strong individual delineation, is certainly true; but that it is not always so, this tragedy sufficiently attests. It is not here the peasant-judge alone who is distinctly marked, but almost every other of the dramatis persona as well. To all these must be added his comedies in our sense of the word, themselves a world of infinite variety, but one in which I must not linger. Ulrici, indeed, says that in comedy was Calderon's forte; "therein first his truly poetical genius unfolds its full strength." I can not agree with him. These seem to me but the lighter play, as contrasted with the earnest toil, of his spirit. Moreover, while he was a master in the comedy of situation, the vein of his comic dialogue is often forced, and often flows scantily enough. He does not deal aways with humble life in perfect good faith; it is too often a sort of parody of his high life, itself a high life below-stairs. Their charm consists in the ideal grace and beauty in which they are steeped, the warm atmosphere of poetry and romance which he generally succeeds in diffusing over them. I can only indicate a few of the most celebrated, as The Fairy Lady, Que es crueldad tu tiranía; Pues desde que te he rogado, Que te detuvieses, miran Mis ojos tu faz hermosa Descollarse por encima * Shakspeare und sein Verhältniss zu Calderon und Goethe, Halle, 1839, p. 533. which, variously transformed, has found a home in almost all lands; The Jailer of Himself, a finished piece of comedy, just playing on the verge of tragedy; The Loud Secret, and The Scarf and the Flower. Finally, we must add to these the Autos, or religious mysteries, of which there will be occasion to speak by-and-by, for they claim a separate consideration. Putting all together, we must confess that the reach and compass of that poetical world which Calderon sought to occupy, was not small. To speak now of some of the technical merits of Calderon in dealing with his subject, after which it may be time to consider other matters which lie less on the surface. We observe, then, in him the completest mastery of his material; all is laid out to the best advantage, all is calculated and weighed beforehand. There are no after-thoughts, no changes of plan as the composition was growing under his hand, out of which the conclusion suits ill with the beginning; but, as one perceives on a second reading, glimpses of the last and preparations for it appear very often from the very first. Vast as is the cycle of his compositions—his dramas are more than one hundred and twenty, his autos more than seventy, being nearly two hundred in all, a number which would appear vaster still if there were not Lope at hand with his fifteen hundred to make Calderon's fertility appear almost like barrenness-there are no where in them any tokens of haste. All parts are fully and in the measure of their importance equably wrought out. Inequalities, of course, there will be, for every poet will at one time soar higher than at another; but there are nowhere to be found the evi dences of carelessness or haste. Several of his dramas, like more than one of Shakespeare's, have been laboriously recast and rewritten, so that we possess them in two shapes-in their earlier and immaturer, in their later and riper forms. Nor, fruitful as his pen was, is it anything impossible that he should have bestowed on all his works that careful elaboration for which I have here given him credit. Almost all poets of a first-rate excellence, dramatic poets above all, have been nearly as remarkable for the quantity as the quality of their compositions; nor has the first injuriously affected the second. Witness the seventy dramas of Eschylus, the more than ninety of Euripides, the hundred and thirteen of Sophocles. And if we consider the few years during which Shakespeare wrote, his fruitfulness is not less extraordinary. The vein has been a large and a copious one, and has flowed freely forth, keeping itself free and clear by the very act of its constant ebullition. And the fact is very explicable: it is not so much that they have spoken, as their nation that has spoken by them. And, in the instance before us, we should not leave out of sight to how great an age the poet attained. His life, like that of Sophocles and of Goethe, was prolonged beyond his eightieth year. Not only was his life a long one, but it was a life singularly free from all outward disturbances; in this most unlike those of his great fellow-countrymen Lope and Cervantes. He did not write for his bread, as, with all his popularity, did the former; he was no shuttlecock of fortune, no wrestler with poverty as with an armed man, and that for barest life, as the immortal author of Don Quixote. It might have been better for him if he had known some of these conflicts; or perhaps, with his temperament, it might not. At all events, such were not assigned to him. The generosity of the monarch whom he served, the large incomings of the preferments which he held-these, even supposing that high literature was no better rewarded in his case than in that of many others, must have exempted him from all anxieties about money; indeed, he appears to have had a considerable property to bequeath at his death and his whole life, with the exception of his campaigns in the Milanese and in Flanders, which can not have been lost time to him even in this respect, and his brief service in Catalonia, may very well have been dedicated entirely to the cultivation of his art. Neither did he make for himself, as do so many to whom the perilous gifts of genius have been allotted, those cares and disquietudes from which he had been graciously exempted from without. No one can doubt that to him was given a cheerful spirit, working joyously, and with no doubts nor misgivings, in that sphere which it found marked out for it. Doubtless that which the Schlegels affirm was true in respect of him the world's riddle was solved for him, and solved in the light of faith. The answer which he had found, and which he offers to others, may be quite unsatisfying to them: it fully satisfied him. No one can contemplate the noble portrait occasionally prefixed to his works-the countenance so calm, so clear, so resolved, surmounted with the dome-like expanse of that meditative brow*-and not feel that to him, if to any, were given "the serene temples of the wise." And this lasted to the end. He was not of those too many poets, who only "do begin their lives in gladness;" it was gladness with him to the end. It was with him as with those mountain-summits, which, ever as they rise the higher, thrust themselves up into clearer and purer air; for we may distinctly mark, as his years advance, an increasing desire in him to withdraw himself from secular themes, to dedicate his genius wholly to the service of religion.† *In a poem published immediately after his death, his eulogist celebrates, "de su rostro grave lo capaz de la frente." It is a countenance not without its resemblances to Shakespeare's, but wanting (and how great a want!) every indication of his humor. 66 † In his epitaph these words occur: Quæ summo plausu vivens |