home, after which period he was transferred to the jesuits' college or seminary at Madrid. His poetical talents, the precocity of which was as remarkable as their undiminished vigour and duration, seem not to have been discouraged by his ecclesiastical instructions. A play, entitled El Mejor Amigo el Muerte, has come down to us, which, from internal evidence, must have been written before the end of the year 1610. To this play Calderon contributed the entire third act, although at that time he had not quite completed his eleventh year. Three years after this period he composed, without assistance, an entire play on the subject of Elias, called "The Chariot of Heaven." This, though seemingly in existence when Vera Tassis wrote, that is, in 1682, the year after Calderon's death, remains still unknown. On proceeding to the university of Salamanca, whither he was sent in his fourteenth year, he seems to have divided his time between cultivating his poetical talents and in applying himself to those scholastic and theological studies, the results of which are so apparent in many of his most celebrated dramas. Before leaving Salamanca, where he continued till his nineteenth year, he wrote among other plays, the names of which are only conjectured, the most famous and perhaps the most powerful of all his dramas, namely, "The Devotion of the Cross"—a work which may be put in comparison with any that has ever been produced at the same age by any other poet. This, which is probably the production of Calderon that is best known out of Spain, owing to the analysis given of it by Sismondi, which is, however, more than usually inaccurate and unfair, was originally called "La Cruz de la Sepultura," and was published at Huesca in 1634 with other Comedies, where it is erroneously attributed to Lope de Vega (Hartzenbusch's edition of Calderon, Madrid, 1850; Notas e Illustraciones, tom. iv. p. 701). It contains some scenes or portions of scenes which do not appear in the edition of Vera Tassis, as if they were rejected by the maturer judgment of Calderon himself. Having left Salamanca in 1619, we find him at Madrid in the following year entering into friendly rivalry with older and better known poets in doing honour to the patron saint of that city, San Isidro, and receiving for his contribution on the occasion the praise of Lope de Vega. In 1622, two years later, he entered the lists with the great Lope himself, not indeed in the drama, in which he was destined to be his successor and superior, but in those poetical offerings at the shrine of the same newly canonized saint, in which he gained the third prize. Lope having won the first, and Zarate the second. Notwithstanding Calderon's predilection for these poetical pursuits, in which he was destined to achieve such pre-eminent success, he was not indifferent to those other instincts which, as a hidalgo and a Spaniard, seemed to him at least equally natural; as we find that, in common with almost every great name in Spanish literature, his first active services were devoted to arms. In 1625 we read of him serving with the army in the Milanese, and in the course of the same year in Flanders. His play, "The Siege of Breda," which commemorates the surrender of that town to the Spaniards under Spinola on the 8th of June, 1625—in some portion of the ten months' siege that preceded it Calderon being supposed to have borne a part—was produced, it is thought from the temporary interest of the subject, towards the end of the same year. How long Calderon continued connected with the army is uncertain; but his dramas, though not produced during that period with the amazing fertility that characterized his genius a few years later, appeared in unbroken succession. From internal evidence his three well-known dramas, "The Garden of Falerina" "'Tis hard to guard a House with two Doors;" and "The Fairy Lady," are supposed to have been written in 1629. On the same evidence his "Worse and Worse," and his "Better and Better," are given respectively to 1630 and 1631. In the former of these years Lope de Vega (Laurel of Apollo, Silva vii.) recognizes the sweetness and poetical elevation of his style—a recognition which was rendered still more emphatic two years later by Montalvan, who speaks not only of the works which Calderon had already produced, but of those which he was then engaged upon. The death of Lope in 1635 removed all impediment to Calderon's supremacy over the Spanish stage, a realm which he ruled with undivided sway and surpassing success until almost the day of his death, which took place on Whitsunday, 1681.
Between the date of his recognition as the legitimate successor of the great Lope and his death—a period almost of sixty years—but few events of his life are recorded. It seems to have flowed on in one unruffled tide of outward prosperity and inward peace, occupied in the splendid creations of his fancy, and the more sacred duties of his priesthood—a state which he had embraced in 1651, and for which the purity of his life and writings, and the enthusiasm of his belief, had, as far as we are able to judge, so appropriately fitted him. With the exception of his residence at Salamanca, the period of his early service in Italy and Belgium, and his presence in Catalonia during the rebellion of 1640—whither he went, almost contrary to the wishes of the king, as a member of the military order of Santiago, of which he had been elected a knight in 1637—his life hitherto had been spent almost exclusively in Madrid, he having become not only an ornament, but almost a necessity at the splendid court of Philip IV. Two years after his entering the priesthood, however, some ecclesiastical appointment seemed due to his attainments and position, and he was accordingly nominated chaplain to the chapel of the New Kings at Toledo. The duties of this office calling him away from the capital, the king soon found that he could not dispense with the presence of his favourite. He in consequence appointed him one of his own chaplains of honour, thus securing his residence at Madrid. He received other important ecclesiastical promotions, in all of which, according to the testimony of one of his contemporaries, "he united by humility and prudence, the duties of an obedient child and a loving father." From his connection with the court and with the church, he was stimulated at the same time to exertions of very opposite kinds; but both of them remarkable, and each pre-eminently worthy of his genius. For the one he produced those marvellous and gorgeous spectacles (Fiestas), performed in the gardens, or on the lake adjoining the palace of the Buen Retiro, which combined a splendour of diction, fancy, and invention, with an ingenuity and prodigal outlay of expenditure as to machinery and decorations, never previously united, or ever likely to be united again. For the church he composed those still more wonderful and more original autos; pieces, many of them nearly as long as his full length plays, which have no parallel in the literature of any country but Spain, and none to equal them even in that for ideal beauty and sublime elevation. Besides upwards of one hundred secular dramas—many of these, however, being on religious subjects, such as "The Devotion of the Cross," which, by Bouterwek and others, has been mistaken for an auto—he has left over seventy of these surprising performances, which are not included in the ordinary editions of Calderon, and from the difficulty of translating which, even German enthusiasm and industry have almost entirely shrunk. They form six quarto volumes, Madrid, 1759. In a sketch like the present, it would be impossible to give an adequate idea either of the great variety and richness of his plays, or of the subtle and profound undermeanings of his autos. In the former—
" All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal Frame,"
are chronicled and put before us in living action, by one who seems to have penetrated the mysteries of existence rather by the intuitions of genius than through the duller medium of experience. Dealing often with the warmest passions, and the most seductive crimes, he is pure without being cold, and terrible without that unconscious complicity in sin which we are forced to suspect in the delineations of similar horrors by other poets. He seems to have been in fact what Goethe was but in theory—above all the passions and weaknesses he describes; but still with a sympathy for all enjoyment that was innocent and natural in human life, such as we may suppose a guardian angel to feel for the being immediately under its protection. Those who seek for subtle delineations of character—those to whom the power of producing original individual creations is the test and result of dramatic power, will be disappointed if they expect to find such in Calderon. But, on the other hand, all who delight in the ingenious complications of a well-compacted plot—all who relish the sweet and playful converse of women, who are worthy of companionship even with "Shakspeare's women"—all to whom the fresh and original reproduction of the famous myths of Grecian imagination, or the pastoral and tragic episodes of the Old Testament, are capable of affording instruction or amusement—all those, in fine, who wish to hear a never-ending hymn of rapture and of praise upon the beauty of external nature, sung in the noblest
