We have the high authority of Sancho for
saying, -
"Para dar y tener
Seso ha menester."
He is a bright boy who can eat his cake and have it.
In some incidents of the closing scenes of these memorable lives there
is a curious parallelism. Lope de Vega and Cervantes lived and died in
the same street, now called the Calle de Cervantes, and were buried in
the same convent of the street now called Calle de Lope de Vega. In this
convent each had placed a beloved daughter, the fruit of an early and
unlawful passion. Isabel de Saavedra, the child of sin and poverty, was
so ignorant she could not sign her name; while Lope's daughter, the
lovely and gifted Marcela de Carpio, was rich in the genius of her
father and the beauty of her mother, the high-born Maria de Lujan.
Cervantes's child glided from obscurity to oblivion no one knew when,
and the name she assumed with her spiritual vows is lost to tradition.
But the mystic espousals of the sister Marcela de San Felix to the
eldest son of God - the audacious phrase is of the father and priest Frey
Lope - were celebrated with princely pomp and luxury; grandees of Spain
were her sponsors; the streets were invaded with carriages from the
palace, the verses of the dramatist were sung in the service by the
Court tenor Florian, called the "Canary of Heaven;" and the event
celebrated in endless rhymes by the genteel poets of the period.
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