BOOK VI 240

INTRODUCTION TO THE GALATEA.

Simple as the bibliography of the _Galatea_ really is, a habit of conjecture has succeeded in complicating it. Though the earliest known edition of the book is unanimously admitted to have appeared at Alcalá de Henares in 1585, it is often alleged that the _princeps_ was actually issued at Madrid during the previous year. This is a mistaken idea arising, probably, out of a slip made by Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, the first Spaniard[1] who attempted to write a formal biography of Cervantes. In his thirteenth paragraph Mayáns[2] remarked by the way that the _Galatea_ was published in 1584; but he laid no stress upon the date, and dismissed the matter in a single sentence. The error (if it were really an error, and not a mere misprint) was natural and pardonable enough in one who lived before bibliography had developed into an exact study. Unfortunately, it was reproduced by others. It is found, for instance, in a biographical essay on Cervantes which precedes the first edition of _Don Quixote_ issued by the Royal Spanish Academy;[3] and the essayist, Vicente de los Ríos, adds the detail that the _Galatea_ came out at Madrid. It was unlucky that this statement should be put forward where it is. The Academy's responsibility for the texts issued in its name is chiefly financial: for the rest, it habitually appoints the most competent representatives available, and it naturally gives each delegate a free hand. But foreigners, unacquainted with the procedure, have imagined that Ríos must be taken as expressing the deliberate and unanimous opinion of the entire Academy. This is a complete misapprehension. On the face of it, it is absurd to suppose that any corporation, as a whole, is irrevocably committed to every view expressed by individual members. Even were it otherwise, it would not affect the case. An error would be none the less an error if a learned society sanctioned it. But, as a matter of fact, like all those concerned in editing texts or in writing essays for the Academy, Ríos spoke for himself alone. He was followed by Pellicer[4] who, though he gives 1584 as the date of the _princeps_, is less categorical as to the place of publication. Some twenty-two years after Pellicer's time, Fernández de Navarrete[5] accepted his predecessors' view as regards the date, and to this acceptance, more than to anything else, the common mistake is due. Relying on Navarrete's unequalled authority, Ticknor[6] repeated the mis-statement which has since passed into general circulation. Further enquiry has destroyed the theory that the _Galatea_ first appeared at Madrid in 1584. However, as most English writers[7] on this question have given currency to the old, erroneous notion, it becomes necessary to set forth the circumstances of the case. But, before entering upon details, it should be observed (1) that no copy of the supposititious 1584 edition has ever been seen by any one; (2) that there is not even an indirect proof of its existence; and (3) that, so far as the evidence goes, no edition of the _Galatea_ was published at Madrid before 1736: that is to say, until more than a century after Cervantes's death.

We do not know precisely when the _Galatea_ was written. M. Dumaine,[8] indeed, declares positively that the poems in the volume--he must surely mean some of them, not all--were addressed to a lady during the author's stay in Italy. If this were so, these verses would date (at latest) from September, 1575, when Cervantes left Italy for the last time. Sr. D. José María Asensio y Toledo[9] holds that the _Galatea_ was begun in Portugal soon after the writer's return from Algiers in 1580. Of these views one may conceivably be true; one must necessarily be false; and it is more than possible that both are wrong. As no data are forthcoming to support either opinion, we may profitably set aside these speculations and proceed to examine the particulars disclosed in the preliminaries of the _Galatea_. The _Aprobación_ was signed by Lucas Gracián[10] Dantisco at Madrid on February 1, 1584, and, as some time must have passed between the submission of the manuscript to the censor and the issue of his license, it seems certain that the text of the _Galatea_ was finished before the end of 1583. In its present form, the dedication, as will be seen presently, cannot have been written till about the end of the following summer. Meanwhile, on February 22, 1584, the _Privilegio_ was granted at Madrid in the King's name by Antonio de Erasso. It was not till a year later--the very end of February 1585--that the _Fe de erratas_ was passed at Alcalá de Henares by the Licenciado Vares de Castro, official corrector to the University of that city. The _Tasa_, which bears the name of Miguel Ondarza Zabala, was despatched at Madrid on March 13, 1585.

To those who have had no occasion to study such matters as these, the space of time which elapsed between the concession of the _Privilegio_ and the despatch of the _Tasa_ might seem considerable; and it is not surprising that this circumstance should be the basis of erroneous deductions on their part. Apparently for no other reason than the length of this interval, it has been concluded that, between February 22, 1584, and March 13, 1585, there was printed at Madrid an edition of the _Galatea_, every copy of which has--_ex hypothesi_--vanished. This assumption is gratuitous.

It is true that the first editions of certain very popular Spanish books--such as the _Celestina_,[11] _Amadís de Gaula_,[12] _Lazarillo de Tormes_,[13] _Guzmán de Alfarache_,[14] and _Don Quixote_[15]--tend to become exceedingly rare and are, perhaps, occasionally thumbed out of existence altogether. But the _Galatea_, like all pastoral novels, appealed to a comparatively restricted class of readers, and was in no danger of wide popularity. No doubt the _princeps_ of the _Galatea_ is exceptionally rare,[16]--rarer than the _princeps_ of _Don Quixote_; but rarity, taken by itself, is no proof that a work was popular, and, in the present instance, the rarity may be due to the fact that the _Galatea_ was issued in a more or less limited edition. This is what we should expect in the case of a first book published in a provincial town by an author who had still to make his reputation; but, in the absence of direct testimony, the question cannot be decided. What can be proved by any one at all acquainted with Spanish bibliography is that there was no unexampled delay in publishing the _Galatea_. Similar instances abound; but, for our present purpose, it will suffice to mention two which are--or should be--familiar to all who are specially interested in Cervantes and in his writings. As we have just seen, the _Tasa_ of the _Galatea_ is dated thirteen months after the _Aprobación_. An exact parallel to this is afforded by Cervantes's own _Novelas exemplares_: Fray Juan Bautista signed the _Aprobación_ on July 9, 1612, and Hernando de Vallejo signed the _Tasa_ on August 12, 1613.[17] Here the interval is precisely thirteen months. A still more striking instance of dilatoriness is revealed in the preliminaries to another work which has been consulted--or, at least, quoted as though it were familiar to them--by almost all writers on Cervantes from 1761 onwards: namely, Diego de Haedo's _Topographia e Historia general de Argel_, published at Valladolid in 1612. Haedo obtained the _Aprobación_ on October 6, 1604, but the licence was not given till February 8, 1610. In this instance, then, the legal formalities were spread out over five years and, at the final stage, there was a further pause of three years; in all, a delay of eight years.[18] There is no ground for assuming that the official procedure in these matters was more expeditions in 1585 than it was a quarter of a century later and, consequently, in the case of the _Galatea_, the interval of time between the issue of the _Aprobación_ and the despatch of the _Tasa_ cannot be regarded as calling for any far-fetched explanation.

The author's Letter Dedicatory to Ascanio Colonna, Abbot of St. Sophia, is undated, but it contains a passage which incidentally throws light on the bibliography of the _Galatea_. Speaking of his military service under Ascanio Colonna's father, Cervantes mentions his late chief--_aquel sol de la milicia que ayer nos quitó el cielo delante de los ojos_--in terms which imply that Marco Antonio Colonna's death was a comparatively recent event. Now, we know from the official death-certificate[19] that the Viceroy of Sicily, when on his way to visit Philip II., died at Medinaceli on August 1, 1584--exactly six months after the _Aprobación_ for the _Galatea_ had been obtained. Allowing for the rate at which news travelled in the sixteenth century, it seems improbable that Cervantes can have written his dedication much before the end of August 1584. It is conceivable, no doubt, that he wrote two different dedications--one for the alleged Madrid edition of 1584, and another for the Alcalá edition of 1585. It is equally conceivable that though the Alcalá edition of the _Galatea_, in common with every subsequent work by Cervantes, has a dedication, the supposititious Madrid edition was (for some reason unknown) published without one. Manifestly, one of these alternatives must be adopted by believers in the imaginary _princeps_. But, curiously enough, the point does not appear to have occurred to them; for, up to the present time, no such hypothesis has been advanced. Assuming, as we may fairly assume, that only one dedication was written, the complete manuscript of the _Galatea_ cannot well have reached the compositors till September or October 1584. It is possible that some part of the text was set up before this date, but of this we have no proof. If the 375 leaves--750 pages--of which the book consists were struck off late in January or early in February 1585, so as to allow of the text being revised by the official corrector at Alcalá de Henares, and thence forwarded to Madrid by the beginning of March, it must be admitted that the achievement did credit to the country printer, Juan de Gracián, whose name figures on the title-page. Further, as Salvá[20] shrewdly remarks, the appearance of the Colonna escutcheon on this same title-page affords a presumption that the Alcalá edition of 1585 is the _princeps_: for it is unreasonable to suppose that a struggling provincial publisher of the sixteenth century would go to the expense of furnishing a simple reprint with a complimentary woodcut.

Each of the foregoing circumstances, considered separately, tells against the current idea that the _Galatea_ was published at Madrid in 1584, and it might have been hoped that an intelligent consideration of their cumulative effect would ensure the right conclusion: that the story is a myth. But, so Donoso Cortés[21] maintained, man has an almost invincible propensity to error, and the discussion on so plain a matter as the bibliography of the _Galatea_ lends colour to this view. The amount of confusion introduced into the debate is extraordinary. It is occasionally difficult to gather what a partisan of the alleged 1584 edition holds; his pages blaze with contradictions: his theory is half-heartedly advanced, hastily abandoned, and confidently re-stated in a bewildering fashion.[22] Again, what was originally put forward as a pious opinion is transfigured into a dogma. Just as there are some who, when writing on the bibliography of _Don Quixote_, insist that the 1608 edition of that book "must have been revised by the author,"[23] so there are some who, when writing on the bibliography of the _Galatea_, insist with equal positiveness that there "must have been an edition of 1584."[24] This emphasis is out of place in both cases; but it is interesting and instructive to note that these two opinions are practically inseparable from each other. The coincidence can scarcely be accidental, and it may prove advantageous: for, obviously, the refutation of the one thesis must tend to discredit the other. If a writer be convicted of error in a very simple matter which can be tested in a moment, it would clearly be imprudent to accept his unsupported statement concerning a far more complex matter to which no direct test can be applied. And, as it happens, we are now enabled to measure the accuracy of the assertion that the _princeps_ of the _Galatea_ was published at Madrid in 1584.

Those who take it upon themselves to lay down that there "must have been" an edition of that place and date are bound to establish the fact. They are not entitled to defy every rule of evidence, and to call on the other side to prove a negative. The burden of proof lies wholly with them. But, by a rare and happy accident, it is possible to prove a negative in the present case. In view of recent researches, the theory that the _princeps_ of the _Galatea_ was issued at Madrid in 1584 is absolutely untenable. All doubts or hesitations on this head are ended by the opportune discovery, due to that excellent scholar and fortunate investigator, Dr. Pérez Pastor, of the original contract between Cervantes and the Alcalá publisher, Blas de Robles. By this contract Blas de Robles binds himself to pay 1336 _reales_ (£29. 13s. 9d. English) for the author's entire rights.[25] This legal instrument is decisive, for it would be ridiculous--not to say impertinent--to suppose that Cervantes sold his interest twice over to two different publishers in two different cities. There can, therefore, be no further controversy as to when and where the _Galatea_ appeared. It is now placed beyond dispute that Cervantes had not found a publisher before June 1584, and that the book was issued at Alcalá de Henares in 1585--probably not before the month of April. The first intention was to entitle the volume _Los seys libros de Galatea_ but (perhaps with a view to emphasizing the promise of a sequel) it was actually published as the _Primera Parte de la Galatea, dividida en seys libros_.[26] On June 14, 1584, Cervantes received 1116 _reales_ in advance, and, by a deed of the same date, Blas de Robles undertook to pay the balance of 250 _reales_ at the end of September:[27] the very period when, as already conjectured, the printing was begun.[28]

Cervantes was in his thirty-third year when he was ransomed at Algiers on September 19, 1580, and, when he reached Portugal in 1581, he may have intended to enlist once more. It has, in fact, been generally thought that he shared in at least one of the expeditions against the Azores under the famous Marqués de Santa Cruz in 1581-83. This belief is based on the _Información_ presented by Cervantes at Madrid on June 6, 1590;[29] but in this petition to the King the claims of Rodrigo de Cervantes and Miguel de Cervantes are set forth in so confusing a fashion that it is difficult to distinguish the services of the elder brother from those of the junior. It is certain that Rodrigo served at the Azores in 1583, and we learn from Mosquera de Figueroa that he was promoted from the ranks for his distinguished gallantry in the action before Porto das Moas.[30] But it is by no means clear that Miguel de Cervantes took any part in either campaign. Such evidence as we have tells rather against the current supposition. It is ascertained that Cervantes was at Tomar on May 21, 1581, and that he was at Cartagena towards the end of June 1581, while we have documentary evidence to prove that he pawned five pieces of yellow and red taffeta to Napoléon Lomelin at Madrid in the autumn of 1583.[31] If these dates are correct (as they seem to be), it is scarcely possible that Cervantes can have sailed with Santa Cruz for the Azores.[32] The likelihood is that he had to be content with some civil employment and, if so, it was natural enough that he should turn to literature with a view to increasing his small income. A modest, clear-sighted man, he probably did not imagine that he was about to write masterpieces, or to make a fortune by his pen. He perhaps hoped to keep the wolf from the door, or, at the most, to find a rich patron, as his friend Gálvez de Montalvo had done.[33] If these were his ideas, and if, as seems likely, he thought of marrying at about this time, it is not surprising that he should write what he believed would sell. So far as we can judge, he would much rather have wielded a sword than a goose-quill, and he was far too great a humorist to vapour about "art" or an "irresistible vocation." His juvenile verses had found favour with Juan López de Hoyos, and perhaps Rufino de Chamberí had appreciated the two sonnets written in Algiers; but the spirited tercets to Mateo Vázquez had failed of their effect, and Cervantes was shrewd enough to know that versifying was not lucrative. Eighty years before it was uttered, he realized the truth of the divine Gombauld's dying exclamation: _On paie si mal des vers immortels!_ Fortunately, he had many strings to his bow. Like Lope de Vega, he was prepared to attempt anything and everything: prose or verse, the drama, picaresque tales, novels of adventure, and the rest. But, to begin with, he divided his efforts between the theatre and fiction.

In the latter province the path of a beginner was clearly marked out. Too obscure, as yet, to venture upon a line of his own, and anxious, if possible, to conciliate the general body of readers, Cervantes was practically compelled to choose between the chivalresque romance and the pastoral. Not knowing that he was born to kill the former kind, he decided in favour of the latter--and for obvious reasons. The Knight-errantries of Amadís and his comrades had been in vogue from the fourteenth--perhaps even from the thirteenth[34]--century onwards. _Amadís de Gaula_ was printed at least as early as 1508,[35] and had begotten a numerous tribe; but, when Cervantes was feeling his way in the ninth decade of the sixteenth century, popular enthusiasm for these tales of chivalry was cooling. The pastoral novel was the latest literary fashion. It would, possibly, be too much to say that the Spanish pastoral novel was a mere offshoot of the chivalresque romances; yet it is undeniable that the pastoral element is found in chivalresque stories of comparatively early date. For example, in the ninth book of _Amadís_, entitled _Amadís de Grecia_ (1530) the shepherd Darinel and the shepherdess Sylvia are among the characters; in the first two parts of _Don Florisel de Niquea_ (1532) the hero masquerades as a shepherd and pays his court to the shepherdess Sylvia; in the fourth part of _Don Florisel de Niquea_ (1551) the eclogues of Archileo and Laris are early instances of what was destined to become a tedious convention.[36] These, however, are simple foreshadowings of an independent school of fiction which was in full vigour while Cervantes was still a boy.

