Note 700 — Chapter XXV

Flor de las Mejores Comedias, Madrid, 1652, 4to. Baena, Hijos de Madrid, Tom. III. p. 227. A considerable number of the plays of Zabaleta may be seen in the forty-eight volumes of the Comedias Escogidas, 1652, etc. One of them, “El Hijo de Marco Aurelio,” on the subject of the Emperor Commodus, was acted in 1644, and, as the author tells us, being received with little favor, and complaints being made that it was not founded in truth, he began at once a life of that Emperor, which he calls a translation from Herodian, but which has claims neither to fidelity in its version, nor to purity in its style. It remained long unfinished, until one morning in 1664, waking up and finding himself struck entirely blind, he began, “as on an elevation,” to look round for some occupation suited to his solitude and affliction. His play had been printed in 1658, in the tenth volume of the Comedias Escogidas, and he now completed the work that was to justify it, and published it in 1666, announcing himself on the title-page as a royal chronicler. But it failed, as his drama had failed before it. In the “Vexámen de Ingenios” of Cancer, where the failure of another of Zabaleta’s plays is noticed, (Obras de Cancer, Madrid, 1761, 4to, p. 111), a punning epigram is inserted on his personal ugliness, the amount of which is, that, though his play was dear at the price paid for a ticket, his face would repay the loss to those who should look on it.