[242] There is a curious poem in English, by Charles Fitzgeffrey, on the Life and Death of Sir Francis Drake, first printed in 1596, which is worth comparing with the Dragontea, as its opposite, and which was better liked in England in its time than Lope’s poem was in Spain. See Wood’s Athenæ, London, 1815, 4to, Vol. II. p. 607.
[243] The time of the story is quite unsettled.
[244] At the end of the whole, it is said, that, during the eight nights following the wedding, eight other dramas were acted, whose names are given; two of which, “El Perseguido,” and “El Galan Agradecido,” do not appear among Lope’s printed plays;—at least, not under these titles.
[245] Among the passages that have the strongest air of reality about them are those relating to the dramas, said to have been acted in different places; and those containing descriptions of Monserrate and of the environs of Valencia, in the first and second books. A sort of ghost-story, in the fifth, seems also to have been founded on fact.
[246] The first edition of the “Peregrino en su Patria” is that of Madrid, 1604, 4to, and it was soon reprinted; but the best edition is that in the fifth volume of the Obras Sueltas, 1776. A worthless abridgment of it in English appeared anonymously in London in 1738, 12mo.
[247] Lope insists, on all occasions, upon the fact of Alfonso’s having been in the Crusades. For instance, in “La Boba para los otros,” (Comedias, Tom. XXI., Madrid, 1635, f. 60), he says,—
To this crusade
There went together France and England’s powers,
And our own King Alfonso.
But the whole is a mere fiction of the age succeeding that of Alfonso, for using which Lope is justly rebuked by Navarrete, in his acute essay on the part the Spaniards took in the Crusades. Memorias de la Academia de la Hist., Tom. V., 1817, 4to, p. 87.