The Spanish chivalresque novel is thought by many sound judges to derive directly from Portugal,[37] which may, in its turn, have received the material of its knightly tales--and perhaps something more than the raw material--from Celtic France.[38] The conclusion is disputed,[39] but whatever opinion may prevail as regards the source of the books of chivalry, it seems fairly certain that the pastoral novel was introduced into Spain by a Portuguese writer whose inspiration came to him from Italy. In a general sense, Virgil is the father of the pastoral in all Latin lands: the more immediate source of the Italian pastoral is believed to be Boccaccio's _Ameto_, the model of Tasso and Guarini as also of Bembo and Sannasaro. Jacopo Sannazaro,[40] a Neapolitan courtier of Spanish descent, is the connecting link between the literatures of Italy and the Peninsula during the first part of the sixteenth century. His vogue in the latter was enhanced through the instrumentality of the renowned poet Garcilaso de la Vega,[41] the "starry paladin" of Spain. No small part of Garcilaso's work is a poetic recasting of Sannazaro's themes,[42] and we can scarcely doubt that Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ suggested the first genuine Spanish pastoral to the Portuguese, Jorge de Montemôr, so called from his birthplace. The point has been contested, for Montemôr's _Siete libros de la Diana_ are often said to have been published in 1542,[43] and the first Spanish translation of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ (by Diego López de Ayala) does not appear to have been issued till 1547.[44] It may, however, be taken as established that Montemôr's _Diana_ was not really printed much earlier than 1558-9,[45] when it at once became the fashion.[46] The argument sets forth that in the city of León, by the banks of the Ezla, dwelt the beautiful shepherdess Diana, beloved of the shepherds Sireno and Silvano; the shepherdess favours Sireno, who is suddenly called away to foreign countries, whence he returns a year later to find a change of times and hearts, Diana being wedded to the shepherd Delio: "and here beginneth the first book, and in the remainder you shall find very diverse histories of events which in sooth befell, howbeit travestied under a pastoral style." Montemôr's diverse histories, which owe something to Bernardim Ribeiro's _Saudades_ or _Hystoria de Menina e moça_[47] (a novel that begins as a chivalresque romance and ends as a pastoral tale), took Western Europe by storm. They may have been in Spenser's mind when he wrote _The Shepherd's Calendar_: they were unquestionably utilized by Sir Philip Sidney in _The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia_, and it has been alleged with more or less plausibility that--possibly through Bartholomew Yong's version of Montemôr, which was finished in 1583, though not published till fifteen years later--the episode of Felismena has been transferred from the _Diana_ to the _Two Gentlemen of Verona_.

The _Diana_ ends with the promise of a Second Part in which the shepherd Danteo and the shepherdess Duarda shall figure, but this Second Part was not forthcoming as Montemôr was killed in Piedmont on February 26, 1561.[48] His design was very badly executed in 1564 by his friend Alonso Pérez, a Salamancan physician, who had the assurance to boast that there was scarcely a scrap of original prose or verse in his volume, the whole (as he vaunts) being stolen and imitated from Latins and Italians. "Nor," adds this astonishing doctor, "do I deem that I am in any sort to blame therefor, since they did as much by the Greeks."[49] Another, and a far better, continuation of Montemôr's _Diana_ was issued at Valencia in this same year of 1664 by Gaspar Gil Polo--a sequel which, after proving almost as successful as Montemôr's original, was destined to be plagiarized in the most shameless fashion by Hierónimo de Texeda.[50]

That Cervantes was well acquainted with these early Spanish pastorals is proved by the discussion on the little books--contrasting with the hundred and more stately folios of the chivalresque romances--in Don Quixote's library. The niece of the Ingenious Gentleman thought that these slimmer volumes should "be burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and piping." The Priest agrees in principle, but in practice he is more mercifully disposed:--"To begin, then, with the _Diana_ of Montemayor. I am of opinion it should not be burned, but that it should be cleared of all that about the sage Felicia and the magic water,[51] and of almost all the longer pieces of verse: let it keep, and welcome, its prose and the honour of being the first of books of the kind." And when questioned concerning the above-named sequels, the judicious Priest declares:--"As for that of the Salamancan, let it go to swell the number of the condemned in the yard, and let Gil Polo's be preserved as if it came from Apollo himself." With this jest on Gil Polo's name, the Priest passes over the next in order of the pastoral novels, Jerónimo de Arbolanche's _Las Habidas_ (1566)[52]--a very rare work which, though not on Don Quixote's shelves, was more or less vaguely known to Cervantes[53]--to pronounce judgment on _Los diez Libros de Fortuna d'Amor_, an amazingly foolish book published in 1573 by a Sardinian soldier named Antonio de lo Frasso. Cervantes was just the man to praise (if possible) the work of an old comrade-in-arms, and, in fact, he contrived (through the Priest) to express his opinion of lo Frasso's book in terms which proved misleading:--"By the orders I have received, since Apollo has been Apollo, and the Muses have been Muses, and poets have been poets, so droll and absurd a book as this has never been written, and in its way it is the best and the most singular of all of this species that have as yet appeared, and he who has not read it may be sure he has never read what is delightful. Give it here, gossip, for I make more account of having found it than if they had given me a cassock of Florence stuff." It might seem difficult to interpret this as praise, and impossible to misunderstand the Priest's delight at meeting with what had already become a bibliographical rarity; but, some hundred and thirty years later, the last words of the passage were taken seriously and led to a reprint of lo Frasso's book by Pedro de Pineda, one of the correctors of Tonson's _Don Quixote_, who had manifestly overlooked the ridicule of the Sardinian in the _Viaje del Parnaso_.[54]

These pastorals, together with the chivalresque romances, had probably been the entertainment of Cervantes's youth. It was probably another and much later essay of the same kind which induced him to try his luck in the pastoral vein: the _Pastor de Fílida_, published at Madrid in 1582 by his friend Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, who is said (on doubtful authority, as we shall see presently) to have introduced Cervantes in his text as the shepherd Tirsi--_de clarísimo ingenio_. Whether this be so, or not, Cervantes, in his usual kindly, indulgent way, places his friend's work on Don Quixote's shelves, and treats it with gracious deference:--"No Pastor that, but a highly polished courtier; let it be preserved as a precious jewel." The book has but trifling interest for us nowadays; yet we may be sure that Cervantes's admiration was whole-hearted, and the fact that the volume passed through several editions[55] vindicates him from any suspicion of excessive partiality. It was his fine habit to praise generously. Neither his temperament nor his training was critical, and he attached even more than its due importance to the verdict of the public. He frankly rejoiced in Gálvez de Montalvo's success, and it is not unreasonable to conjecture that this success helped to hasten the appearance of the _Galatea_.

It may seem strange that Cervantes, whose transcriptions from life are eminently distinguished for truth and force, should have been induced to experiment in the province of artificial, languid pastoralism. But if, as Taine would have it, climate makes the race, the race makes the individual, and at this period the races of Western Europe had gone (so to say) pastorally mad.[56] The pastoral novel is not to our modern taste; but, as there is no more stability in literature than in politics, its day may come again.[57] In Cervantes's time there was no escaping from the prose idyll. Prodigious tales from the Indies had stimulated the popular appetite for wonders, and the demand was supplied to satiety in the later chivalresque romances. Feliciano de Silva and his fellows could think of nothing better than the systematic exaggeration of the most marvellous episodes in _Amadís de Gaula_. The adventures became more perilous, the knights more fantastically brave, the ladies (if possible) lovelier, the wizards craftier, the giants huger, the monsters more terrific, and so forth. In this vein nothing more was to be done: the formula was exhausted. The rival and more cultured school, founded by Sannazaro, endeavoured to lead men's minds from these noisy banalities to the placid contemplation of nature, or rather of idealized antiquity, by substituting for the din of arms, the stir of cities, and the furrowing of strange oceans by the prows of vulgar traders, the still, primeval

"Summers of the snakeless meadow, unlaborious earth, and oarless sea."

Unluckily no departure from Sannazaro's original pattern was thought legitimate. Sir Philip Sidney rejects every attempt at innovation with the crushing remark that "neyther Theocritus in Greek, Virgill in Latine, nor Sanazar in Italian did affect it."[58] Hence the unbroken monotony of the pastoral convention. Nothing is easier than to mock at this new Arcadia where beauteous shepherdesses vanish discreetly behind glades and brakes, where golden-mouthed shepherds exchange confidences of unrequited passion, arguing the high metaphysical doctrine of Platonic love, or chanting most melancholy madrigals at intervals which the seasoned reader can calculate to a nicety beforehand. There never was, and never could be, such an atmosphere of deliberate dilettantism in such a world as ours. Taken as a whole these late Renascence pastorals weary us, as Sidney's _Arcadia_ wearied Hazlitt, with their everlasting "alliteration, antithesis and metaphysical conceit," their "continual, uncalled-for interruptions, analysing, dissecting, disjointing, murdering everything, and reading a pragmatical, self-sufficient lecture over the dead body of nature." Briefly, while these pastoral writers of the sixteenth century persuaded themselves and their readers that they were returning to communion with hills and forests, to us it seems as though they offered little beyond unassimilated reminiscences of conventional classicism.

It would be idle to deny that the _Galatea_ has many defects of the school to which it belongs, but it must always have a singular interest as being the first serious literary experiment made by a writer of consummate genius. Cervantes had the model, the sacred model, perpetually before his eyes, and he copied it (if not with conviction) with a grim determination which speaks for itself. He, too,--the _ingenio lego_--must be interpolating his learning, and referring to Virgil, Ovid, Propertius and the rest of them, with an air of intimate familiarity. Twenty years afterwards, when he had outgrown these little affectations, and was penning the amusing passage in which he banters Lope's childish pedantry,[59] the brilliant humorist must surely have smiled as he remembered his own performances in the same kind. He does honour to the grand tradition of prolixity by putting wiredrawn conceits into the mouths of shepherds who are much more like love-sick Abelards than like Comatas or Lacon, and, when his own stock of scholastic subtleties is ended, he has no scruple in allotting to Lenio and Tirsi[60] a short summary of the arguments which had been used long before by Filone and Sofía in his favourite book, León Hebreo's _Dialoghi di Amore_.[61] Had he taken far more material than he actually took, he would have been well within his rights, according to the prevailing ideas of literary morality. Whatever illiterate admirers may say, it is certain that Cervantes followed the fashion in borrowing freely from his predecessors. No careful reader of the _Galatea_ can doubt that its author either had Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ on his table, or that he knew it almost by heart.[62] His appreciation for the _Arcadia_ was unbounded, and in the _Viaje del Parnaso_[63] the sight of Posilipo causes him to link together the names of Virgil and Sannazaro:--

Vímonos en un punto en el paraje, Do la nutriz de Eneas piadoso Hizo el forzoso y último pasaje. Vimos desde allí á poco el más famoso Monte que encierra en sí nuestro hemisfero, Más gallardo á la vista y más hermoso. Las cenizas de Títiro y Sincero Están en él, y puede ser por esto Nombrado entre los montes por primero.

In the _Galatea_, enthusiasm takes the form of conscientious imitation. It cannot be mere coincidence that Ergasto's song--_Alma beata et bella_--is echoed by Elicio as _O alma venturosa_; that such a _ritornello_ as _Ricominciate, o Muse, il vostro pianto_ reappears as _Pastores, entonad el triste canto_; that _Ponete fin, o Muse, al vostro pianto_ is rendered as _Pastores, cesad ya del triste canto_. The sixth book of the _Galatea_ is an undisguised adaptation of Sannazaro's work. In view of these resemblances, and many others indicated by Professor Scherillo,[64] the large indebtedness of Cervantes to Sannazaro cannot be denied.

Nor are León Hebreo and Sannazaro Cervantes's sole creditors. The _Canto de Calíope_, which commemorates the merits of a hundred poets and poetasters, was probably suggested by the _Canto de Turia_ in the third book of Gil Polo's _Diana enamorada_, or by the list of rhymers in Boscán's _Octava Rima_, or even by a similar catalogue interpolated in the thirty-eighth canto of Luis Zapata's unreadable epic, _Carlos famoso_.[65] It may be pleaded for Cervantes that he admired Boscán, Gil Polo, and Zapata, and that his imitation of them is natural enough. _Sea muy enhorabuena._ The same explanation cannot apply to the uncanny resemblance, which Professor Rennert[66] has pointed out, between the address to Nisida in the third book of the _Galatea_ and the letter to Cardenia in the second book of Alonso Pérez' worthless sequel to Montemôr's _Diana_. Had Cervantes remembered this small loan when writing the sixth chapter of _Don Quixote_, gratitude would probably have led him to pass a more lenient sentence on the impudent Salamancan doctor.

It was in strict accordance with the pastoral tradition that the author should introduce himself and his friends into his story. In Virgil's Fifth Eclogue, Daphnis was said to stand for Julius Cæsar, Mopsus for Æmilius Macer of Verona, Menalcas for the poet himself. Sannazaro had, it was believed, revived the fashion in Italy.[67] Ribeiro presented himself to the public as Bimnardel, Montemôr asked for sympathy under the name of Sireno, and Sir Philip Sidney masqueraded as Pyrocles. In the _Pastor de Fílida_, it is understood that Mendino is Don Enrique de Mendoza y Aragón, that Pradileo is the Conde de Prades (Luis Ramón y Folch), that Silvano is the poet Gregorio Silvestre, that Tirsi is Francisco de Figueroa (or, as some rashly say,[68] Cervantes), and that Montalvo himself appears as Siralvo. The new recruit observed the precedents and, if we are to accept the authority of Navarrete,[69] the Tirsi, Damon, Meliso, Siralvo, Lauso, Larsileo, and Artidoro of the _Galatea_ are pseudonyms for Francisco de Figueroa, Pedro Láinez, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, Luis Barahona de Soto, Alonso de Ercilla, and Andrés Rey de Artieda respectively.[70] Lastly, commentators and biographers are mostly agreed that the characters of Elicio and Galatea stand for Cervantes and for Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano[71] whom he married some ten months after the official _Aprobación_ to his novel was signed. We know on Cervantes's own statement that many of his shepherds were shepherds in appearance only,[72] and Lope de Vega confirms the tradition;[73] but we shall do well to remember that, in attempting to identify the characters of a romance with personages in real life, conjecture plays a considerable part.[74] Some of the above identifications might easily be disputed, and, at the best, we can scarcely doubt that most of the likenesses given by Cervantes in the _Galatea_ are composite portraits.

In any case, it is difficult to take a deep interest in Cervantes's seventy-one[75] shepherds and shepherdesses. Their sensibility is too exquisite for this world. Among the swains, Lisandro, Silenio, Mireno, Grisaldo, Erastro, Damon, Telesio, Lauso, and Lenio weep most copiously. Among the nymphs, Galatea, Lidia, Rosaura, Teolinda, Maurisa, Nisida and Blanca choke with tears. Teolinda, Leonarda and Rosaura swoon; Silerio, Timbrio, Darinto, Elicio and Lenio drop down in a dead faint. In mind and body these shepherds and shepherdesses are exceptionally endowed. They can remain awake for days. They can recite, without slurring a comma, a hundred or two hundred lines of a poem heard once, years ago; and the casuistry of their amorous dialectics would do credit to Sánchez or Escobar. All this is common form. A generation later, Honoré d'Urfé replied to the few who might accuse Astrée of talking above her station:--"Reponds-leur, ma Bergere, que pour peu qu'ils ayent connoissance de toy, ils sçauront que tu n'es pas, ny celles aussi qui te suiuent, de ces Bergeres necessiteuses qui pour gagner leur vie conduisent les troupeaux aux pasturages: mais que vous n'auez toutes pris cette condition que pour viure plus doucement & sans contrainte. Que si vos conceptions & vos paroles estoient veritablement telles que celles des Bergers ordinaires, ils auroient aussi peu de plaisir de vous escouter que vous auriez beaucoup de honte à les redire."[76] The plea was held to be good. The pastoral convention of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thrust out all realism as an unclean thing. The pity is that Cervantes, in his effort to conform to the rule, was compelled to stifle what was best and rarest in his genius. Yet, amid these philosophizings and artificialities, a few gleams of his peculiar, parenthetical humour flash from him unawares: as when the refined Teolinda seeks to console Lidia--_limpiándole los ojos con la manga de mi camisa_:[77] or in the description of Crisalvo's fury--_que le sacaba de juicio, aunque él tenía tan poco, que poco era menester para acabárselo_: or in Arsindo's thoughtful remark that the shepherds might possibly be missed by the flocks from which they had been absent for the last ten days. Again, there is a foreshadowing of a famous passage in _Don Quixote_ when the writer compares the shepherd's life with the courtier's. Once more, the story of Timbrio's adventures--which are anything but idyllic--is given with uncommon spirit. There are ingenuity and fancy in many of the poems, and there is interest as well as grace in the little autobiographical touches--the mention of Arnaute Mamí, the local patriotism that surges up in allusions to the river Henares on which stands the author's native town--_el gran Compluto_, as he says in his eloquent way.

