was a question which troubled good Spaniards as much as it delighted Mr. Dobson. Dedicated to Pope Urban VIII., the poem won for its author the Cross of St. John and the title of Doctor of Divinity. Three years later he issued his Laurel de Apolo, a cloying eulogy on some three hundred poets, as remarkable for its omissions as for its flattering of nonentities. The Dorotea (1632), a prose play fashioned after the model of the Celestina, was one of Lope's favourites, and is interesting, not merely for its graceful, familiar style, retouched and polished for over thirty years, but as a piece of self-revelation. The Rimas del licenciado Tomé de Burguillos (1634) closes with the mock-heroic Gatomaquia, a vigorous and brilliant travesty of the Italian epics, replenished with such gay wit as suffices to keep it sweet for all time.
Lope de Vega's career was drawing to its end. The elopement, with a court gallant, of his daughter, Antonia Clara, broke him utterly.[22] He sank into melancholy, sought to expiate by lashing himself with the discipline till the walls of his room were flecked with his blood. Withal he wrote to the very end. On August 23, 1635, he composed his last poem, El Siglo de Oro. Four days later he was dead. Madrid followed him to his grave, and the long procession turned from the direct path to pass before the window of the convent where his daughter, Sor Marcela, was a nun. A hundred and fifty-three Spanish authors bewailed the Phœnix in the Fama póstuma, and fifty Italians published their laments at Venice under the title of Essequie poetiche.
Lope left no achievement unattempted: the epic, Homeric or Italian, the pastoral, the romantic novel, poems narrative and historical, countless eclogues, epistles, not to speak of short tales, of sonnets innumerable, of verses dashed off on the least occasion. His voluminous private letters, full of wit and malice and risky anecdote, are as brilliant and amusing as they are unedifying. It is sometimes alleged that he deliberately capped Cervantes' work; and, as instances in this sort, we are bid to note that the Galatea was followed by Dorotea, the Viaje del Parnaso by the Laurel de Apolo. In the first place, exclusive "spheres of influence" are not recognised in literature; in the second, the observation is pointless. The Galatea is a pastoral novel, the Dorotea is not; the first was published in 1585, the second in 1632. Again, the Viaje del Parnaso appeared in 1614, the Laurel de Apolo in 1630. The first model was the Canto del Turia of Gil Polo. It would be as reasonable—that is to say, it would be the height of unreason—to argue that Persiles y Sigismunda was an attempt to cap the Peregrino en su patria. The truth is, that Lope followed every one who made a hit: Heliodorus, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso. A frank success spurred him to rivalry, and the difficulty of repeating it was for him a fresh stimulus. Obstacles existed to be vanquished. He was ever ready to accept a challenge; hence such a dexterous tour de force as his famous Sonnet on a Sonnet, imitated in a well-known rondeau by Voiture, translated again and again, and by none more successfully than by Mr. Gibson:—
"To write a sonnet doth Juana press me,
I've never found me in such stress and pain;
A sonnet numbers fourteen lines 'tis plain,
And three are gone ere I can say, God bless me!
I thought that spinning rhymes might sore oppress me,
Yet here I'm midway in the last quatrain;
And, if the foremost tercet I can gain,