"I don't know, Deïko.

Tell me what's best."

"Come, you know the Turks' weakness. You must give them something; it's the only way to get out of it: else they'll drag you from one court-house to another till you're utterly ruined. Poor old Stoïko could have spared himself this with a trifle. Give, Tsanko! give 'em your white silver to keep off black sorrow."

His wife came too, weeping bitterly:

"Let's give them what we can! Never mind, Tsanko: it's the only way to get out of the murderers' hands. They've killed poor old Stoïko. Dear, dear! to think I should live to see it." "But what are we to give, wife? You know we haven't any money."

"Let's give the necklace!"

"What! Donka's necklace, with the coins?"

"Yes, yes! it's all we have, it's the only way to get rid of them. Why, they're asking for Donka now-the cursed brutes!" "Do what God thinks best, wife. I'm all in a muddle," mut

tered Tsanko from his prison.

His wife and Deïko went away.

Soon after, a light shone through the chinks in the boards of the closet, and the door was unlocked.

Come out, Tsanko: you're free," said Deïko. "The Agas were good fellows after all. They've given you back the knife as well; so there's no cause for fear.

You've got off cheap." And bending to his ear, he whispered low:

"It can't last much longer: either they'll finish us off, or we must them. This life can't go on like this."

LOPE DE VEGA

(1562-1635)

BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN

HE comedies of Lope de Vega - of which three hundred still exist, but difficult to obtain - are worth serious study by the sociologists, and the modern maker of plays who may need to revive a jaded imagination. The material used in these dramas is enormous; it is rich, suggestive, often rare and poetical. Sismondi (Literature of the South of Europe') says of Lope:

"In order to have written 2,200 theatrical pieces, he must every eight days, from the beginning to the end of his life, have given to the public a new play of about three thousand verses; and in these eight days he must not only have found the time necessary for invention and writing, but also for making the historical researches into customs and manners on which the play is founded, to consult Tacitus, for example, in order to compose his 'Nero': while the fruits of his spare time were twenty-one volumes in quarto of poetry, among which are five epic poems.»

He was called the Phoenix of Poets; and Calderon justly named him "the prodigy of nature" (el monstruo de naturaleza). The fecundity of Alexandre Dumas père is in our time a matter of wonder, in spite of the fact that he had co-laborers; the ease with which Lope de Vega turned out comedies, tragi-comedies, tragedies, moralities, autos sacramentales, interludes, and even epics, beats the very record of the author of 'Monte Cristo.' Lope was pressed into continuous action by the hungry theatrical managers, and a continual flood of gold poured into his caskets; but like Dumas the elder, he was generous and extravagant. It is easy to understand the non-morality of Dumas, who seems to have been a creature of emotion and imagination; and one feels that the reader who could take Aramis or D'Artagnan so seriously as to copy their moral laxity, must not only be as unstable as water, but already corrupt. In the case of Lope we find, especially in the "cloak and sword" dramas, an amazing disregard for the crime of murder, and the constant assumption that "love excuses all things." And yet he was intensely religious and moral in those dramatic legends of the saints, and in those sacred spectacles called "autos," which were usually performed in honor of the Blessed Sacrament on the Feast of Corpus Christi. There is in his 'Lives and Legends of the Saints,' and in his 'Autos,' the same strange mixture of mythological and Christian personages,