MORETO-Y-CABANA

MORETO-Y-CABANA, AUGUSTIN, a celebrated Spanish dramatist, flourished in the former half of the seventeenth century. A few isolated facts are the only record of his personal history. He shared in the patronage which Philip IV. extended to literary men, and he stood second to Calderon alone in the favour of the theatre. In wealth of fancy, fertility of invention, and rapidity of composition, he was inferior to the greatest of his contemporaries. Yet his power of depicting character was rivalled in few of the dramas of his predecessors. So strikingly life-like was his

picture of The Handsome Don Diego, that the name in a short time came to be used as a national synonyme for a fop. He also showed an infallible dexterity in constructing dramas on borrowed plots, which in course of time superseded their originals in the public favour. The best of all his plays, Disdain met with Disdain, was founded on the great Lope's Miracles of Contempt, and drove it off the stage. But he was fated to be imitated as well as to imitate. The play last mentioned was copied, though unsuccessfully, by Molière in his Princesse d'Élide; and it has since been translated into German, and altered to suit the German stage. Some of Moreto's dramas were religious, such as The Most Fortunate Brothers; and a few were heroic, such as The Brave Justiciary of Castile. But the greater number were comedies of familiar life, or, as they were called, "comedies of cloak and sword." A collection of Moreto's plays was published in three volumes, 1654 and 1681. Meanwhile their author, renouncing literature, had retired to a religious house at Toledo in 1657, and had died there in 1669.