Cervantes is admittedly a wonderful creator; but the pastoral of his time--a pastiche or mosaic of conventional figures--gave him no opportunity of displaying his powers as an inventor. He is also a very great prose-writer, ranging with an easy mastery from the loftiest rhetoric to the quick thrust-and-parry of humoristic colloquy. Still, as has often been remarked, his attention is apt to wander, and vigilant grammarians have detected (and chronicled) slips in his most brilliant chapters. In the matter of correctness, the _Galatea_ compares favourably with _Don Quixote_, and its style has been warmly eulogized by the majority of critics. And, on the whole, the praise is deserved. The _Galatea_ is (one fancies) the result of much deliberation--the preliminary essay of a writer no longer young indeed, but abounding in hope, in courage, and in knowledge of the best literary models which his country had produced. The First Part of _Don Quixote_ was dashed off at odds and ends of time by a man acquainted with rebuffs, poverty, disastrous failure of every kind. Purists may point to five grammatical flaws in _Don Quixote_ for one in the _Galatea_, and naturally the latter gains by this comparison. But, whatever the technical weaknesses of _Don Quixote_, that book has the supreme merit of allowing Cervantes to be himself. In the _Galatea_ he is, so far as his means allow, Virgil, Longus, Boccaccio, Petrarch, León Hebreo, Sannazaro, Montemôr--even the unhappy Pérez--every one, in fact, but himself. Hence, in the very nature of things, the smoothly filed periods of this first romance cease to be characteristic of the writer, and have even led some to charge him with being a corrupter of the language, a _culto_ before _culteranismo_ was invented.[78]

The charm of Cervantes's style, at its best, lies in its spontaneity, strength, variety, swiftness, and noble simplicity: it is the unrestrained expression of his most original and seductive personality. In the _Galatea_, on the other hand, Cervantes is too often an echo, a timid copyist, reproducing the accepted _clichés_ with an exasperating scrupulousness. Galatea is _discreta_, Silvia is _discreta_, Teolinda is _discreta_: Lisandro is _discreto_, Artidoro is _discreto_, Damon is _discreto_. The noun and its regulation epithet are never sundered from each other. And _verde_--the eternal adjective _verde_--haunts the distracted reader like an obsession: the _verdes árboles_, the _verde suelo_, the _verde yerba_, the _verde prado_, the _verde carga_, the _verde llano_, the _verde parra_, the _verde laurel_, the _verdes ramos_,--and even _verdes ojos_.[79] A hillock is _espeso_: a wood is _espeso_. One may choose between _verdadero y honesto amor_ and _perfeto y verdadero amor_. Beauty is _extremada_: grace or wit is _extremada_: a good voice is _extremada_. And _infinito_ sparkles on almost every second page. It is all, of course, extremely correct and in accord with a hundred thousand precedents. But, since the charm palls after incessant repetition, it would not be surprising if some should think that such undeviating fidelity to a model is not an unmixed good, that tame academic virtues may be bought too dear, and that a single chapter of that sadly incorrect book, _Don Quixote_, is worth a whole wilderness of impeccable pastorals.

Still we cannot feel so sure as we should wish to be that Cervantes was of this mind. He longed to be an Arcadian, though he had no true vocation for the business. And yet the sagacious criticism of Berganza in the _Coloquio de los perros_[80] shows that he saw the absurdity of shepherds and shepherdesses passing "their whole lives in singing and playing on the pipes, bagpipes, rebecks, and hautboys, and other outlandish instruments." The intelligent dog perceived that all such tales as the _Diana_ "are dreams well written to amuse the idle, and not truth at all, for, had they been so, there would have been some trace among my shepherds of that most happy life and of those pleasant meadows, spacious woods, sacred mountains, lovely gardens, clear streams and crystal fountains, and of those lovers' wooings as virtuous as they were eloquent, and of that swoon of the shepherd's in this spot, of the shepherdess's in that, of the bagpipe of one shepherd sounding here, and the flageolet of the other sounding there." Cervantes knew well enough that shepherds in real life were not called Lauso or Jacinto, but Domingo or Pablo; and that they spent most of their leisure, not in chanting elegies, but in catching fleas and mending their clogs. He tells us so. And that he realised the faults of his own performance is evident from the verdict pronounced on "the _Galatea_ of Miguel de Cervantes" by the Priest in _Don Quixote_:--"That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of indulgence that is now denied it; and in the meantime do you, Señor Gossip, keep it shut up in your own quarters."[81]

This reference, as Mr. Ormsby noted, "is Cervantes all over in its tone of playful stoicism with a certain quiet self-assertion." Cervantes had, indeed, a special tenderness for the _Galatea_ as being his eldest-born--_estas primicias de mi corto ingenio_--and this is shown by his constant desire to finish it, his persistent renewal of the promise with which the First Part closes. The history of these promises is instructive. In 1585 Cervantes[82] publicly pledged himself to bring out a continuation, if the First Part of the _Galatea_ were a success: it was to follow shortly (_con brevedad_). The work does not seem to have made a great hit; but Cervantes, the only man entitled to an opinion on this particular matter, was satisfied with its reception and, as the Priest's speech shows, in 1605 he held by his intention of publishing the promised sequel. But he dallied and tarried. _Con brevedad_ is, as posterity knows, an expression which Cervantes interprets very liberally. Twenty-eight years after the publication of the _Galatea_, he used the phrase once more in the preface to the _Novelas exemplares_: the sequel to _Don Quixote_, he promises, shall be forthcoming shortly (_con brevedad_). This announcement caught Avellaneda's eye, and drove him into a grotesque frenzy of disappointment. It seems evident that he took the words--_con brevedad_--in their literal sense, imagining that Cervantes had nearly finished the Second Part of _Don Quixote_ in 1613, and that its appearance was a question of a few months more or less. Accordingly, meanly determining to be first in the field, he hurried on with his spurious sequel, penned his abusive preface, and rushed into print. It is practically certain that this policy of sharp practice produced precisely the result which he least desired. Perhaps he hoped that Cervantes, discouraged at being thus forestalled, would abandon his own Second Part in disgust. There was never a more complete miscalculation. Stung to the quick by Avellaneda's insolence, Cervantes, in his turn, made what haste he could with the genuine continuation. Had Avellaneda but known how to wait, the chances are that Cervantes would have devoted his best energies to the composition of _Las Semanas del Jardín_ (promised in the dedication of the _Novelas exemplares_), or of _El Engaño á los ojos_ (promised in the preface to his volume of plays), or of _El famoso Bernardo_ (promised in the dedication of _Persiles y Sigismunda_). Frittering away his diminishing strength on these various works, and enlarging the design of _Don Quixote_ from time to time--perhaps introducing the Knight, the Squire, the Bachelor and the Priest as shepherds--Cervantes might only too easily have left his masterpiece unfinished, were it not for the unintentional stimulus given by Avellaneda's insults.

How far is this view of the probabilities confirmed, or refuted, by what occurred in the case of the _Galatea_? The Second Part of that novel, like the Second Part of _Don Quixote_, had been promised _con brevedad_. Ten years passed, and still the sequel to the pastoral did not appear. Ticknor[83] records the tradition that Cervantes "wrote the _Galatea_ to win the favour of his lady," Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, and cynically adds that the new Pygmalion's "success may have been the reason why he was less interested to finish it." The explanation suggested is not particularly creditable to Cervantes, nor is it credible in itself. Cervantes's intention, so often expressed, was excellent, and it is simple justice to remember that, for the best part of the dozen years which immediately followed the publication of the _Galatea_, he was earning his bread as a tax-collector or tithe-proctor. This left him little time for literature. Twenty years went by, and still the promised _Galatea_ was not issued. One can well understand it. Cervantes had been discharged from the public service: he was close on sixty and seemed to have shot his bolt: his repute and fortune were at the lowest point. His own belief in the _Galatea_ might be unbounded; but it was not very likely that he would succeed in persuading my businesslike bookseller to issue the Second Part of a pastoral novel which had (more or less) failed nearly a quarter of a century earlier. He struck out a line for himself and, in a happy hour for the world, he found a publisher for _Don Quixote_. It was the daring venture of a broken man with nothing to lose, and its immense success completely changed his position. Henceforward he was an author of established reputation, and publishers were ready enough to take his prose and pay for it. As the reference in _Don Quixote_ shows, Cervantes had never, in his most hopeless moment, given up his idea of publishing his sequel to the _Galatea_. His original promise in 1585 was explicit, if conditional: and manifestly in 1605 he held that the condition had been fulfilled. In the latter year he was much less explicit as to his intention of publishing a continuation of _Don Quixote_, and, in the concluding quotation adapted from _Orlando Furioso_, he almost invited some other writer to finish the book. Probably no contemporary reader would have been surprised if the sequel to the _Galatea_ had appeared before the sequel to _Don Quixote_.[84] Still it must be acknowledged that the instant triumph of _Don Quixote_ altered the situation radically. In these circumstances, which he could not possibly have foreseen when he vaguely suggested that another hand might write the further adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cervantes was perfectly justified in deciding to finish the later work before printing the earlier one. It would have been the most natural thing in the world for an ordinary man to make the most of his popularity and to bring out both sequels in rapid succession. But Cervantes was not an ordinary man, and few points in his history are more inexplicable than the fact that, after the amazing success of _Don Quixote_, he published practically nothing for the next eight years.

At last in 1613, the _Novelas exemplares_ were issued. The author was silent as to the continuation of the _Galatea_, but he promised that the Second Part of _Don Quixote_ should be forthcoming--_con brevedad_. We know what followed. The _Viaje del Parnaso_ was published in the winter of 1614; and, though it contains a short Letter Dedicatory and Preface,[85] which might easily have been made the vehicle of a public announcement in Cervantes's customary manner, there is no allusion to the new _Don Quixote_ or to the new _Galatea_. Next year, however, in the dedication[86] of his _Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos_, Cervantes informed the Conde de Lemos,--with whom the book was a special favourite[87]--that he was pushing on with the _Galatea_. He makes the same statement in the Prologue to the Second Part of _Don Quixote_,[88] and the assurance is repeated by him on his deathbed in the noble Letter Prefatory to _Persiles y Sigismunda_.[89] This latter is a solemn occasion, and Cervantes writes in a tone of impressive gravity which indicates that he weighed the full meaning of what he knew would be his last message. _Ayer me dieron la Extremaunción, y hoy escribo esta: el tiempo es breve, las ansias crecen, las esperanzas menguan._ And, in the Prologue, written somewhat earlier, the old man eloquent bids this merry life farewell, declares that his quips and jests are over, and appoints a final rendezvous with his comrades in the next world. At this supreme moment his indomitable spirit returns to his first love, and once more he promises--for the fifth time--the continuation of the _Galatea_.

In view of the dying man's words it is exceptionally difficult to believe that not a line of this sequel was actually written. It is equally difficult to believe that, if the _Galatea_ existed in a fragmentary state, the widow, the daughter, the son-in-law, the patron, the publisher, the personal friends, the countless admirers of the most illustrious and most popular novelist in all the Spains, should have failed to print it. We cannot even venture to guess what the facts of the case really were. From Cervantes's repeated declarations it would seem probable that he left a considerable amount of literary manuscript almost ready for the Licenser. With the exception of _Persiles y Sigismunda_, every shred of every work that he mentions as being in preparation has vanished. It would be strange if this befell an author of secondary rank: it is incomprehensible when we consider Cervantes's unique position, recognized in and out of Spain. All we know is this: that, on Cervantes's lips, _con brevedad_ might mean--in fact, did mean--more than thirty years, and that the sequel to the _Galatea_, though promised on five separate occasions, never appeared. Providence would seem to have decreed against the completion of many Spanish pastorals. Montemôr's _Diana_, the sequels to it by Pérez and Gil Polo, all remained unfinished: the _Galatea_ is unfinished, too. It is possible, but unlikely, that the world has been defrauded of a masterpiece. Yet, unsuited as was the pastoral _genre_ to the exercise of Cervantes's individual genius, we should eagerly desire to study his treatment of the old theme in the maturity of his genius and with the consciousness that his splendid reputation was at stake. He might perhaps have given us an anticipation in prose of Lope de Vega's play, _La Arcadia_,[90] a brilliant, poetic parody after Cervantes's own heart. Fate has ruled against us, and

The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain.[91]

The pastorals lived on for many years in Spain[92] and out of it; but _Don Quixote_, the _Novelas exemplares_, _Guzmán de Alfarache_, and the growing crowd of picaresque realistic tales had so completely supplanted them in popular favour that Cervantes himself could scarcely have worked the miracle of restoring their former vogue among his countrymen.

Sr. D. Ramón León Máinez,[93] whose honourable enthusiasm for all that relates to Cervantes forbids his admitting that there are spots on his sun, considers the _Galatea_ to be the best of pastorals, and other whole-hearted admirers (such as August and Friedrich von Schlegel)[94] have said as much. This, however, is not the general verdict of those who have read the _Galatea_ from beginning to end, and really such readers are not many. Prescott[95] cautiously observes that it is "a beautiful specimen of an insipid class." Hazlitt, who may be taken as the honest representative of a numerous constituency, confesses that he does not know the book, and offers an ingenious apology for his remissness. Cervantes, he declares, claims the highest honour which can belong to any author--"that of being the inventor of a new style of writing." But, after this ingratiating prelude, he continues:--"I have never read his _Galatea_, nor his _Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda_, though I have often meant to do it, and I hope to do so yet. Perhaps there is a reason lurking at the bottom of this dilatoriness. I am quite sure that the reading of these works could not make me think higher of the author of _Don Quixote_, and it might, for a moment or two, make me think less." And no doubt it might: just as the reading of _Hours of Idleness_, of _Zastrozzi_, and of _Clotilde de Lusignan ou le beau Juif_ might, for a moment or two, make us think less of the authors of _Don Juan_, of _Epipsychidion_, and of _Eugénie Grandet_.

