arises, which Cyprian, standing on a solitary seacoast, thus describes, in one of those lyrical portions, which are often, without particular reason, interposed between the dialogue, in Spanish dramas :

"What is this? Ye heavens for ever pure,

At once intensely radiant and obscure!
Athwart th' etherial halls

The lightning's arrows and the thunder-balls
The day affright;

As from the horizon round

Burst with earthquake sound,

In mighty torrents the electric fountains,
Clouds quench the sun, and thunder-smoke
Strangles the air, and fire eclipses heaven."
From yonder clouds, even to the waves below,
The fragments of a single ruin choke
Imagination's flight;

For, on flakes of surge like feathers light,
The ashes of the desolation cast

Upon the gloomy blast

Tell of the footsteps of the storm.

And nearer see the melancholy form

Of a vast ship, the outcast of the sea,
Drives miserably!

And it must fly the pity of the port

Or perish; and its last and sole resort
Is its own raging enemy."

From this ship, which is a Phantom-ship, the Devil appears at the feet of Cyprian, as the only person escaped from the wreck. Coming as a man in suffering, he is hospitably received, and gives the following account of himself, which is obviously an ingenious allegory on his state in heaven, and his fall:

"Since thou desirest, I will then unveil
Myself to thee; for in myself I am
A world of happiness and misery;
This I have lost, and that I must lament
For ever. In my attributes I stood
So high and so heroically great,

In lineage so supreme, and with a genius,
Which penetrated with a glance the world
Beneath my feet, that, won by my high merit,
A king-whom I may call the King of kings,
Because all others tremble in their pride
Before the terrors of his countenance-
Named me his counsellor. But the high praise
Stung me with pride and envy; and I rose
In mighty competition to ascend

His seat, and place my foot triumphantly
Upon his subject thrones. Chastised, I know
The depth to which ambition falls. Too mad
Was th' attempt; and yet more mad were now
Repentance of th' irrevocable deed.
Therefore, I chose this ruin with the glory
Of not to be subdued, before the shame
Of reconciling me with him who reigns,
By coward cession. Nor was I alone;
VOL. IV.-No. 8.
44

Nor am I now; nor shall I be alone;

And there was hope, and there may still be hope;
For many suffrages among his vassals

Hailed me their lord and king, and many still

Are mine, and many more perchance shall be."

The Devil ends this artful and poetical account of himself, by exciting a love for magic in Cyprian, and offering his instruction. After this, we have again a scene of thoroughly Spanish intrigue. Lælius goes to Justina, to reproach her with the lover he supposed he had seen descending from her balcony, and finds her just coming out of her house. The Devil immediately shows himself within the house, as if anxious to be concealed; but in such a way, that he is seen only by Lælius, whose suspicions and anger, are, of course, greatly increased by it. Lælius, to discover who it is, forces his way in, against the intreaties of Justina; and thus, at last, that great offence against Spanish honour is consummated-a lover of the lady is in her apartments, unknown to her family. At this moment, Lysander comes home, and laments to Justina, that a persecution of the Christians is ordered; thus confessing, in the hearing of Lælius, son of the governor, that both himself and Justina are Christians. This further increases the cruel embarrassment of Justina, which seems to be at its height, when Florus comes to reproach her with the affair of the balcony, and detecting Lælius concealed in the house, can no longer doubt who is the favoured lover. They fight-it being the third duel in the piece-the Governor, Lælius's father, enters, and imprisons them both, excessively indignant at Justina, as the cause of his son's folly and danger. And so this part of the action is closed. Meanwhile, Cyprian's love has grown more and more ungovernable, and the Devil irritates and excites him more and more with the hopes of magic, until, at last, he surrenders his soul to perdition, if, at the end of a year, he can possess Justina.

This year elapses between the second and the last act, which opens with Cyprian, as an accomplished magician, demanding a fulfilment of the compact. The Devil attempts to do it, by tempting Justina to love, in every possible way. This is allegorically expressed in a beautiful lyrical dialogue, where, whatever surrounds her, seems to grow vocal and solicit her to love. It opens thus:

This allegory is carried on occasionally with great beauty; but, though Justina is partly tempted to love, still, by the entire purity of her thoughts, she prevents the Devil from obtaining the least power over her. She is, however, greatly alarmed, by these preternatural solicitings, which thus seem to come from whatever she beholds, and she therefore determines to resort for strength, to the secret church and worship of her persecuted sect. The Devil, in the mean time, unable to fulfil his compact with Cyprian, endeavours to deceive him, and sends a phantom in the form of Justina, which, when Cyprian approaches it, proves a loathsome corpse. The Devil now confesses he has no power over Justina. Cyprian insists on the reason: and the De, vil again confesses it is because she is protected by one greater than himself, who, by further compulsion and adjuration, he is made to acknowledge is the God of the Christians. This, of course, brings all back to the original argument at the opening of the piece. Cyprian's doubts are solved. He devotes himself to the Supreme Deity, whom he has thus discovered, and surrenders himself, as a Christian, to the Governor of Antioch. The Governor, in the mean time, pursuing Justina with vengeance, for his son's follies and crimes, has traced her to the Christian Church, where she, too, is seized, and brought before him. Both are carried out for martyrdom; the buffoon servants make many poor jests on the occasion; and the whole ends, by the appearance in the air, of a great dragon ridden by the Devil, who is again compelled to confess the Supreme Deity, and, amidst thunder and earthquake, to proclaim that Cyprian and Justina are already welcomed into heaven.

