the Second, and which, with the wide claims he makes for it, could never have been the rule of conduct and intercourse anywhere, without shaking all the foundations of society and poisoning the best and dearest relations of life.

Here, therefore, we find pressed upon us the question, What was the origin of these extravagant ideas of domestic honor and domestic rights, which are found in the old Spanish drama from the beginning of the full-length plays in Torres Naharro, and which are thus exhibited in all their excess in the plays of Calderon?

The question is certainly difficult to answer, as are all like it that depend on the origin and traditions of national character; but—setting aside as quite groundless the suggestion sometimes made, that the old Spanish ideas of domestic authority might be derived from the Arabs—we find that the ancient Gothic laws, which date back to a period long before the Moorish invasion, and which fully represented the national character till they were supplanted by the “Partidas” in the fourteenth century, recognized the same fearfully cruel system that is found in the old drama. Every thing relating to domestic honor was left by these laws, as it is by Calderon, to domestic authority. The father had power to put to death his wife or daughter who was dishonored under his roof; and if the father were dead, the same terrible power was transferred to the brother in relation to his sister, or even to the lover, where the offending party had been betrothed to him.

No doubt, these wild laws, though formally renewed and reënacted as late as the reign of Saint Ferdinand, had ceased in the time of Calderon to have any force; and the infliction of death under circumstances in which they fully justified it would then have been murder in Spain, as it would have been in any other civilized country of Christendom. But, on the other hand, no doubt these laws were in operation during many more centuries than had elapsed between their abrogation and the age of Calderon and Philip the Fourth. The tradition of their power, therefore, was not yet lost on the popular character, and poetry was permitted to preserve their fearful principles long after their enactments had ceased to be acknowledged anywhere else.[666]

Similar remarks may be made concerning duels. That duels were of constant recurrence in Spain in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as earlier, we have abundant proof. But we know, too, that the last which was countenanced by royal authority occurred in the youth of Charles the Fifth; and there is no reason to suppose that private encounters were much more common among the cavaliers at Madrid in the time of Lope de Vega and Calderon than they were at London and Paris.[667] But the traditions that had come down from the times when they prevailed were quite sufficient warrant for a drama which sought to excite a strong and anxious interest more than any thing else. In one of the plays of Barrios there are eight, and in another twelve duels;[668] an exhibition that, on any other supposition, would have been absurd.

Perhaps the very extravagance of such representations made them comparatively harmless. It was, in the days of the Austrian dynasty, so incredible that a brother should put his sister to death merely because she had been found under his roof with her lover, or that one cavalier should fight another in the street simply because a lady did not wish to be followed, that there was no great danger of contagion from the theatrical example. Still, the immoral tendency of the Spanish drama was not overlooked, even at the time when Calderon’s fame was at the highest. Guerra, one of his great admirers, in an Aprobacion prefixed to Calderon’s plays in 1682, praised, not only his friend, but the great body of the dramas to whose brilliancy that friend had so much contributed; and the war against the theatre broke out in consequence, as it had twice before in the time of Lope. Four anonymous attacks were made on the injudicious remarks of Guerra, and two more by persons who gave their names,—Puente de Mendoza and Navarro;—the last, oddly enough, replying in print to a defence of himself by Guerra, which had then been seen only in manuscript. But the whole of this discussion proceeded on the authority of the Church and the Fathers, rather than upon the grounds of public morality and social order; and therefore it ended, as previous attacks of the same kind had done, by the triumph of the theatre;[669]—Calderon’s plays and those of his school being performed and admired quite as much after it as before.