The _Galatea_ survives as the first timorous experiment of a daring genius. It had no great vogue in Spain, and it is a mistake to say that "seven editions were called for in the author's lifetime."[96] At least, bibliographers know that, if they were called for, they certainly did not appear. As a matter of fact the book was only twice reprinted while Cervantes was alive, and, as neither of these editions was published in Spain, it is possible that he was unaware of their existence. In 1590 the _Galatea_ was reproduced at Lisbon, expurgated of all heathenish allusions by Frey Bertholameu Ferreyra, acting for the Portuguese Inquisition; and this incomplete Portuguese reprint helped to make the pastoral known outside the Peninsula. It so happened that César Oudin, a teacher of Spanish at Paris--where he had already (1608) reprinted the _Curioso impertinente_,[97]--travelled through Spain and Portugal during 1610, and in the course of his journey he unsuccessfully endeavoured to obtain a copy of the Alcalá _Galatea_. He had to be content with a copy of the mutilated Lisbon edition, and this he reprinted in 1611 at Paris,[98] probably with an eye to using it as a text-book for his French pupils who were passing through an acute crisis of the pastoral fever. M. Jourdain had not yet put his embarrassing question to his music and dancing masters:--"Pourquoi toujours des bergers?" At all events, there is some evidence to prove that the _Galatea_ was popular in fashionable Parisian circles while Cervantes still lived. In his _Aprobación_ to the Second Part of _Don Quixote_, the Licenciado Francisco Márquez Torres records that when, on February 25, 1615, he visited the French embassy, he was beset by members of the Envoy's suite[99] who, taking fire at the mention of Cervantes's name, belauded the First Part of _Don Quixote_, the _Novelas exemplares_, and the _Galatea_--which one of them knew almost by heart.[100] It is unlikely that the author himself knew much of the _Galatea_ by heart; but at about this period Honoré d'Urfé[101] had restored the vogue of pastoralism in France, and Márquez Torres's ecstatic Frenchman (if he really existed) only shewed the tendency to exaggeration characteristic of recent converts. He was, very possibly, among the last of the elect in Madrid. One edition--some say two editions--of the _Galatea_ appeared posthumously in 1617: two more editions (provincial, like their immediate predecessor or predecessors) were issued in 1618. Then the dust of a hundred years settled down on all copies of the forgotten book. Three reprints during the eighteenth century, ten reprints during the nineteenth century, satisfied the public demand.[102]

The sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries did not produce a single translation of the _Galatea_.[103] But in 1783 appeared a French adaptation of this pastoral by the once famous Chevalier Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian,[104] who compressed the six books of the original into three, added a fourth book of his own in which he married Elicio to Galatea, and so contrived a happy ending. "Il _florianise_ tant soit peu toutes choses," says Sainte-Beuve[105] drily. In this delicate, perfumed, powder-and-patch arrangement by the idyllic woman-beater[106] and Captain of Dragoons, Cervantes's novel became astonishingly popular. Edition after edition was struck off from the French presses, and the work was read all over Europe in translations: three in German, two in Italian, three in English, two in Portuguese, one in Greek. Odder still, in this form, the book made its way home again and, just as certain Spaniards who had forgotten Guillén de Castro enjoyed Juan Bautista Diamante's translation (1658) of Corneille's _Cid_, so three editions go to prove that, a century and a half later, certain other Spaniards who had forgotten Cervantes enjoyed Casiano Pellicer's translation (1797) of Florian's _Galatée_.[107] And there was more to follow next year. Cándido María Trigueros[108] showed himself worthy of his Christian name by bettering Florian's example: he laid violent hands on Cervantes, suppressed here, amplified there, purged the book of its verses, and supplied a still happier ending--on a monumental scale--by incontinently marrying ten lucky shepherds to ten lovely shepherdesses. One cannot help wondering what Cervantes would have thought of this astounding performance. It was too much for the Spanish public, and Trigueros turned to do better work in adapting old plays to the modern stage. The taste for Arcadianism died away at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Artificial pastorals have, indeed, not yet recovered from a polite but deadly note published in the preface to _Obermann_: "Le genre pastoral, le genre descriptif out beaucoup d'expressions rebattues, dont les moins tolérables, à mon avis, sont les figures employées quelques millions de fois et qui, dès la première, affaiblissent l'objet qu'elles prétendaient agrandir." Such expressions, continues the writer, are _l'émail des prés_, _l'azur des cieux_, _le cristal des eaux_, _les lis et les roses de son teint_, _les gages de son amour_, _l'innocence du hameau_, _des_ _torrens s'échapperènt de ses yeux_--"et tant d'autres que je ne veux pas condamner exclusivement, mais que j'aime mieux ne pas rencontrer." Sénancour was perhaps thinking more particularly of Florian at the moment, but his criticism applies also to Cervantes's first book.

It was not till 1830 that the first genuine translation of the _Galatea_ appeared, and this German version was followed by two others in the same language. These stood alone till 1867[109] when it occurred to a droll, strange man named Gordon Willoughby James Gyll (or James Willoughby Gordon Gill),[110] to publish an English rendering of Cervantes's pastoral in which, as he thought, "the rural characters are nicely defined; modesty and grace with simplicity prevailing." Gyll, who wrongly imagined that he was the first to translate the _Galatea_, seems to have been specially attracted by Cervantes's verses,--a compliment which the author would have enjoyed all the more on learning from his admirer that these "compositions are cast in lyrics and iambics, without being quite of a dithyrambic character, furnishing relief to the prose, and evincing the skill and tendency of the bard in all effusions relative to love, the master-passion of our existence, without which all would be arid and disappointing to the eagle spirit of the child of song." After this opening you know what to expect. And you get it--three hundred and forty-nine pages of it! Gyll never writes of parts, but of "portions"; rather than leave a place, he will "evacuate" it; nothing will induce him to return if he can "revert"; he prefers "scintillations" to gleams, "perturbators" to disturbers, "cogitation" to thought, and "exculpations" to excuses. Gyll's English, as may be judged from the specimens just quoted, is almost as eccentric as the English of Mohindronauth Mookerjee in his _Memoir of the late Honourable Justice Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee_, and it is much less amusing. His effrontery is beyond description. He knew nothing of Cervantes whom he actually believed to be a contemporary of Floridablanca in the eighteenth century.[111] He almost implies that he has read Cervantes's lost _Filena_, though he admits that it "is now rarely found." His ignorance of Spanish is illimitable. How he can have presumed to translate from it passes all understanding. He misinterprets the easiest phrases, and he follows the simple plan of translating each word by the first rough equivalent that he finds given in some poor dictionary. It would be waste of time to criticize the inflated prose and detestable verse which combine to make Gyll's rendering the worst in the world. Two specimens will suffice to show what Gyll can do when he gives his mind to it. At the very opening of the First Book, he reveals his powers:--"But the perspicacity of Galatea detected in the motions of his countenance what Elicio contained in his soul, and she evinced such condescension that the words of the enamoured shepherd congealed in his mouth, though it appeared to him that he had done an injury to her, even to treat of what might not have the semblance of rectitude." This is Gyll as a master of prose. Gyll, the lyric poet, is even richer in artistic surprises. Take, for instance, the closing stanzas of Lauso's song at the beginning of the Fifth Book:--

In this extraordinary agony, The feelings entertained go but for dumb Seeing that love defies, And I am cast in the midst of the fierce fire. Cold water I abhor Were it not for my eyes, Which fire augments and spoils In this amorous forge. I wish not or seek water, Or from annoyance supplicate relief.

Begin would all my good, My ills would finish all, If fate should so ordain, That my sincere trust in life, Silenca[112] would assure, Sighs assure it. My eyes do thoroughly me inform Me weeping in this truth. Pen, tongue, will In this inflexible reason me confirm.

These examples speak for themselves.[113] Cervantes was not indeed a very great poet; but his verses are often graceful and melodious, and it would have afflicted him sorely to see his lines travestied in this miserable fashion. It is inexplicable that such absolute nonsense should be published. But it is a singular testimony to the public interest in all concerning Cervantes that, in default of anything better, this discreditable version should have been read, and even reprinted.

For the present edition a new translation has been prepared. It proceeds on the one sound principle of translating from the original as faithfully as possible, without either omission or addition. The task of rendering the _Galatea_ into English is less trying, and therefore less tempting, than the task of rendering _Don Quixote_ or the _Novelas exemplares_; but the _Galatea_ offers numerous difficulties, and it will be found that these have been very satisfactorily overcome by Dr. Oelsner and Mr. A. Baker Welford. They have the distinction of producing the first really adequate translation of the _Galatea_ in any language.

JAS. FITZMAURICE-KELLY.

February, 1903.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The article on Cervantes in Nicolás Antonio's _Bibliotheca Hispana_ (Roma, 1672), vol. ii., p. 105, is bibliographical rather than biographical. In Antonio's time practically nothing was known concerning the details of Cervantes's life. It is curious that the first writer to attempt a biography of Cervantes was a foreigner--possibly Peter Motteux, whose English translation dates from 1700: a biographical sketch, entitled _An Account of the Author_, was included in the third volume (London, 1703). The following sentences, which I quote from the first volume of the third edition (London, 1712), are not without interest:--

"For the other Passages of his Life, we are only given to understand that he was for some time Secretary to the Duke of Alva" (p. ii). "Some are of the Opinion, that upon our Author's being neglectfully treated by the Duke of Lerma, first Minister to K. Philip the Third, a strange imperious, haughty Man, and one who had no Value for Men of Learning; he in Revenge, made this Satyr which, as they pretend, is chiefly aim'd at that Minister" (pp. iii.-iv.). The biographer then refers to Avellaneda's spurious sequel, and continues:--"Our Author was extremely concern'd at this Proceeding, and the more too, because this Writer was not content to invade his Design, and rob him, as 'tis said, of some of his Copy, but miserably abuses poor Cervantes in his Preface" (p. iv.).

These idle rumours as to Cervantes's relations with Lerma are taken from René Rapin's _Réflexions sur la poétique d'Aristote, et sur les ouvrages des Poetes anciens & modernes_ (Paris, 1674, p. 229) and from Louis Moréri's _Grand Dictionaire historique ou le mélange curieux de l'histoire sacrée et profane_ (Paris, 1687, third edition, vol. i., p. 795); but it is odd to find them reaching England before they reached Spain. Mayáns and Pedro Murillo Velarde do not reproduce them till 1737 and 1752 respectively: the first in his _Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (Briga-Real), and the second in his _Geographica historica_ (Madrid), vol x., lib. x., p. 28.

[2] See the _Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ in Tonson's reprint of _Don Quixote_ (Londres, 1738), vol. i., p. 6. This edition is generally described as Lord Carteret's edition; but, though Carteret certainly commissioned Mayáns to write the biography of Cervantes, and though he may have patronized Tonson's venture, it does not seem so sure that he paid for printing the text (which, as regards the First Part, is merely a mechanical reproduction of the 1607 Brussels edition). The usual version of the story is that Carteret, on looking over the library of Queen Caroline, wife of George II., missed _Don Quixote_ from the shelves, and ordered the sumptuous Tonson edition with a view to making the Queen a present of the most delightful book in the world. It may be so. Carteret appears to have been interested in Spanish literature, and we know that Harry Bridges's translation (Bristol, 1728) of some of the _Novelas exemplares_ was brought out "under the Protection of His Excellency." But, with regard to Carteret's defraying the entire cost of Tonson's reprint of _Don Quixote_, there are some circumstances which cause one to hesitate before accepting the report as true. So far as can be gathered, the first mention of Carteret in this connexion is found in Juan Antonio Mayáns's preface to the sixth edition (Valencia, 1792) of Luis Gálvez de Montalvo's _Pastor de Fílida_:--

"Carolina, Reina de Inglaterra, muger de Jorge segundo, avia juntado, para su entretenimiento, una coleccion de libros de Inventiva, i la llamava _La Bibliotheca del sabio Merlin_, i aviendosela enseñado a Juan Baron Carteret, le dijo este sabio apreciador de los Escritores Españoles, que faltava en ella la Ficcion más agradable, que se avia escrito en el Mundo, que era la Vida de D. Quijote de la Mancha, i que él queria tener el mérito de colocarla" (p. xxv.).

This statement, it will be seen, was made more than fifty years after the event to which it refers. Nevertheless it may be true. Juan Antonio Mayáns may have had the story from Gregorio Mayáns. He was most unlikely to invent it, and the fact that he gives 1737 as the date of Gregorio's biography inclines one to believe in his general accuracy: all other writers give 1738 as the date, but it has recently been found that a _tirage à part_ was struck off at Briga-Real (i.e. Madrid) a year before the _Vida_ was printed in London. It must, however, be remembered that Gregorio Mayáns never met Carteret, and was never in England. Knowing that Carteret paid him for his share in the work, he might easily have imagined that Carteret also paid Tonson, and may have been understood to state this inference as a positive fact. In any case, the memory of an elderly man is not always trustworthy in such matters as these. Moreover, as Gregorio Mayáns died in 1781, we must allow for the possibility of error on the part of Juan Antonio, when repeating a tale that he had heard at least eleven years before.

Some external evidence, such as it is, tells against the common belief, Leopoldo Rius in his _Bibliografía crítica de las obras de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (Madrid, 1895-1899) notes (vol. ii. p. 300) a German work entitled _Angenehmes Passetems_ (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1734): in the preface to this publication it is stated as a piece of news that the Spanish Ambassador in London, the Conde de Montijo, has ordered a copy of _Don Quixote_ to be handsomely bound for Queen Caroline. We do not know if Montijo gave her the book, but it seems certain that _Don Quixote_ was in her library. A copy of the Antwerp edition of 1719, bearing her name and the royal crown, passed into the possession of my friend, the late Mr. Henry Spencer Ashbee: see his pamphlet, _Some Books about Cervantes_ (London, 1900), pp. 29-30. Possibly the interview with Carteret took place before 1734, or before Queen Caroline possessed the Antwerp edition. But it is worth noting that the Queen died on November 20, 1737, and that Tonson's edition appeared next spring. If Carteret were so deeply engaged in the undertaking as we are assured, and if his chief motive were (as reported) to pay a courtly compliment to Queen Caroline, it is strange that he should not have caused the edition to be dedicated to the Queen's memory, and it is still stranger that the preliminaries should not contain the least allusion to her. As it happens, the Dedication, dated March 26, 1738, is addressed to the Condesa de Montijo, wife of the ex-Ambassador above-named. It would be a small but useful service if one of Cervantes's many English admirers should establish what share Carteret actually had in an enterprise for which, hitherto, he has received the whole credit.

[3] See _El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha...._ Nueva edición corregida por la Real Academia Española (Madrid, 1780), vol. i., p. xii.

[4] See Juan Antonio Pellicer's edition of _Don Quixote_ (Madrid, 1797-1798), vol. i. pp. lxxv.-lxxvi.: "Restituido pues Cervantes á España en la primavera del año de 1581 fixó su residencia en Madrid.... Hizo también lugar para escribir y publicar el año de 1584 _La Galatea_."

It appears that all the assertions here made by Pellicer are mistaken. (1) Cervantes did not return to Spain in the spring of 1581, but late in 1580; (2) he did not reside permanently in Madrid during 1581, for we find him at Tomar on May 21 of that year; (3) if we are to understand that the _Galatea_ was composed in 1684, this is disproved by the fact that the manuscript was passed by the censor on February 1, 1584, and must naturally have been in his possession for some time previously; (4) it will be shewn that the _Galatea_ was not published in 1584, but in 1585. Pellicer is not to be blamed for not knowing the real facts. The pity is that he should give his guesses as though they were certainties. Yet, in a sense, events have justified his boldness; for no man's guesses have been more widely accepted.

[5] See Martín Fernández de Navarrete's _Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (Madrid, 1819), pp. 65-68. Navarrete, however, points out that the _Galatea_ cannot have appeared early in 1584, as his predecessors had alleged: "No se publicó hasta los últimos meses de aquel año." I do not understand him to say that the book was published at Madrid.

[6] See George Ticknor's _History of Spanish Literature_ (Sixth American Edition, Boston, 1888), vol. ii., p. 117.

[7] Amongst others, John Gibson Lockhart in his _Introduction_ to a reprint of Peter Motteux's version of _Don Quixote_ (Edinburgh, 1822), vol. i., p. 25; Thomas Roscoe, _The Life and Writings of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (London, 1839), p. 38; Mrs. Oliphant in her _Cervantes_ (Edinburgh and London, 1880), p. 76; and Alexander James Duffield in his _Don Quixote: his critics and commentators_ (London, 1881), p. 79. In his _Later Renaissance_ (London, 1898), p. 149, Mr. David Hannay gives the date as 1580. On the other hand, John Ormsby stated the facts with his habitual accuracy in the Introduction to the first edition of his translation of _Don Quixote_ (London, 1885), vol. i., p. 29.

[8] See C.-B. Dumaine's _Essai sur la vie et les œuvres de Cervantes d'après un travail inédit de D. Luis Carreras_ (Paris, 1897), p. 47: "Les vers de la Galatée remontent au temps de son séjour en Italie. Ces poésies étaient addressées à une dame, à laquelle il témoignait de tendres sentiments."

