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With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now that

Don John was dead and he had no one to press his clai on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; he

had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,

therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venture

committed his "Galatea" to the press It was published, as Salva y Mallen

shows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubt

helped to make his naood in any other way

While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina de

Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and

apparently a friend of the faht him a fortune which may

possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that was

all The draes and

strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned to

it for a congenial employment In about three years he wrote twenty or

thirty plays, which he tells us were perfor of

cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses,

outcries, or disturbance In other words, his plays were not bad enough

to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own upon

it Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two of