Calderon, however, not only relied on the interest he could thus excite by an extravagant story full of domestic violence and duels, but often introduced flattering allusions to living persons and passing events, which he thought would be welcome to his audience, whether of the court or the city. Thus, in “The Scarf and the Flower,” the hero, just returned from Madrid, gives his master, the Duke of Florence, a glowing description, extending through above two hundred lines, of the ceremony of swearing fealty, in 1632, to Prince Balthasar, as prince of Asturias; a passage which, from its spirit, as well as its compliments to the king and the royal family, must have produced no small effect on the stage.[670] Again, in “El Escondido y la Tapada,” we have a stirring intimation of the siege of Valencia on the Po, in 1635;[671] and in “Nothing like Silence,” repeated allusions to the victory over the Prince of Condé at Fontarabia, in 1639.[672] In “Beware of Smooth Water,” there is a dazzling account of the public reception of the second wife of Philip the Fourth at Madrid, in 1649, for a part of whose pageant, it will be recollected, Calderon was employed to furnish inscriptions.[673] In “The Blood-stain of the Rose”—founded on the fable of Venus and Adonis, and written in honor of the Peace of the Pyrenees and the marriage of the Infanta with Louis the Fourteenth, in 1659—we have whatever was thought proper to be said on such subjects by a favorite poet, both in the loa, which is fortunately preserved, and in the play itself.[674] But there is no need of multiplying examples. Calderon nowhere fails to consult the fashionable and courtly, as well as the truly national, feeling of his time; and in “The Second Scipio” he stoops even to gross flattery of the poor and imbecile Charles the Second, declaring him equal to that great patriot whom Milton pronounces to have been “the height of Rome.”[675]

In style and versification, Calderon has high merits, though they are occasionally mingled with the defects of his age. Brilliancy is one of his great objects, and he easily attains it. But he frequently falls, and with apparent willingness, into the showy folly of his time, the absurd sort of euphuism, which Góngora and his followers called “the cultivated style.” This is the case, for instance, in his “Love and Fortune,” and in his “Conflicts of Love and Loyalty.” But in “April and May Mornings,” on the contrary, and in “No Jesting with Love,” he ridicules the same style with great severity; and in such charming plays as “The Lady and the Maid,” and “The Loud Secret,” he wholly avoids it,—thus adding another to the many instances of distinguished men who have sometimes accommodated themselves to their age and its fashions, which at other times they have rebuked and controlled. Everywhere his verses charm us by their delicious melody; everywhere he indulges himself in the rich variety of measures which Spanish or Italian poetry offered him,—octave stanzas, terza rima, sonnets, silvas, liras, and the different forms of the redondilla, with the ballad asonantes and consonantes;—showing a mastery over his language extraordinary in itself, and one which, while it sometimes enables him to rise to the loftiest tones of the national drama, seduces him at other times to seek popular favor by fantastic tricks that were wholly unworthy of his genius.[676]

But we are not to measure Calderon as his contemporaries did. We stand at a distance too remote and impartial for such indulgence; and must neither pass over his failures nor exaggerate his merits. We must look on the whole mass of his efforts for the theatre, and inquire what he really effected for its advancement,—or rather what changes it underwent in his hands, both in its more gay and in its more serious portions.

Certainly Calderon appeared as a writer for the Spanish stage under peculiarly favorable circumstances; and, by the preservation of his faculties to an age beyond that commonly allotted to man, was enabled long to maintain the ascendency he had early established. His genius took its direction from the very first, and preserved it to the last. When he was fourteen years old he had written a piece for the stage, which, sixty years later, he thought worthy to be put into the list of dramas that he furnished to the Admiral of Castile.[677] When he was thirty-five, the death of Lope de Vega left him without a rival. The next year, he was called to court by Philip the Fourth, the most munificent patron the Spanish theatre ever knew; and from this time till his death, the destinies of the drama were in his hands nearly as much as they had been before in those of Lope. Forty-five of his longer pieces, and probably more, were acted in magnificent theatres in the different royal palaces in Madrid and its neighbourhood. Some must have been exhibited with great pomp and at great expense, like “The Three Greatest Wonders,” each of whose three acts was represented in the open air on a separate stage by a different company of performers;[678] and “Love the Greatest Enchantment,” brought out in a floating theatre which the wasteful extravagance of the Count Duke Olivares had erected on the artificial waters in the gardens of the Buen Retiro.[679] Indeed, every thing shows that the patronage, both of the court and capital, placed Calderon forward, as the favored dramatic poet of his time. This rank he maintained for nearly half a century, and wrote his last drama, “Hado y Devisa,” founded on the brilliant fictions of Boiardo and Ariosto, when he was eighty-one years of age.[680] He therefore was not only the successor of Lope de Vega, but enjoyed the same kind of popular influence. Between them, they held the empire of the Spanish drama for ninety years; during which, partly by the number of their imitators and disciples, but chiefly by their own personal resources, they gave to it all the extent and consideration it ever possessed.

