Still better is _El desdén con el desdén_, a piece which shows to perfection Moreto’s unparalleled tact in making a mosaic a beautiful thing. Diana, the young girl who knows no more of the world than of the moon, but who imagines men to be odious wretches from what she had read of them—Diana is taken from Lope’s _La Vengadora de las mugeres_; the behaviour of her various suitors is suggested by Lope’s _De corsario á corsario_; the quick-witted maid is from Lope’s _Los Milagros del desprecio_; the trick by which the Conde de Urgel traps Diana is borrowed from Lope’s _La Hermosa fea_. Not one of the chief traits in _El desdén con el desdén_ is original; but out of these fragments a play has been constructed far superior to the plays from which the component parts are derived. The plot never flags and is always plausible, the characters are full of life and interest, and the dialogue sparkles with mischievous gaiety. All this is Moreto’s, and it is a victory of intellectual address. It clearly impressed Molière, who set out to do by Moreto what Moreto had done by others: the result is _La Princesse d’Élide_, one of Molière’s worst failures. Gozzi renewed the attempt, and failed likewise in _La Principessa filosofa_. _El desdén con el desdén_ outlives these imitations as well as others from skilful hands in England and in Sweden, and surely it deserves to live as an example of what marvellous deftness can do in contriving from scattered materials a charming and essentially original work of art.
Compared with Moreto, Juan Matos Fragoso is, as I have said, a bungler. In _A lo que obliga un agravio_, which is from Lope’s _Los dos bandoleros_, he fails, though he has the collaboration of Sebastián de Villaviciosa. He fails by himself in _La Venganza en el despeño_, which is taken from Lope’s _El Príncipe despeñado_. There is some reason to think that he tried to pass himself off as the author of Lope’s _El Desprecio agradecido_. This play is given in the thirty-ninth volume of the _Escogidas_ with Matos Fragoso’s name attached to it, and, as Matos Fragoso edited this particular volume, it seems to follow that he lent himself to a mean form of fraud. However, there is no gainsaying his popularity, and he may be read with real pleasure—as in _El Sabio en el rincón_, which is from Lope’s _El Villano en su rincón_—when he hits on a good original, and gives us next to nothing of his own. A better dramatist, and a far more reputable man, was Antonio de Solís, who was born ten years after Calderón; but Solís’s reputation really depends on his _Historia de la conquista de Méjico_, which appeared in 1684, two years before his death. He was naturally a prose-writer who took to the drama because it was the fashion. And that play-writing was a fashionable craze may be gathered from the fact that Spain produced over five hundred dramatists during the reigns of Philip IV. and Charles II. So the historians of dramatic literature tell us, but perhaps even they have not thought it necessary to read all this mass of plays with minute attention. Here and there a name floats down to us, not always flatteringly; Juan de Zabaleta, for instance, is remembered chiefly through Cáncer’s epigram on his ugliness and on his failure:—