Gabriel, a Spanish ecclesiastic, and an eminent follower of Lope de Vega, in the Spanish drama, is better known to the world of letters by his nome de plume of Tirso de Molina, was born at Madrid late in the sixteenth century. All that is known of his life is, that after receiving his education at Alcalá, he entered the church in 1613, and died probably in February 1648. Some accounts represent him as sixty years of age at his death, while others make him eighty.

Tirso de Molina, as he chose to call himself when he doffed his priestly robes, was a man of a decidedly dramatic genius; but very immoral in the habitual manifestation of it. The prevailing tone of his plays is unquestionably bad; and although he was a churchman, he has not succeeded in keeping the products of his genius out of the way of the confessional and the inquisition. Yet many of his less offensive dramas have kept possession of the stage down to our day. Besides 5 volumes of his collected dramas, containing 59 plays, published in 1616-1635, there are some 21 additional plays that have been printed; and, according to a statement made by the author in the preface to his Cigarreras de Toledo, 1624, he wrote 300 in all. Of these the best known out of Spain is his El Burlador de Sevilla (The Deceiver of Seville), an original exhibition of a character that has, since the time of Lope de Vega, become celebrated on every stage, both in Europe and America. Don Juan Tenorio, in the hands of Tirso, is a fellow of undaunted courage, of unmingled depravity, and of a cold cynical humour, rendering him at once one of the most interesting, and at the same time one of the most repulsive personages in the whole range of the drama. Molière held him up to the combined admiration and disgust of the French people in 1665, in his Festin de Pierre. To Zamaora in Spain, to Thomas Corneille in France, to Shadwell (Libertine, 1676), and Lord Byron in England, and to Mozart in Germany, Tirso's Don Juan has since afforded ample exercise for ingenuity and sometimes for theft. But the most famous of Tirso de Molina's efforts is his Don Gil in the Green Pantaloons, one of the very best specimens of an intriguing comedy in any language.

Among the merits of Tellez must be mentioned his unquestionable power of gay narration, an extraordinary command of the Castilian dialect, and a luxurious power of versifying, capable of pleasing every taste with the variety of his metres, and the more fastidious by the elegance and grace of his rhythms. Among his faults may be mentioned his palpable caprice. He now begins with much naturalness with the accidents of a bull-fight; again, he introduces a speech of 400 lines in the first act. His characters, besides, want variety and often delicacy. (See Ticknor's Spanish Literature, vol. ii.)