[9] See Sr. D. José María Asensio y Toledo's _Nuevos documentos para ilustrar la vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, con algunas observaciones y articulos sobre la vida y obras del mismo autor y las pruebas de la autenticidad de su verdadero retrato_ (Seville, 1864), pp. 51-52. Sr. Asensio y Toledo, who repeats his view as to the date of composition in his _Cervantes y sus obras_ (Barcelona, 1901), p. 195, relies mainly on an expression in the preface: "Huyendo destos dos inconvenientes no he publicado antes de ahora este libro." Taken by itself, this phrase certainly implies that the book had been completed some time before; but the passage is too rhetorically, and too vaguely, worded to admit of safe deductions being drawn from it. The idea that the _Galatea_ was written in Portugal was thrown out long ago by Eustaquio Fernández de Navarrete: see his _Bosquejo histórico sobre la novela española_ in Manuel Rivadeneyra, _Biblioteca de autores españoles_, (Madrid, 1854), vol. xxxiii., p. xxiv.

[10] Lucas Gracián Dantisco wrote an imitation of Della Casa's book under the title of _Galateo español_ (Barcelona, 1594). His brother, Tomás, is mentioned by Cervantes in the _Canto de Calíope_.

[11] The earliest known edition of the _Celestina_ is believed to be represented by an unique copy which was once in Heber's collection. The colophon of this volume is dated Burgos 1499; but there is some doubt concerning the date inasmuch as the last page has been recently inserted and may not be a faithful reproduction of the original printer's mark. It is, however, tolerably certain that this edition came from the press of Fadrique de Basilea (Friedrich Biel): for whom, see Conrad Haebler's _Typographie Ibérique du quinzième siècle_ (La Haye and Leipzig, 1901), pp. 30-32. It is also fairly certain that this Heber copy, whatever its exact date may be, is earlier than the Seville edition of 1501, reprinted (1900) by M. Raymond Foulché-Delbosc in his _Bibliotheca Hispanica_. Finally, the probability is that the edition which survives in the Heber volume was preceded by another edition of which no trace remains: see M. Foulché-Delbosc's remarkable _Observations sur la Célestine_ in the _Revue hispanique_ (Paris, 1900), vol. vii., pp. 28-80.

[12] The earliest known edition of _Amadís de Gaula_ (Zaragoza, 1508) is believed to exist in an unique copy in the British Museum, press-marked as C. 57. g. 6. But there is reason to think that there was a previous edition which has disappeared.

[13] There are three distinct editions of _Lazarillo de Tormes_ all dated 1554. They were published respectively at Alcalá de Henares, Burgos, and Antwerp, and--so M. Foulché-Delbosc inclines to believe--in the order here given: see his _Remarques sur Lazarille de Tormes_ in the _Revue hispanique_ (Paris, 1900). vol. vii., pp. 81-97. M. Foulché-Delbosc argues with great ingenuity that these three editions of 1554 derive from another edition (printed before February 26, 1554) of which no copy has as yet been found.

[14] Sr. D. Francisco Rodríguez Marín mentions that a copy of the _princeps_ of the _Primera Parte de Guzmán de Alfarache_ (Madrid, 1599) existed in the library of the Marqués de Jerez de Caballeros, recently acquired by Mr. Archer M. Huntington: see Rodríguez Marín's _El Loaysa de "El Celoso Extremeño"_ (Sevilla, 1901), p. 283, _n._ 102. Another copy of this rare edition is in the British Museum Library.

[15] Rius (_op. cit._, vol. i., p. 4) mentions eight copies of the _princeps_ of _Don Quixote_ (Madrid, 1605), and it is certain that there are other copies in existence.

[16] In _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works_ (London, 1895), p. 267, Mr. Henry Edward Watts, says of the Alcalá _Galatea_ (1585) that "only one copy is known--in the possession of the Marqués de Salamanca." This is a mistake. Rius, who does not refer to the volume alleged to be in the Marqués de Salamanca's possession, specifies (_op. cit._, vol. i., pp. 100-101) five other copies. He could not be expected to know that there was yet another copy in England. English students of Cervantes were, however, aware of the fact fifteen years before the publication of Mr. Watts's work: see _A Catalogue of the printed books, manuscripts, autograph letters, and engravings, collected by Henry Huth. With collations and bibliographical descriptions_ (London, 1880), vol. i., p. 282.

[17] See the Introduction to vol. vii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1902), p. viii.

[18] It may be interesting to note the exact dates attached to the official instruments in Haedo's book. The _Licencia_ of the General of the Benedictines was signed by his deputy, Fray Gregorio de Lazcano, at Valladolid on October 6, 1604; the _Aprobación_ was signed by Antonio de Herrera at Madrid on October 18, 1608; the _Privilegio_ was signed by Jorge de Tovar at Madrid on February 18, 1610; the _Fe de erratas_ was signed by Dr. Agustín de Vergara at Valladolid on June 3, 1612; the _Tasa_ was signed by Miguel Ondarza Zabala at Madrid on October 19, 1612. As we have already seen, the last-named signed the _Tasa_ of the _Galatea_ some twenty-six years previously.

[19] See Fernández de Navarrete, _op. cit._, pp. 392-393: "Petri ad vincula 1º día de agosto de 1584 murió el Ilmo. Sr. Marco Antonio Colona, virey de Sicilia, en casa del Ilmo. Sr. duque de Medinaceli, que fué miércoles en la noche, á las once horas de la noche: rescibió todos los sacramentos: no hizo testamento: enterróse en depósito, que se hizo ante Hernando de Durango, secretario del consejo del Ilmo. Sr. duque, en la capilla mayor de esta colegial á la parte del evangelio, debajo de la reja de las reliquias; hiciéronse tres oficios con el cabildo de esta colegial, y en todos tres oficios celebraron por el ánima de S. E. todos los prebendados, y seis días consecutivos, que fué cada prebendado nueve misas: no se hizo otra cosa,--El canónigo Guzmán."

[20] See the _Catálogo de la biblioteca de Salvá_, escrito por D. Pedro Salvá y Mallen, y enriquecido con la descripcion de otras muchas obras, de sus ediciones, etc. (Valencia, 1872), vol. ii., p. 124, no. 1740.

[21] See the _Obras de Don Juan Donoso Cortés_, ordenadas y precedidas de una noticia biográfica por Don Gavino Tejado (Madrid, 1854), vol. iv., pp. 59-60: "Entre la verdad y la razón humana, después de la prevaricación del hombre, ha puesto Dios una repugnancia inmortal y una repulsión invencible ... entre la razón humana y lo absurdo hay una afinidad secreta, un parentesco estrechísimo."

[22] Of these perplexing statements it will suffice to note a few which occur in _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works by Henry Edward Watts_ (London, 1895):

(_a_) "A new epoch in the life of Cervantes opens in 1584. In that year he printed his first book...." (p. 76).

(_b_) "A few days before the publication of _Galatea_, Cervantes was married at Esquivias.... The 12th of December, 1584, was the date of the ceremony." (p. 90).

(_c_) "Cervantes married his wife in December, 1584, and for reasons which will be manifest to those who have read the story of his life I think we may presume that his first book was printed before that date." (p. 257).

(_d_) "The _Galatea_, Cervantes' first book ... was approved for publication on the 1st of February, 1584, but, for some reason not explained, it was not published till the beginning of the year following." (p. 87).

(_e_) "Salvá maintains it (_i.e._ the Alcalá edition of 1585) to be the _editio princeps_, but I agree with Asensio and the older critics in believing that there must have been an edition of 1584." (p. 257).

(_f_) "Navarrete and Ticknor, following all the older authorities, make the place of publication Madrid and the date 1584. But Salvá has proved in his Bibliography that the _Galatea_ was first published at Alcalá, the author's birthplace, at the beginning of 1585." (p. 87 _n._ 3).

These sentences do not appear to convey a strictly consistent view: (_b_) contradicts (_c_), (_c_) contradicts (_d_), (_d_) contradicts (_e_), and (_e_) contradicts (_f_).

As to (_b_) and (_d_), the expressions "a few days" and "the beginning of the new year" should evidently be interpreted in a non-natural sense. The _Tasa_, as we have seen, was not signed at Madrid till March 13, 1585; the next step was to return the printed sheets to the publisher at Alcalá de Henares; the publisher had then to forward the _Tasa_ to the printer, and finally the whole edition had to be bound. In these circumstances, the date of publication cannot easily be placed earlier than April, 1585. Accordingly, the expression (_b_)--"a few days"--must be taken to mean about ninety or a hundred days: and "the beginning of the year," mentioned under (_d_), must be advanced from January to April.

Concerning (_e_), it is true that Sr. Asensio y Toledo was at one time inclined to believe in the existence of a 1584 edition of the _Galatea_: see Salvá, _op. cit._, vol ii, p. 124. But Sr. Asensio y Toledo admitted that Salvá's argument had shaken him: "sus observaciones de V. me han hecho parar un poco." This was over thirty years ago. Meanwhile, Sr. Asensio y Toledo has revised his opinion, as may be seen in his latest publication, _Cervantes y sus obras_ (Barcelona. 1902). "En el año 1585 salió á luz _La Galatea_" (p. 268).... "El libro se imprimió en Alcalá, por Juan Gracián, y es de la más extremada rareza" (pp. 382-383). He now accepts Salvá's view without reserve.

As to (_f_), I have searched Navarrete's five hundred and eighty pages and Ticknor's one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven pages, but have been unable to find that either of them gives Madrid as the place of publication. An exact reference to authorities is always advisable.

[23] See the _Life of Miguel de Cervantes by Henry Edward Watts_ (London, 1891), p. 117.

[24] See _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works by Henry Edward Watts_ (London, 1895), p. 257.

[25] See _Documentos Cervantinos hasta ahora inéditos recogidos y anotados por el Presbítero D. Cristóbal Pérez Pastor Doctor en Ciencias_. Publicados á expensas del Excmo. Señor D. Manuel Pérez de Guzmán y Boza, Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros (Madrid, 1902), vol. ii., pp. 87-89: "Madrid, 14 Junio 1584. En la villa de Madrid a catorce días del mes de Junio de mil e quinientos e ochenta e quatro años por ante mi el escribano público e testigos deyuso escriptos, paresció presente Miguel de Çerbantes, residente en esta corte, e otorgó que zede, vende, renuncia e traspassa en Blas de Robles, mercader de libros, residente en esta corte, un libro de prosa y verso en que se contienen los seis libros de Galatea, que él ha compuesto en nuestra lengua castellana, y le entrega el previllegio original que de Su Magestad tiene firmado de su real mano y refrendado de Antonio de Heraso, su secretario, fecho en esta villa en veinte e dos días del mes de Hebrero deste presente año de ochenta e quatro para que en virtud de él el dicho Blas de Robles, por el tiempo en él contenido, haga imprimir e vender e venda el dicho libro y hacer sobre ello lo (_sic_) y lo a ello anejo, dezesorio y dependiente, todo lo que el dicho Miguel de Çerbantes haria a hazer podria siendo presente, y para que cumplidos los dichos dies años del dicho previllegio pueda pedir e pida una o más prorrogaciones y usar y use de ellas y del privillegio que de nuevo se le concediere, esto por prescio de mill e trescientos e treynta e seys reales que por ello le da e paga de contado de que se dió y otorgó por bien contento y entregado a toda su voluntad, y en razón de la paga y entrega dellos, que de presente no paresce, renunció la excepcion de la _non numerata pecunia_ y las dos leyes y excepcion del derecho que hablan e son en razón de la prueba del entregamiento como en ellas y en cada una de ellas se contiene, que no le valan, e se obligó que le será cierto e sano el dicho previllegio e las demas prorrogaciones que se le dieren e concedieren en virtud de él e de este poder e cesion e no le será pedido ni alegado engaño, aunque sea enormísimo, en más o en menos de la mitad del justo precio, porque desde agora, caso que pudiera haber el dicho engaño, que no le hay, se lo suelta, remite y perdona, y si alguna cosa intentare a pedir no sea oido en juicio ni fuera de él, y se obligó que el dicho previllegio será cierto e sano e seguro y no se le porná en ello agora ni en tiempo alguno por ninguna manera pleito ni litigio alguno, e si le fuere puesto incoará por ello causa y la seguirá, fenescerá y acabará a su propia costa o mision e cumplimiento de su interese, por manera que pacificamente el dicho Blas de Robles quede con el dicho previllegio e prorrogaciones libremente so pena de le pagar todas las costas e daños que sobre ello se le recrescieren, e para el cumplimiento de ello obligó su persona e bienes, habidos e por haber, e dió poder cumplido a todas e qualesquier justicias e juezes de Su Magestad Real de qualesquier partes que sean al fuero e jurisdicion de las quales y de cada una de ellas se sometió, e renunció su propio fuero, jurisdicion e domicilio y la ley _Si convenerit de jurisdictione omnium judicum_ para que por todo rigor de derecho e via executiva le compelan e apremien a lo ansi cumplir e pagar con costas como si sentencia definitiva fuese dada contra él e por él consentida e pasada en cosa juzgada, e renunció las leyes de su favor e la ley e derecho en que dice que general renunciacion fecha de leyes non vala, e ansi lo otorgó e firmó de su nombre siendo testigos Francisco Martínez e Juan Aguado e Andrea de Obregón, vecinos de le dicha villa, al qual dicho otorgante doy fee conozco.--Miguel de Cerbantes.--Pasó ante mi Francisco Martínez, escribano.--Derechos xxxiiij^o."

[26] Sr. Asensio y Toledo (_op. cit._, p. 194) inclines to think that Cervantes, when engaged on the first rough draft of his novel, intended to call it _Silena_.

[27] _Documentos_, vol. ii., pp. 90-92. "Madrid, 14 Junio 1584. Sepan quantos esta carta de obligacion vieren como yo Blas de Robles, mercader de libros, vecino de esta villa de Madrid, digo: que por quanto hoy día de la fecha de esta carta y por ante el escribano yuso escripto, Miguel de Çervantes, residente en esta corte de Su Magestad, me ha vendido un libro intitulado los seys libros de Galatea, que el dicho Çervantes ha compuesto en nuestra lengua castellana, por prescio de mill e trescientos e treynta e seys reales y en la escriptura que de ello me otorgó se dió por contento y pagado de todos los dichos maravedís e confesó haberlos rescebido de mi realmente y con efecto, y porque en realidad de verdad, no obstante lo contenido en la dicha escriptura, yo le resto debiendo ducientos e cinquenta reales y por la dicha razón me obligo de se los dar e pagar a él o a quien su poder hubiere para en fin del mes de Setiembre primero que verná deste presente año de ochenta e quatro, llanamente en reales de contado, sin pleito ni litigio alguno, so pena del doblo e costas, para lo qual obligo mi persona e bienes habidos e por haber e por esta carta doy poder cumplido a todas e qualesquier justicias e juezes de Su Magestad real de qualesquier partes que sean, al fuero e jurisdicion de las quales e de cada una de ellas me someto, e renuncio mi propio fuero, jurisdicion e domicilio y la ley _Si convenerit de jurisdictione omnium judicum_ para que por todo rigor de derecho e via executiva me compelan e apremien a lo ansi cumplir e pagar con costas como si sentencia difinitiva fuese dada contra mi e por mi consentida e pasada en cosa juzgada, e renuncio todas e qualesquier leyes que en mi favor sean y la ley e derecho en que dice que general renunciacion fecha de leyes non vala, en firmeza de lo qual otorgué esta carta de obligacion en la manera que dicha es ante el presente escribano e testigos deyuso escriptos. Que fué fecha e otorgada en la villa de Madrid a catorze días del mes de Junio de mill e quinientos e ochenta e quatro años, siendo testigos Andrés de Obregón e Juan Aguado e Baltasar Pérez, vecinos de esta villa, y el otorgante, que doy fee conozco, lo firmó de su nombre en el registro.--Blas de Robles.--Pasó ante mi Francisco Martínez, escribano.--Sin derechos."

