Note 383 — Chapter XVII

“San Nicolas de Tolentino,” Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, ff. 167, etc. Each act, as is not uncommon in the old Spanish theatre, is a sort of separate play, with its separate list of personages prefixed. The first has twenty-one; among which are God, the Madonna, History, Mercy, Justice, Satan, etc. It opens with a masquerading scene in a public square, of no little spirit; immediately after which we have a scene in heaven, containing the Divine judgment on the soul of one who had died in mortal sin; then another spirited scene, in a public square, among loungers, with a sermon from a fervent, fanatical monk; and afterwards, successive scenes between Nicholas, who has been moved by this sermon to enter a convent, and his family, who consent to his purpose with reluctance; the whole ending with a dialogue of the rudest humor between Nicholas’s servant, who is the buffoon of the piece, and a servant-maid, to whom he was engaged to be married, but whom he now abandons, determined to follow his master into a religious seclusion, which, at the same time, he is making ridiculous by his jests and parodies. This is the first act. The other two acts are such as might be anticipated from it.