This piece, the Magico Prodigioso, contains, we think, as many of the peculiar marks and characteristics of Calderon's manner, as any one that could be selected from his works. Among his more popular pieces in Spain, are the Dama Duende, (The Fairy Lady,) which may be seen again in Hauteroche's Esprit follet; No hay burlas con el Amor, (No jesting with Love,) and La Vanda y la Flor, (The Scarf and the Flower.) These, with others of the same character, but all dramatised novels, constitute his chief merit at home, where pathetic dramas, which, like the Firm-hearted Prince, depend on a deep tragic interest, have never maintained the rank they do with the grave nations of the North.

On looking over the mass of Calderon's works, and considering him as the immediate successor of Lope, we shall still find, that, during the fifty years he was unquestioned master of the stage,

he did not effect or attempt any considerable revolution on the Spanish theatre. He added to it no new forms of dramatic composition, and he did not much modify those which had been arranged and settled by Lope. But he gave the whole a new colouring; and, in some respects, a new physiognomy. His drama is more poetical in its objects and tendencies, and has less an air of reality and truth, than that of his great predecessor. We have, in its best portions, a sense of treading in a new world, governed by higher motives, and stimulated by new passions; and we must have our own feelings and imaginations not a little raised and excited, before we can take part in what we witness. To this elevated tone, and the constant effort necessary to sustain it, we are to trace what is characteristic both in Calderon's merits and defects. It renders him less easy, graceful, and natural, than Lope. It imparts to his style, a constraint and mannerism which often offend us. It leads him to repeat from himself, till his personages become standing characters; and his ladies and gallants seem brought out, like the masks of the ancient theatre, to represent, with the same attributes and costume, the different stories and actions his different plots require. It leads him to break down all the distinctions of national, as well as individual, character, and to bring on the stage Greeks and Romans, Heathen divinities, and the supernatural fictions of a Christian imagination, all in Spanish fashions, and with Spanish feelings; and to carry them all, much in the same way, through a long succession of singular intrigues and adventures, during which a proud, idealized, romantic elevation of mind is constantly produced, in striking situations, and with brilliant effect. In short, it has led him to consider the whole Spanish Drama a mere form, within whose limits his imagination may be indulged without restraint; and, the consequence is, that while the high tone of Spanish honour, courtesy, and love, is every where preserved, his actions are often combined in such gross disproportions, and his characters are produced with such fantastic and impossible attributes, that a large majority of his dramas must, after all, be considered as failures, and a still greater number be admitted to have any thing for their support, rather than truth and nature.

But where he does succeed, his success is of no common character. He sets before us a world of ideal beauty, splendour, and perfection, into which nothing enters but the highest and purest elements of the Spanish character. The fervid and solemn enthusiasm of Moorish heroism; the chivalrous adventures of Castilian honour; the generous self-devotion of individual loyalty; and that love, which is the most reserved secret of woman's heart in a state of society, where it must be so severely withdrawn from the world-all seem to find in Calderon their peculiar and appropriate home. And, when he has once entered

into this poetical fairy-land, whose glowing impossibilities his own genius has created, and when he has gathered around himself forms of heroism and loveliness, like those of Tuzani, Gutierrez, Clara, and Don Ferdinand, he has reached the point he proposed to himself; he has set before us the magnificent show of an idealized drama, resting on the purest and noblest elements of the Spanish national character, and which, with all its inevitable defects, is, at least, one of the most extraordinary phenomena in modern poetry.

Calderon, like Lope, was surrounded with many imitators and followers, in whose hands the national drama gradually decayed. Among the more prominent of them, was Moreto, of whom, if we had time, we would gladly speak, not only for the sake of his great merit, but because his delightful and humorous play, El Desden con el Desden, is in the volume of Mr. Sales. There was also Diamante and Roxas; Solis, the historian, Candamo, the lyrical poet, Zamora, an actor; and, finally, Cañizares, who compounded his works, in a great measure, from the elder dramatists. All these, and multitudes of other writers, flourished between the time when Calderon came upon the stage, and its final fall, about the time when the Bourbons came to the throne, in 1700. They mark, too, its decay.

The theatre, however, as we have already intimated, did not depend in Spain, so much on the full length dramas, as it did in other countries. There were, besides, the Loas, or long dramatic prologues, the Entremeses between the acts; the Saynetes, or farces at the end; the Xacaras, which were a sort of old ballads, sung where they were needed; and lyrical dances, or dances with song, like the Zarabandas, which were put in for the same general purpose of increasing the zest of the entertainment. They were all, however, in one tone and spirit, and constitute the dramatic literature of the public, popular theatres in Spain, during the seventeenth century: The genuine and exclusive nationality of this literature, is its most prominent characteristic. It was a more popular amusement; it belonged more to all classes of the nation, than any theatre since the Greek. Its actors were almost always strolling companies, with a person at their head, called El Autor, because from the time of Lope de Rueda, the manager often wrote the pieces he caused to be represented; and this Author, as he was called, when he came to a place, where he intended to act, went round in person and posted his bills, announcing the entertainment. When dramatic representations were not so common as they afterwards became, such occasions were eagerly seized, and pieces performed both morning and afternoon. Even later, when they grew common, they were still always given in the day-time, beginning, in the winter, at two o'clock, and in the summer at three, so that every