[28] It may be as well to say that my conjecture (p. xiii) was made, and that the draft of this Introduction was written, before the publication of Dr. Pérez Pastor's second volume.

[29] See Navarrete, _op. cit._, pp. 312-313: "Señor.--Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra dice, que ha servido á V. M. muchos años en las jornadas de mar y tierra que se han ofrecido de veinte y dos años á esta parte, particularmente en la batalla naval, donde le dieron muchas heridas, de las cuales perdió una mano de un arcabuzazo, y el año siguiente fué á Navarino, y después á la de Túnez y á la Goleta, y viniendo á esta corte con cartas del Sr. D. Joan y del duque de Sesa para que V. M. le hiciese merced, fué captivo en la galera del Sol, él y un hermano suyo, que también ha servido á V. M. en las mismas jornadas, y fueron llevados á Argel, donde gastaron el patrimonio que tenian en rescatarse, y toda la hacienda de sus padres y los dotes de dos hermanas doncellas que tenía, las cuales quedaron pobres por rescatar á sus hermanos, y después de libertados fueron á servir á V. M. en el reino de Portugal y á las Terceras con el marques de Santa Cruz, y agora al presente están sirviendo y sirven á V. M., el uno dellos en Flandes de alferez, y el Miguel de Cervantes fué el que trajo las cartas y avisos del alcaide de Mostagan, y fué á Oran por orden de V. M., y después ha asistido sirviendo en Sevilla en negocios de la armada por orden de Antonio de Guevara, como consta por las informaciones que tiene, y en todo este tiempo no se le ha hecho merced ninguna."

[30] See Cristóbal Mosquera de Figueroa's _Comentario en breve compendio de disciplina militar, en que se escriue la jornada de las islas de los Açores_ (Madrid, 1596), f. 58.

Dr. Pérez Pastor sums up the case concisely in the _Prólogo_ to his _Documentos Cervantinos_ (Madrid, 1897), vol. i., pp. xi.-xii.; "Casi todos los biógrafos de Cervantes han sostenido que éste asistió á la jornada de la Tercera, fundándose en que así lo indica en el pedimento de la Información del año 1590; pero si tenemos en cuenta que en dicho documento van englobados los servicios de Miguel y Rodrigo de Cervantes, y por ende que es fácil atribuir al uno los hechos del otro hermano, que Miguel estaba en Tomar por Mayo de 1581, en Cartagena á fines de Junio de este año, ocupado en cosas del servicio de S. M., y en Madrid por el otoño de 1583, que el Marqués de Santa Cruz, después de haber reducido la Tercera y otras islas, entró en Cádiz el 15 de Septiembre del dicho año, se hace casi imposible que Miguel de Cervantes pudiera asistir á dicha jornada."

[31] _Ibid._, p. 89. "Madrid, 10 Septiembre, 1585. En la villa de Madrid, a diez días del mes de septiembre de mill y quinientos y ochenta y cinco años, en presencia de mi el presente y testigos de yuso escriptos parescieron presentes Rodrigo de Zervantes y doña Magdalena de Zervantes, hermanos, residentes en esta corte, e dixeron que por quanto habrá dos años, poco más o menos tiempo, Miguel de Zerbantes, su hermano, por orden de la dicha doña Magdalena empeñó al señor Napoleon Lomelin cinco paños de tafetan amarillos y colorados para aderezo de una sala, que tienen setenta y quatro varas y tres quartas, por treinta ducados, y que hasta agora han estado en el empeño, y la dicha doña Magdalena hizo pedimento ante el señor alcalde Pedro Bravo de Sotomayor en que pidió se le entregasen pagado el dicho empeño, y después de haber puesto y fecho el dicho pedimento se han concordado en esta manera.... Testigos que fueron presentes a lo que dicho es, Juan Vázquez del Pulgar y Juste de Oliva, sastre, los quales juraron a Dios en forma debida de derecho conocer a los dichos otorgantes y que se llaman e nombran como de suso dize sin cautela, y Marcos Diaz del Valle, estantes en Madrid, y los dichos otorgantes lo firmaron de sus nombres.--Rodrigo de Cerbantes.--Doña Magdalena de Cerbantes--Pasó ante mi Baltasar de Ugena. Derechos real e medio."

[32] Curiously enough, there is some dispute as to whether Cervantes's great rival, Lope de Vega, did or did not take part in an expedition to the Azores. Lope's assertion in his _Epístola_ to Luis de Haro is explicit enough. If any doubt on the subject has arisen, this is mainly due to Lope's vanity in under-stating his age.

[33] See the _Letter Dedicatory_ in Gálvez de Montalvo's _Pastor de Fílida_ addressed to Don Enrique de Mendoza y Aragón. Gálvez de Montalvo rejoices in his good fortune without any false shame: "Entre los venturosos, que a U. S. conocen, i tratan, he sido yo uno, i estimo que de los más, porque deseando servir a U. S. se cumplio mi deseo, i assi degè mi casa, i otras mui señaladas, dò fué rogado que viviesse, i vine a èsta, donde holgaré de morir, i donde mi mayor trabajo es estar ocioso, contento, i honrado como criado de U. S."

[34] See the suggestive observations of that admirable scholar, Madame Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in Gustav Gröber's _Grundriss der romanischen Philologie_ (Strassburg, 1897), II Band, 2 Abteilung, p. 216, _n._ 2. "Schon an den Namen _Amadís_ knupft sich so manche Frage. Ist er eine willkurliche, auf der Halbinsel entstandene Abänderung aus dem frz. _Amadas_ (engl. _Amadace_) latinisirt zu _Amadasius_? d. h. eine wohlklingendere Analogiebildung zu dem portug. Namen _Dinís_? also _Amad-ysius_? Man vergleiche einerseits: _Belis Fiis Leonis Luis Belianis Belleris; Assiz Aviz; Moniz Maris_ etc., und andererseits das alte Adj. _amadioso_, heute _(a)mavioso_. Oder gab es eine frz. Form in _-is_, wie die bereits 1292 vorkommende ital. (_Amadigi_) wahrscheinlich machen würde, falls sie erwiesen echt wäre (s. _Rom._ xvii., 185)?..."

[35] See a very interesting note in _Il Cortegiano del Conte Baldesar Castiglione annotato e illustrato da Vittorio Cian_ (Firenze, 1894), p. 327. Commenting on Castiglione's allusion to _Amadís_--"pero bisogneria mandargli all'Isola Ferma" (lib. iii., cap. liv.)--Professor Cian notes the rapid diffusion of _Amadís de Gaula_ in Italy: "Ma i' _Amadís_ era conosciuto assai prima frai noi, ed è notevole a questo proposito una lettera scritta in Roma da P. Bembo, il 4 febbraio 1512, al Ramusio, nella quale parlando del Valerio (Valier), loro amico, e amico del nostro C. e dell' Ariosto e dei Gonzaga di Mantova, il poeta veneziano ci porge questa notizia: 'Ben si pare che il Valerio sia sepolto in quel suo Amadagi....' (pubbl. da me nel cit. _Decennio delta vita del Bembo_, p. 206)."

[36] See vol. xl. of Manuel Rivadeneyra _Biblioteca de autores españoles_ entitled _Libros de caballerías con un discurso preliminar y un catalógo razonado por Don Pascual de Gayangos_ (Madrid, 1857), pp. xxxi. et seqq.

[37] The Portuguese case is well stated by Theophilo Braga in his _Historia das novelas portuguezas de cavalleria_ (Porto, 1873), in his _Questões de litteratura e arte portugueza_ (Lisboa, 1881), and in his _Curso de historia de litteratura portugueza_ (Lisboa, 1885). It is most forcibly summarized by Madame Michaëlis de Vasconcellos (_op. cit._, pp. 216-226) who cites, as partisans of the Portuguese claim, Warton, Bouterwek, Southey, Sismondi, Clemencín, Ticknor, Wolf, Lemcke, and Puymaigre. To these names might be added those of the two eminent masters, M. Gaston Paris and Sr. D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo.

[38] See _La Littérature française au moyen âge XI^e-XIV^e siècle par Gaston Paris, Membre de l'Institut_. Deuxième édition revue, corrigée, augmentée et accompagnée d'un tableau chronologique. (Paris, 1890). Referring to the _romans bretons_, M. Gaston Paris writes (p. 104): "Le Perceforest français au XIV^e siècle, _l'Amadís_ portugais puis espagnol aux XV^e et XVI^e siècles sont des imitations de ces grands romans en prose."

[39] Chiefly by Gayangos in the _Discurso preliminar_ to Rivadeneyra, vol. xl.; by José Amador de los Ríos in his _Historia crítica de la literatura española_ (1861-65), vol. v., pp. 78-97; by Eugène Baret in _De l'Amadis de Gaule_ (second edition, Paris, 1871); by Ludwig Braunfels in his _Kritischer Versuch über den Roman Amadis von Gallien_ (Leipzig, 1876); and by Professor Gottfried Baist in the above-mentioned section of the _Grundriss der romanischen Philologie_, pp. 440-442.

[40] See the _Arcadia di Jacobo Sannazaro secondo i manoscritti e le prime stampe con note ed introduzione di Michele Scherillo_ (Torino, 1888).

[41] _Ibid._, pp. cclxi.-cccxliv.

[42] Compare, for example, Garcilaso's lines:--

Tengo vna parte aqui de tus cabellos, Elissa, embueltos en vn blanco paño; Que nunca de mi seno se me apartan. Descojolos, y de vn dolor tamaño Enternecer me siento, que sobre 'llos Nunca mis ojos de llorar se hartan, Sin que de allí se partan: Con sospiros calientes, Mas que la llama ardientes: Los enxugo del llanto, y de consuno Casi los passo y cuento vno a vno, Iuntandolos con vn cordon los ato, Tras esto el importuno Dolor, me dexa descansar vn rato.

with the lines sung by Meliseo at the end of Sannazaro's twelfth _egloga_:--

I tuoi capelli, o Phylli, in una cistula Serbati tegno, et spesso, quand' io volgoli, Il cor mi passa una pungente aristula. Spesso gli lego et spesso oimè disciolgoli, Et lascio sopra lor quest' occhi piovere; Poi con sospir gli asciugo e inseme accolgoli. Basse son queste rime, exili et povere; Ma se'l pianger in Cielo ha qualche merito, Dovrebbe tanta fe' Morte commovere. Io piango, o Phylli, il tuo spietato interito, E'l mondo del mio mal tutto rinverdesi. Deh pensa, prego, al bel viver preterito, Se nel passar di Lethe amor non perdesi.

An exhaustive study on Garcilaso's debts to Italy is given by Professor Francesco Flamini--_Imitazioni italiane in Garcilaso de la Vega_--in _La Biblioteca delle scuole italiane_ (Milano, June 1899).

[43] See George Ticknor's _History of Spanish Literature_ (Sixth edition, Boston, 1888), vol. iii., p. 94. Ticknor, however, failed to notice that the date in his copy was a forgery: see Mr. J. L. Whitney's _Catalogue_ (Boston, 1879), p. 234, and compare Salvá y Mallen, _op. cit._, vol. ii., p. 168.

[44] Scherillo, _op. cit._, p. ccxlvii.

[45] The proof of this has been supplied independently by the late John Ormsby (see vol. iii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901), p. 51, _n._ i.); by Professor Hugo Albert Rennert (see _The Spanish Pastoral Romances_ (Baltimore, 1892), p. 9); and by myself (see the _Revue hispanique_ (Paris, 1895), vol. ii., pp. 304-311). All three appear to have been anticipated in the excellent monograph entitled _Jorge de Montemayor, sein Leben und sein Schäferroman die_ "_Siete Libros de la Diana_" _nebst einer Übersicht der Ausgaben dieser Dichtung und bibliographischen Anmerkungen herausgegeben von Georg Schönherr_ (Halle, 1886), p. 83.

The decisive point is that Ticknor's copy, the oldest known edition, must be at least as late as 1554, for Montemôr here refers to the Infanta Juana as a widow: see (lib. iv.) the fifth stanza of the _Canto de Orfeo_. Her husband, Dom João, died on January 2, 1554. A duplicate of the Ticknor volume is in the British Museum library.

[46] See the preface to Fray Bartholomé Ponce's _Primera Parte de la Clara Diana á lo divino, repartida en siete libros_ (Zaragoza, 1582): "El año mil quinientos cincuenta y nueue, estando yo en la corte del Rey don Philipe segundo deste nombre ... vi y ley la Diana de Jorge de Mõtemayor, la qual era tan accepta quanto yo jamas otro libro en Romance aya visto: entonces tuue entrañable desseo de conocer a su autor, lo qual se me cumplio tan a mi gusto, que dentro de diez días se offrecio tener nos combidados a los dos, vn canallero muy Illustre, aficionado en todo estremo al verso y poesia."

[47] For Ribeiro, see Madame Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, _op. cit._, pp. 291-295. Ribeiro's work seems to have been printed posthumously, the earliest known edition being issued at Ferrara in 1554. But, as Madame Michaëlis de Vasconcellos observes (p. 295, _n._ 8): "Dass lange vor dem ital. Drucke Ribeiro's wie Falcao's Werke grossen Ruf hatten, steht ausser Zweifel. Sie müssen in Handschriften oder Flugblättern unter den Lesenden Kurs gehabt haben." It is, perhaps, not superfluous to mention that Ribeiro's _Menina e moça_, like Virgil's _Formosum Corydon ardebat Alexim_, takes its title from the opening words.

[48] See Schönherr, _op. cit._, p. 26. "Was das genauere Datum des Todes Montemayor's betrifft, so wird hierfür im Vorwort der _Diana_ ed. 1622 der 26. Februar des Jahres 1561 angegeben, und zwar war es des Dichters Freund Alonso Pérez, der es der Nachwelt überlieferte, wiewohl es sich in dessen erster, 1564 erschienener Ausgabe der _Segunda Parte de la Diana_ noch nicht findet. Die Richtigkeit seiner Angabe lässt sich einigermassen prufen, nicht mit Hülfe der Elegie des Dorantes, die Salvá's Vermutung (No. 1909) entgegen der Ausgabe vom Jahre 1561 noch nicht angehängt ist, wol aber in Hinblick auf des oben stehende Sonett Pagan's, welches bereits in dessen 1562 erschienener _Floresta de varia poesía_ enthalten ist, so dass man hiernach keine Ursache hat, der Datierung des Pérez zu misstrauen."

The sonnet mentioned by Schönherr, and reprinted by Salvá y Mallen, occurs on _f_ of Diego Ramírez Pagán's _Floresta de varia poesía_ (1562):

Nuestro Monte mayor, do fué nascido? En la ciudad del hijo de Laerte. Y que parte en la humana instable suerte? Cortesano, discreto, y entendido. Su trato como fué, y de que ha biuido? Siruiendo, y no acerto, ni ay quien acierte. Quien tan presto le dió tan cruda muerte? Imbidia, y Marte, y Venus lo ha mouido. Sus huessos donde están? En Piamonte. Porque? Por no los dar a patria ingrata. Que le deue su patria? Inmortal nombre. De que? Larga vena, dulce, y grata. Y en pago que le dan? Talar el monte. Y haura quien le cultiue? No ay tal hõbre.

The British Museum Library contains a copy of Ramírez Pagán's _Floresta_: a book esteemed by Gallardo, Gayangos, and Salvá (_op. cit._, vol. i., p. 153, no. 339) as "uno de los más raros que existen en la literatura poética española."

[49] See the prologue to Pérez' continuation (A 5 of the Antwerp edition, 1580) " ... casi en toda esta obra no ay narracion, ni platica, no solo en verso, más aun en prosa, que à pedaços de la flor de Latinos y Italianos hurtado, y imitado no sea; y no pienso por ello ser digno de reprehension, pues lo mesmo de los Griegos hizieron."

