remes_.
The Spanish drama in all its forms retained its command over the nation,
because they were alike popular in origin and character; nor is there
any other example of so complete an adaptation of a national art to the
national taste and sentiment in its ethics and aesthetics, in the nature
of the plots of the plays (whatever their origin), in the motives of
their actions, in the conduct and tone and in the very costume of their
characters.

Decay of the national Spanish drama.

The French school of the 18th century.

Other later dramatists.

National as it was, and because of this very quality, the Spanish drama
was fated to share the lot of the people it so fully represented. At the
end of the 17th century, when the Spanish throne at last became the
declared apple of discord among the governments of Europe, the Spanish
people lay, in the words of an historian of its later days, "like a
corpse, incapable of feeling its own impotence." That national art to
which it had so faithfully clung had fallen into decline and decay with
the spirit of Spain itself. By the time of the close of the great war,
the theatre had sunk into a mere amusement of the populace, which during
the greater part of the 18th century, while allowing the old masters the
measure of favour which accords with traditional esteem, continued to
uphold the representatives of the old drama in its degeneracy--authors on
the level of their audiences. But the Spanish court was now French, and
in the drama, even more than in any other form of art, France was the
arbiter of taste in Europe. With the restoration of peace accordingly
began isolated attempts to impose the French canons of dramatic theory,
and to follow the example of French dramatic practice; and in the middle
of the century these endeavours assumed more definite form. Montiano's
bloodless tragedy of _Virginia_ (1750), which was never acted, was
accompanied by a discourse endeavouring to reconcile the doctrines of the
author with the practice of the old Spanish dramatists; the play itself
was in blank verse (a metre never used by Calderon, though occasionally
by Lope), instead of the old national ballad-measures (the
romance-measure with assonance and the rhymed _redondilla_ quatrain)
preferred by the old masters among the variety of metres employed by
them. The earliest Spanish comedy in the French form (a translation only,
though written in the national metre)[67] (1751), and the f