850 
ings *. Twenty-one million three 
hundred thousand of his lines are_ 
said to be actually printed ; and no 
less than eighteen hundred plays of 
his composition to have been acted 
on the stage. He nevertheless as- 
serts, in one of his last poems, that, 
“ No es minima parte, aunque es ex- 
ceso, 
De lo que esta por imprimir, lo im- 
preso. 
“ The printed part though far too large, 
is less, 
Than that which yet unprinted waits the 
press. 
‘¢ It is-true that the Castilian 
language is copious ; that the verses 
are often extremely short, and that 
the laws of metre and of rhyme + 
are by no means severe. Yet were 
we to give credit to such accounts, 
allowing him to begin his composi- 
tions at the age of thirteen, we must 
believe that upon an average he 
wrote more than nine hundred 
lines a day ; a fertility of imagina- 
tion, and a celerity of pen, which, 
when we consider the occupations of 
his life as a soldier, a secretary, a 
master of a family, and a priest ; 
his acquirements in Latin, Italian 
and Portuguese ; and his reputa- 
tion for erudition, become not only 
improbable, but, absolutely, and, 
one may almost say, physically im- 
possible. 
' As the credibility however of 
miracles must depend upon the 
weight of evidence, it will not be 
foreign to the purpose to examine 
the testimonies we possess of this 
extraordinary facility and exube- 
ANNUAL REGISTER, 1806, 
rance of composition. There does 
not now exist the fourth part of the 
works which he and his admirers 
mention, yet enough remains to 
render him one of the most volumi- 
nous authors thatever put pen to 
paper. Such was his facility, that 
he informs us in his Eclogue to Clau- 
dio, that more than a hundred times 
he composed a play and produced 
iton the stage in twenty-four hours. 
Montalvan declares that he latterly 
wrote in metre with as much rapi- 
dity as in prose, and in confirma- . 
tion of it he relates the following 
story :* : 
‘¢ ¢ His pen was unable to keep 
pace with his mind, as he invented 
even more than his hand was capa- 
ble of transcribing. He wrote a 
comedy in two days, which it would 
not be very easy for the most expe- 
ditious amanuensis to copy outin the 
tine. At Toledo he wrote fifteen 
acts in fifteen days, which made five 
comedies. These he read at a pri- 
vate house, where Maestro Joseph 
de Valdebicso was present and was 
witness of the whole; but because 
this is variously related, I will men- 
tion what I myself know from my 
own knowledge. Roque de Figu- 
eroa, the writer for the theatre at 
Madrid, was at such a loss for co- 
medies that the doors of the theatre 
dela Cruz were shut ; but as it was 
in the Carnival, he was so anxious 
upon the subject that Lope and my- 
self agreed to compose a joint co- 
medy as fastas possible. It was the 
Tercera Orden de San Francisco, 
and is the very one in which Arias 
acted the part of the saint more 
naturally than was ever witnessed on 
the 
* Parnaso Espanol. 
+ Appendix, No, ITI. 
t Montalvan’s Eulogium. 
) 