[50] The whole history, bibliographical and literary, of the pastoral movement in Spain may be studied in the searching and learned monograph of Professor Hugo Albert Rennert, _The Spanish Pastoral Romances_ (Baltimore, 1892). A minute examination of Texeda's plagiary, which escaped detection by Ticknor, will be found on pp. 39-42 of Professor Rennert's work.

[51] The reference is, no doubt, to the passage in the fifth book of Montemôr's _Diana_: "Y tomando el vaso que tenía en la mano izquierda le puso en la suya á Sireno, y mando que lo bebiese, y Sireno lo hizo luego; y Selvagia y Silvano bebieron ambos el otro, y en este punto cayeron todos tres en el suelo adormidos, de que no poco se espantó Felismena y la hermosa Belisa que allí estaba...." Cp. Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ (_Prosa nona_, Scherillo's edition, p. 171): "Al quale subgiunse una lodula, dicendo, in una terra di Grecia (dela quale yo ora non so il nome) essere il fonte di Cupidine, del quale chiunche beve, depone subitamente ognie suo amore."

The expedient of the magic water, to which Cervantes refers once more in the _Coloquio de los Perros_ (see vol. viii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1902), p. 163), seems to be as old as most things in literature. Scherillo, in his valuable commentary to the _Arcadia_ cites a parallel from Pliny, _Naturalis Historia_, lib. xxxi., cap. 16: "Cyzici fons Cupidinis vocatur, ex quo potantes amorem deponere Mucianus credit."

[52] It is just possible, however, that Cervantes may have omitted the _Habidas_ deliberately; for though Ticknor (_op. cit._, vol. iii., p. 99, _n._ 18), on the authority of Gayangos, quotes the book as "among the earliest imitations of the Diana," so excellent a scholar as Professor Rennert (_op. cit._, p. 111) inclines to think "that it is rather a 'Novela Caballeresca.'"

[53] This seems to follow from the references in the _Viaje del Parnaso_:

El fiero general de la atrevida Gente, que trae un cuervo en su estandarte, Es ARBOLANCHES, muso por la vida (cap. vii., ter. 81).

And

En esto, del tamaño de un breviario Volando un libro por el aire vino. De prosa y verso que arrojó el contrario. De verso y prosa el puro desatino Nos dió á entender que de ARBOLANCHES eran _Las Avidas_ pesadas de contino (cap. vii., ter. 60-61).

These sallies have brought down on Cervantes the displeasure of implacable bibliographers. Salvá y Mallen (_op. cit._, vol. ii., pp. 19-20, no. 1518) drily observes that, as the book is almost wholly in verse, it does not at all correspond to Cervantes's description of it, and he gives us to understand (what most readers have realised for themselves) that, in criticism of his contemporaries, Cervantes--like the rest of the world--is prone to err.

See also _Cervantes vascófilo ó sea Cervantes vindicado de su supuesto antivizcainismo por Julián Apráiz y Sáenz del Burgo, Natural de Vitoria y vizcaino, alavés y guipuzcoano por todos sus abolengos_. Nueva edición considerablemente aumentada (Vitoria, 1895), pp. 270-274. In a note (p. 274) to his letter addressed (April 23, 1884), to Sr. D. José Colá y Goiti, Dr. Apráiz--who courageously sets himself to prove that Cervantes, so far from disliking the Basques as has been generally supposed, had in fact the highest opinion of them--points out that _Los nueve libros de las Habidas_ take no more space than a 16mo. volume. "Y una vez leída la obra del poeta navarro insisto, tanto en que no hay más prosa que brevísimos renglones del argumento de la obra, como acerca del mérito que le reconocen Rosell, Gayangos y Vedia, y Gallardo, mucho más habida cuenta de la temprana edad de 20 años que tenía el poeta al escribir su poema, según el mismo dice al dirigirse á la señora (_i.e._ Doña Adriana de Egues y de Biamonte), á quien lo dedica. Parece que había muerto 3 años antes de la publicación de su poema."

If Arbolanche (or Arbolanches) really died in 1563, it is almost impossible that Cervantes can have had--as has been insinuated--any personal grudge against him. Perhaps he had read the _Habidas_ when he was a lad, was bored, and in his old age exaggerated his impression, without remembering very clearly the contents of the book. Or, it may be, as Dr. Apráiz suggests (_op. cit._, pp. 273-274), that Cervantes mistook Arbolanche (or Arbolanches) for the author of some dull pastoral whose name escaped him. If this be so, it is exceedingly regrettable that he should twice have made the same blunder: for the consequence has been that the name of Arbolanche (or Arbolanches), a poet of distinct merit, has become--among those who have not read him and who follow Cervantes blindly--a synonym for a ridiculous prose writer. Cp. the lines in the celebrated _Sátira contra los malos escritores de su tiempo_ by Jorge Pitillas (_i.e._ José Gerardo de Hervás y Cobo de la Torre):--

De Arbolanches descubre el genio tonto, Nombra á Pedrosa novelero infando Y en criticar á entrambos está pronto.

[54] See cap. iii., ter. 81-89.

Miren si puede en la galera hallarse Algún poeta desdichado acaso, Que á las fieras gargantas puede darse.-- Buscáronle, y hallaron á LOFRASO, Poeta militar, sardo, que estaba Desmayado á un rincón marchito y laso: Que á sus _diez libros de Fortuna_ andaba Añadiendo otros diez, y el tiempo escoge, Que más desocupado se mostraba. Gritó la chusma toda: Al mar se arroje, Vaya LOFRASO al mar sin resistencia. --Por Dios, dijo Mercurio, que me enoje. ¿Cómo? ¿y no será cargo de conciencia, Y grande, echar al mar tanta poesía, Puesto que aquí nos hunda su inclemencia? Viva _Lofraso_, en tanto que dé al día Apolo luz, y en tanto que los hombres Tengan discreta alegre fantasía. Tocante á tí, o _Lofraso_, los renombres, Y epítetos de agudo y de sincero, Y gusto que mi cómitre te nombres.-- Esto dijo Mercurio al caballero, El cual en la crujía en pie se puso Con un rebenque despiadado y fiero. Creo que de sus versos le compuso, Y no sé cómo fué, que en un momento Ó ya el cielo, ó _Lofraso_ lo dispuso, Salimos del estrecho á salvamento, Sin arrojar al mar poeta alguno: Tanto del sardo fué el merecimiento.

[55] Salvá y Mallen (_op. cit._, vol. ii., p. 143, no. 1817) states that the _Pastor de Fílida_ was reprinted at Lisbon in 1589. at Madrid in 1590, at Barcelona in 1613, and at Valencia in 1792: and there may be other editions.

[56] Sannazaro's _Arcadia_ was translated into French by Jean Martin in 1644; see Heinrich Koerting, _Geschichte des französischen Romans im XVII Jahrhundert_ (Oppeln und Leipzig, 1891), vol. i., p. 64. Montemôr's _Diana_ was translated into French by N. Colin in 1579. Nicolas de Montreux, who used the anagram of Olenix du Mont-Sacré, published the first volume of _Les Bergeries de Juliette_ in the same year as the _Galatea_ (1585).

[57] Cp. an interesting passage in the _Avant-propos_ to George Sand's _François le Champi_ (Paris, 1868), pp. 15-16:

--"Oui, oui, le monde naïf! dit-il, le monde inconnu, fermé à notre art moderne, et que nulle étude ne te fera exprimer à toi-même, paysan de nature, si tu veux l'introduire dans le domaine de l'art civilisé, dans le commerce intellectuel de la vie factice.

--Hélas! répondis-je, je me suis beaucoup préoccupé de cela. J'ai vu et j'ai senti par moi-même, avec tous les êtres civilisés, que la vie primitive était le rêve, l'idéal de tous les hommes et de tous les temps. Depuis les bergers de Longus jusqu'à ceux de Trianon, la vie pastorale est un Éden parfumé où les âmes tourmentées et lassées du tumulte du monde ont essayé de se réfugier. L'art, ce grand flatteur, ce chercheur complaisant de consolations pour les gens trop heureux, a traversé une suite ininterrompue de _bergeries_. Et sous ce titre: _Histoire des bergeries_, j'ai souvent désiré de faire un livre d'érudition et de critique où j'aurais passé en revue tous ces différents rêves champêtres dont les hautes classes se sont nourries avec passion.

J'aurais suivi dans leurs modifications toujours en rapport inverse de la dépravation des mœurs, et se faisant pures et sentimentales d'autant plus que la société était corrompue et impudente. Ce serait un traité d'art complet, car la musique, la peinture, l'architecture, la littérature dans toutes ses formes: théâtre, poëme, roman, églogue, chanson; les modes, les jardins, les costumes même, tout a subi l'engouement du rêve pastoral. Tous ces types de l'âge d'or, ces bergères qui sont des nymphes et puis des marquises, ces bergères de l'_Astrée_ qui passent par le Lignon de Florian, qui portent de poudre et du satin sous Louis XV., et auxquels Sedaine commence, à la fin de la monarchie, à donner des sabots, sont tous plus ou moins faux, et aujourd'hui ils nous paraissent niais et ridicules. Nous en avons fini avec eux, nous n'en voyons plus guère que sous forme de fantômes à l'opéra, et pourtant ils ont régné sur les cours et ont fait les délices des rois qui leur empruntaient la houlette et la panetière."

[58] See his _Apologie for Poetrie_ (Arber's reprint, London, 1869), p. 63.

[59] See vol. iii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901), p. 8.

[60] See the discussion in book iv. of the _Galatea_.

[61] These borrowings have been pointed out by Sr. D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo in his _Historia de las ideas estéticas en España_ (Madrid, 1883-1891), tom. ii., vol i., p. 108-109: " ... el sentido de esta controversia es enteramente platónico, y derivado de León Hebreo, hasta en las palabras, de tal suerte, que podríamos suprimirlas, á no ser por la reverencia debida á todas las que salieron de la pluma de Cervantes, puesto que nada original se descubre en ellas, y aun la forma no es por cierto tan opulenta y pródiga de luz, como la de _El Cortesano_."

Sr. D. Adolfo y San Martín, in his Castilian translation of my _History of Spanish Literature_ (Madrid, 1901) which he has enriched with many valuable notes, observes (p. 325) that Cervantes, when writing the preface to the First Part of _Don Quixote_ in 1604, evidently did not know there were in existence at least three Spanish renderings of the _Dialoghi_--one of them, published at Madrid in 1590, being by the famous Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega.

For León Hebreo (or Judas Abarbanel) see Solomon Munk, _Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe_ (Paris, 1857), pp. 522-528 and Dr. B. Zimmels, _Leo Hebraeus, ein jüdischer Philosoph der Renaissance; sein Leben, seine Werke und seine Lehren_ (Breslau, 1886).

[62] Yet the obvious resemblances between the _Arcadia_ and the _Galatea_ have been unaccountably overlooked by Francesco Torraca in a monograph entitled _Gl'imitatori stranieri di Jacopo Sannazaro_ (Seconda edizione accresciuta, Roma, 1882). "Non mi sembra, però, che la _Galatea_ e l' _Arcadia_ di Lope contengano imitazioni dello scrittore napoletano." (p. 23).

[63] See cap. iii., ter. 49-51.

[64] See Scherillo, _op. cit._, pp. ccliii.-cclx. for an interesting and striking enumeration (which might, as the commentator says, be extended) of Cervantes's debts to Sannazaro. It is quaint and significant to find that while Sannazaro in his _Prosa duodecima_ alludes apologetically, but with excellent reason, to _il mio picciolo Sebetho_, Cervantes in his sixth book, with no reason of any sort, introduces _las frescuras del apacible Sebeto_.

[65] Cervantes, as appears from a somewhat confused allusion early in the seventh chapter of the First Book of _Don Quixote_, seems to have been one of the few (besides the author) who enjoyed _Carlos famoso_. Zapata himself complained with a comic ruefulness that his forty thousand lines were not widely appreciated, and that he was out of pocket in consequence: "Yo pensé también que en haber hecho la historia del Emperador Carlos V., nuestro señor, en verso, y dirigídola á su pio y poderosísimo hijo, con tantas y tan verdaderas loas de ellos y nuestros españoles, que había hecho algo. Costóme cuatrocientos mil maravedís la ímpresión, y de ella no saqué sino saña y alongamiento de mi voluntad." Zapata, however, consoles himself with thinking that he is in good company and closes with a pious, confident moral: "De Homero se dice que en su vida no se hizo de él caso, _et sua riderunt tempora Meonidem_. Del autor del famoso libro poético de Amadís no se sabe haste hoy el nombre, honra de la nacion y lengua española, que en ninguna lengua hay tal poesía ni tan loable.... De manera que podemos decir todos el _sic vos non vobis_ de Virgilio, por lo cual todos de paso y como accesorio deben no poner su felicidad acá, donde no hay ninguna, sino atender á aquello que Dios les ha prometido; que si plantaren la viña de las buenas obras, gozarán perpétuamente del fruto de ella y otro no se la vendimiará." See Zapata's _Miscelánea_ in the _Memorial histórico español_ (Madrid, 1859), vol. xi., pp. 304-305. It is interesting to note that Zapata hazards no guess as to the authorship of _Amadís de Gaula_.

[66] _Op. cit._, pp. 60-61, _n._ 76.

[67] Sannazaro's latest and best editor, Signor Scherillo, is properly sceptical (_op. cit._, pp. clxxvi.-ccviii.) as to many current identifications of the personages in the _Arcadia_. It seems certain that Barcinio is Chariteo of Barcelona, and that Summontio is Pietro Summonto, the Neapolitan publisher of the book. It is probable that Meliseo is Giovanni Pontani, and that Massilia is the author's mother. It is possible that Sincero is Sannazaro. But, as Signor Scherillo drily observes, it is not easy to follow those who think that Sannazaro was Ergasto, Elpino, Clonico, Ophelia, and Eugenio--not "three gentlemen at once," but five. Other writers hold that Ophelia is Chariteo; that Pontano is Ergasto, Opico and Montano; that Eleuco is the Great Captain; and that Arcadia stands for France. These and similar absurdities are treated as they deserve in Signor Scherillo's masterly introduction.

[68] The supposition that Tirsi, in the _Pastor de Fílida_, was intended to represent Cervantes is noted by Navarrete (_op. cit._, p. 278), and on the authority of that biographer has been frequently repeated. It is right to say that Navarrete simply mentions the identification in passing, and that he is careful to throw all responsibility for it on Juan Antonio Mayáns who was the first to suggest the idea in the introduction to his reprint of the _Pastor de Fílida_ (Valencia, 1792), pp. xxxvii, lxxvii, and lxxx. The theory has been disproved by Juan Antonio Pellicer (_op. cit._, p. cxxxiii.)

There can be no reasonable doubt that the Tirsi of the _Pastor de Fílida_ is Francisco de Figueroa. It is absolutely certain that the Tirsi of the _Galatea_ is Figueroa: for, in the Second Book, Cervantes places it beyond question by ascribing to Tirsi two sonnets and a _canción_ by Figueroa. Cp. _Poesías de Francisco de Figueroa, llamado el Divino_ (Madrid, 1804).

(_a_) ¡Ay de quan ricas esperanzas vengo Al deseo más pobre y encogido, Que jamas encerró pecho herido De llaga tan mortal, como yo tengo! Ya de mi fe, ya de mi amor tan luengo, Que Fili sabe bien quan firme ha sido, Ya del fiero dolor con que he vivido, Y en quien la vida á mi pesar sostengo; Otro más dulce galardon no quiero, Sino que Fili un poco alce los ojos A ver lo que mi rostro le figura: Que si le mira, y su color primero No muda, y aun quizá moja sus ojos, Bien serán más que piedra helada y dura. (p. 17)

(_b_) La amarillez y la flaqueza mia, El comer poco y el dormir perdido, La falta quasi entera del sentido El débil paso, y la voz ronca y fría; La vista incierta, y el más largo día En suspiros y quejas repartido, Alguno pensará que haya nacido De la pasada trabajosa vía: Y sabe bien amor, que otro tormento Me tiene tal; y otra razón más grave Mi antigua gloria en tal dolor convierte: Amor solo lo sabe, y yo lo siento: Si Fili lo supiese: ¡o mi suave Tormento, o dolor dulce, o dulce muerte! (p. 15)

(_c_) Sale la aurora de su fértil manto Rosas suaves esparciendo y flores, Pintando el cielo va de mil colores, Y la tierra otro tanto, Quando la dulce pastorcilla mía, Lumbre y gloria del día, No sin astucia y arte, De su dichoso albergue alegre parte. (pp. 45-46).

