Lope's book is a familiar discourse having the playful ease of an afterdinner speech. It consists of a series of
paragraphs of irregular length, varying from four to forty lines each. It is written in blank verse, hendecasyllabics, except that the last two lines of every paragraph are in rhyme. These terminal couplets recall the rhyming exit-speeches common in contemporary Elizabethan drama; and in both cases apparently the rhymes serve to heighten the emphasis at the end of the rhetorical period. At the conclusion of his address, Lope drops into Latin and inserts ten lines in that tongue, ten lines of unidentified origin. These Latin verses may be his own composition or they may yet be traced to some overlooked poem. They are brought into harmony with the rest of the work by the ingenious device of rhyming the last Latin line with a line in Spanish, thus making a couplet half in the learned language and half in the vernacular.