Calderon, however, neither effected nor attempted any great changes in its forms. Two or three times, indeed, he prepared dramas that were either wholly sung, or partly sung and partly spoken; but even these, in their structure, were no more operas than his other plays, and were only a courtly luxury, which it was attempted to introduce, in imitation of the genuine opera just brought into France by Louis the Fourteenth, with whose court that of Spain was now intimately connected.[681] But this was all. Calderon has added to the stage no new form of dramatic composition. Nor has he much modified those forms which had been already arranged and settled by Lope de Vega. But he has shown more technical exactness in combining his incidents, and arranged every thing more skilfully for stage-effect.[682] He has given to the whole a new coloring, and, in some respects, a new physiognomy. His drama is more poetical in its tone and tendencies, and has less the air of truth and reality, than that of his great predecessor. In its more successful portions,—which are rarely objectionable from their moral tone,—it seems almost as if we were transported to another and more gorgeous world, where the scenery is lighted up with unknown and preternatural splendor, and where the motives and passions of the personages that pass before us are so highly wrought, that we must have our own feelings not a little stirred and excited before we can take an earnest interest in what we witness or sympathize in its results. But even in this he is successful. The buoyancy of life and spirit that he has infused into the gayer divisions of his drama, and the moving tenderness that pervades its graver and more tragical portions, lift us unconsciously to the height where alone his brilliant exhibitions can prevail with our imaginations,—where alone we can be interested and deluded, when we find ourselves in the midst, not only of such a confusion of the different forms of the drama, but of such a confusion of the proper limits of dramatic and lyrical poetry.

To this elevated tone, and to the constant effort necessary in order to sustain it, we owe much of what distinguishes Calderon from his predecessors, and nearly all that is most individual and characteristic in his separate merits and defects. It makes him less easy, graceful, and natural than Lope. It imparts to his style a mannerism, which, notwithstanding the marvellous richness and fluency of his versification, sometimes wearies and sometimes offends us. It leads him to repeat from himself till many of his personages become standing characters, and his heroes and their servants, his ladies and their confidants, his old men and his buffoons,[683] seem to be produced, like the masked figures of the ancient theatre, to represent, with the same attributes and in the same costume, the different intrigues of his various plots. It leads him, in short, to regard the whole of the Spanish drama as a form, within whose limits his imagination may be indulged without restraint; and in which Greeks and Romans, heathen divinities, and the supernatural fictions of Christian tradition, may be all brought out in Spanish fashions and with Spanish feelings, and led, through a succession of ingenious and interesting adventures, to the catastrophes their stories happen to require.

In carrying out this theory of the Spanish drama, Calderon, as we have seen, often succeeds, and often fails. But when he succeeds, his success is sometimes of no common character. He then sets before us only models of ideal beauty, perfection, and splendor;—a world, he would have it, into which nothing should enter but the highest elements of the national genius. There, the fervid, yet grave, enthusiasm of the old Castilian heroism; the chivalrous adventures of modern, courtly honor; the generous self-devotion of individual loyalty; and that reserved, but passionate love, which, in a state of society where it was so rigorously withdrawn from notice, became a kind of unacknowledged religion of the heart;—all seem to find their appropriate home. And when he has once brought us into this land of enchantment, whose glowing impossibilities his own genius has created, and has called around him forms of such grace and loveliness as those of Clara and Doña Angela, or heroic forms like those of Tuzani, Mariamne, and Don Ferdinand, then he has reached the highest point he ever attained, or ever proposed to himself;—he has set before us the grand show of an idealized drama, resting on the purest and noblest elements of the Spanish national character, and one which, with all its unquestionable defects, is to be placed among the extraordinary phenomena of modern poetry.[684]

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