[69] _Op. cit._, p. 66.

[70] Juan Antonio Mayáns declares (_op. cit._, p. xxxvii) that Damon is Figueroa; but, as previously stated (p. xxxi, _n._ 2), his mistake is shown by Pellicer.

[71] This is not, however, the opinion of Eustaquio Fernández de Navarrete (_op. cit._, p. xxxii): "Puede sospecharse que la primer heroína de su novela no fué doña Catalina Palacios de Salazar, con quien Cervantes casó á poco tiempo de publicar su libro, sino que lo escribió en Portugal durante sus amores con una dama de aquel país, á quien debió grandes obligaciones; y que después cuando volvió a España, al trabar relaciones con doña Catalina, retocó la obra y la acomodó al nuevo sugeto." This story of Cervantes's relations with an anonymous Portuguese lady, supposed to be the mother of his illegitimate daughter, was generally accepted till 1895. It was never anything more than a wild guess and, thanks to Dr. Pérez Pastor, we now know that there is no truth in it.

On the other hand Sr. D. Ramón León Máinez, in his _Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (Cádiz, 1876), pronounces very emphatically in favour of the current identifications as regards the hero and the heroine: "En Elicio se ve con mucha perfección la imagen de Cervantes. Galanteador, tímido, discreto, delicado, sentidisimo, su amor es tan casto como los pensamientos de su alma. Adora más que ama; venera más que pretende" (p. 69). "Ningún otro personaje puede encubrir á Elicio sino Cervantes: ninguna otra señora puede velarse bajo la figura de Galatea sino Doña Catalina de Palacios. Son los retratos al natural de dos seres privilegiados, de dos personas ilustres, de dos amantes que más ó menos encubiertamente se tributaban el homenaje de su adoracion." (p. 71.)

It will be observed that Sr. D. Ramón León Máinez takes things very seriously.

[72] See p. 6 of the present volume.

[73] See the _Dorotea_, Act 2, sc. 2: "¿Qué mayor riqueza para una mujer que verse eternizada? Porque la hermosura se acaba, y nadie que la mire sin ella cree que la tuvo; y los versos de la alabanza son eternos testigos que viven en su nombre. La Diana de Montemayor fué una dama de Valencia de Don Juan, junto á León, y Ezla, su rio, y ella serán eternos por su pluma. Así la Fílida de Montalvo, y la Galatea de Cervantes, la Camila de Garcilaso, la Violante de Camoes, la Silvia de Bernaldez, la Filis de Figueroa, la Leonor de Corte-Real no eran damas imaginarias."

[74] It is conjectured, for instance, that Lenio was intended for Pedro Liñán de Riaza, and that Daranio was meant for Diego Durán. These are simple guesses.

[75] I do not profess to have counted the number, which I give on the authority of Carlos Barroso: see his letter to Sr. Ramón León Máinez, entitled _Mais noticias Cervanticas_, in the _Crónica de los Cervantistas_ (Cádiz, 1872), vol. i., pp. 166 et seqq.

[76] See _L'Avthevr a la Bergere Astrée_ at the beginning of the First Part of _Astrée_, I quote from vol. i. of the Paris edition of 1647.

[77] This, however, may be an unintentional slip into realism. But it has all the effect of humour, and may fairly be bracketed with a passage from the fourth book of Sidney's _Arcadia_, quoted by Professor Rennert (_op. cit._, p. 11, _n._ 29): "O my dun-cow, I did think some evil was towards me ever since the last day thou didst run away from me, and held up thy tail so pitifully."

[78] See Francisco Martínez Marina's _Ensayo histórico-crítico sobre el origen y progresos de las lenguas: señaladamente del romance castellano_ in the _Memorias de la Real Academia de la Historia_ (Madrid, 1805), vol. iv., pp. 61-62: "Los primeros que se señalaron, á mi parecer, en esos vicios, que es en preferir su gusto é ingenio á las reglas del arte antigua, y en consultar más con su imaginación que con los modelos del excelente lenguaje, y en pretender hacerse únicos y singulares en su clase por la novedad de sus plumas, fueron, según yo pienso, y permítaseme decir lo que ninguno ha dicho tan claramente hasta ahora, los insignes Mariana y Cervantes.

¡Qué nuevo y extraño es el modo de hablar del primero. ¿En qué se parece al de nuestros mejores escritores castellanos? ¡Quán afectado su estilo! ¡artificiosas las arengas! ¡estudiados los períodos y aun las palabras, y hasta la colocacion de ellas!... Pues ¡y Cervantes quanto ha latinizado! Véase la Galatea"....

[79] In the Second Book of the _Galatea_, Silveria is said to have green eyes, Attentive readers will remember that Loaysa has green eyes in _El Celoso extremeño_: see vol. viii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1902), p. 24. Green would seem to have been a favourite colour with Cervantes: see a paper entitled _Lo Verde_, published by a writer who uses the pseudonym of Doctor Thebussem, in _La España moderna_ (Madrid, March, 1894), vol. lxiii., pp. 43-60.

[80] See vol. viii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1902), pp. 163-164.

[81] See vol. iii. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1902), pp. 52-53.

[82] See the last paragraph of the _Galatea_: "El fin deste amoroso cuento y historia, con los sucessos de Galercio, Lenio y Gelasia: Arsindo y Maurisa; Grisaldo, Artandro y Rosaura: Marsilio y Belisa, con otras cosas sucedidas á los pastores hasta aquí nombrados, en la segunda parte desta historia se prometen. La qual, si con apazibles voluntades esta primera viere rescebida, tendrá atrevimiento de salir con brevedad a ser vista y juzgada de los ojos y entendimientos de las gentes."

[83] _Op. cit._, vol. ii., p. 119.

[84] Sr. Asensio y Toledo has suggested (_Cervantes y sus obras_, pp. 382-386) that Cervantes's reference in _Don Quixote_ to Bernardo González de Bobadilla's _Nimphas y Pastores de Henares_, a pastoral published at Alcalá in 1587, denotes some irritation against one whom he possibly regarded as a poacher. What really happened was that, during the diverting and important scrutiny of the Knight's library, the Barber came upon González de Bobadilla's book, together with Bernardo de la Vega's _Pastor de Iberia_ and Bartolomé López de Enciso's _Desengaño de los celos_. The Priest directed the Barber to "hand them over to the secular arm of the housekeeper, and ask me not why, or we shall never have done." On the strength of this, some genial contemporaries seem to have charged Cervantes with being jealous of these obscure writers. Cp. the passage in the _Viaje del Parnaso_:--

Ni llamado, ni escogido Fué el gran pastor de Iberia, el gran BERNARDO Que DE LA VEGA tiene el apellido. Fuiste envidioso, descuidado y tardo, Y á las ninfas de Henares y pastores, Como á enemigo les tiraste un dardo. Y tienes tu poetas tan peores Que estos en tu rebaño, que imagino Que han de sudar si quieren ser mejores. (cap. iv. ter. 169-171.)

[85] As Cervantes intended to dedicate the new _Don Quixote_ (and, presumably, the new _Galatea_) to the Conde de Lemos, he may very naturally have thought that it would be out of place to mention either of these works in the dedication of the _Viaje del Parnaso_ to Rodrigo de Tapia. But the short address to the reader gave him the opportunity which no one used more cleverly--when he had any announcement to make. Moreover, he had another excellent opening when he referred to the _Galatea_ in the text of the _Viaje del Parnaso_:

Yo corté con mi ingenio aquel vestido Con que al mundo la hermosa Galatea Salió para librarse del olvido. (cap. iv. ter. 5.)

[86] " ...luego yra el gran Persiles, y luego las semanas del jardín, y luego la segunda parte de la Galatea, si tanta carga pueden lleuar mis ancianos ombros."

[87] Lemos's liking for the _Galatea_ is mentioned in the Letter Dedicatory to _Persiles y Sigismunda_: "si a dicha, por buena ventura mía, que ya no sería ventura, sino milagro, me diesse el cielo vida, las (_i.e._ Semanas del Jardín y Bernardo) verá y con ellas fin de la Galatea, de quien se està aficionado Vuessa Excelencia...."

[88] See vol. iv. of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901), p. 8.

[89] See note (2) above.

[90] It may be convenient to point out that the _Arcadia_ mentioned in the text is a play published in the _Trezena Parte de las Comedias de Lope de Vega Carpio_ (Madrid, 1620) and should not be confounded with Lope's pastoral novel, the _Arcadia_ (Madrid, 1598). This warning will appear unnecessary to Spanish scholars. But the bibliography of Lope's works is so vast and intricate that a slip may easily be made. For example, Mr. Henry Edward Watts (_Life of Miguel de Cervantes_, London, 1891, p. 144) at one time mistook Lope's _Dorotea_ for the _Arcadia_, assuming the former to be a pastoral novel. This very curious error is corrected in the same writer's _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works_ (London, 1895, p. 200, _n._) with the remark that "if any blunder is excusable in a writer it is that of not remembering the name of one of Lope's multitudinous productions." In the same work we are assured (p. 111) that of all Lope's plays "there are not half-a-dozen whose names are remembered to-day out of Spain; nor one character, scene or line which any one not a member of the Spanish Royal Academy cares to recall." If ignorance has really reached this point, the caution given in the opening words of this note may be useful to the general reader.

[91] Sr. D. Ramón León Máinez, in an exuberant paragraph, sketches out (_op. cit._, p. 71) the continuation as he believes Cervantes to have conceived it: "Si más tarde hubiera cumplido su promesa de estampar la segunda parte de aquella obra bellísima, que indudablemente dejó escrita al morir, y fué una de las producciones suyas inéditas que se perdieron; cuán deleitosa y dulcemente hubiera hablado en ella de la prosecución de sus amores, de la fina correspondencia en lo sucesivo para con él por parte de su idolatrada doncella, del allanamiento de dificultades, del progreso de sus aspiraciones y de la realización de sus deseos! Allí nos hubiera descrito con la perfección, dulzura y encanto que él sabíalo hacer, el regocijo de su alma, la felicidad de su amada, el vencimiento de su contrario, los esmeros y desvelos de los amigos, el beneplácito de sus deudos, y su bien logrado casamiento con doncella tan ilustre, de tal hermosura y virtud adornada. El relato de las bodas estaría hecho en la segunda parte de _Galatea_ con encantadora sencillez, y con amenidad incomparable, como trabajo al fin de mano tan maestra y acreditada."

This prophecy tends to allay one's regret for the non-appearance of the _Galatea_; but it is exceedingly possible that Sr. Máinez knows no more of Cervantes's intentions than the rest of us.

[92] For particulars, see Professor Rennert, _op. cit._, pp. 64-119.

[93] _Vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra_ (Cádiz, 1876): "_La Galatea_ de Cervantes á todas las producciones pastoriles sobrepuja en las dotes inventivas. No mentemos esa innumerabilidad de composiciones que aparecieron antes y después de 1584. Comparar con ellas la concepción de Cervantes, sería ofender la memoria de este autor esclarecido" (p. 67). "_La Galatea_ no sólo es una obra superior entre todas las pastorales españolas, mirada en cuanto á la inventiva: es también mejor que las que antes y después de su aparición se publicaron, considerada bajo el punto de vista de la forma y de los méritos literarios" (p. 79). Cp. also a passage on p. 65: "Tal vez ninguno de los idiomas modernos pueda ofrecer tan preciadas concepciones como en este género presentan las letras castellanas." The biographer notes the weak points of Montemôr's _Diana_, of Gil Polo's _Diana enamorada_, of Lope de Vega's _Arcadia_ (the novel, not the play), of Suárez de Figueroa's _Constante Amarilis_, of Valbuena's _Siglo de oro_, and concludes (p. 68): "el talento de Cervantes era tan grande, tan superior, tan de eximio y delicado gusto, que supo evitar todos esos vicios, olvidarse de todos los defectos, para imitar lo bueno, y ofrecer una obra, en lo posible, perfecta. Vense en ella acción dramática, vitalidad, episodios interesantísimos, escenas amenas, gracia, seducción, hermosura. El ánimo se solaza y dulcemente se regocija al presenciar tal conjunto de preciosidades."

Sr. Máinez praises (p. 80), as a model of style, a passage in the First Book of the _Galatea_, beginning: "En las riberas de Betis, caudalosísimo río que la gran Vandalia enriquece, nació Lisandro (que éste es el nombre desdichado mío), y de tan nobles padres, cual pluguiera al soberano Dios que en más baja fortuna fuera engendrado." Scherillo points out, however (_op. cit._, p. cclv), that this is modelled upon the opening of Sincero's story in the _Prosa settima_ of Sannazaro's _Arcadia_: "Napoli (sicome ciaschuno molte volte può avere udito) è nela più fructifera et dilectevole parte de Italia, al lito del mare posta, famosa et nobilissima città.... In quella dunque nacqui io, ove non da oscuro sangue, ma (se dirlo non mi si disconviene) secondo che per le più celebre parti di essa città le insignie de' miey predecessori chiaramente dimostrano: da antichissima et generosa prosapia disceso, era tra gli altri miei coetanei forse non il minimo riputato."

[94] See August Wilhelm von Schlegel's _Sämmtliche Werke_ (Leipzig, 1846-1847), vol. i., p. 339 for a sonnet on the _Galatea_:--

Wie blauer Himmel glänzt auf Thales Grüne Ein heller Strom fleusst lieblich auf und nieder Von Berg und Wald verdeckt, erscheint er wieder, Und spiegelt klar der Landschaft bunte Bühne.

Wer ist die Blonde dort mit sitt'ger Miene? Wie tönen süss die Leid- und Liebes- Lieder! Mit ihren Heerden nah'n die Hirtenbrüder, Und jeder zeigt, wie er der Holden diene.

O Lust und Klang! o linde Aetherlüfte! Im zarten Sinn sinnreich beschneider Liebe So Himmlisches, doch Kindlichem Verwandtes.

Fremd wären uns die feinsten Blumendüfte, Wenn Galatea nicht sie uns beschreibe, Die Göttliche des göttlichsten Cervantes.

Friedrich von Schlegel is no less rapturous in prose. See his corybantics in the periodical entitled _Athenaeum_ (Berlin, 1799), vol. ii., pp. 325-326. After referring to Cervantes as the author of _Don Quixote_, Schlegel continues: "der aber doch auch noch andre ganz ehr-und achtbare Werke erfunden und gebildet hat, die dereinst wohl ihre Stelle im Allerheiligsten der romantischen Kunst finden werden. Ich meyne die liebliche und sinnreiche Galatea, wo das Spiel des menschlichen Lebens sich mit beschneidner Kunst und leiser Symmetrie zu einem künstlich schönen Gewebe ewiger Musik und zarter Sehnsucht ordnet, indem es flieht. Es ist der Blüthekranz der Unschuld und der frühsten noch schücternen Jugend." He repeated his enthusiastic appreciation in the following year (_Athenaeum_, Berlin, 1800, vol. iii., p. 80): "Da Cervantes zuerst die Feder statt des Degens ergriff, den er nicht mehr führen konnte, dichtete er die Galatea, eine wunderbar grosse Composition von ewiger Musik der Fantasie und der Liebe, den zartesten und lieblichsten aller Romane." ...

[95] See William H. Prescott, _Biographical and Critical Miscellanies_ (London, 1845), p. 114.

[96] See _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works_ by Henry Edward Watts. (London, 1895), p. 88.

[97] See vol. iii., p. xxvi, and vol. vii., p. xiv, _n._ 2 of the present edition (Glasgow, 1901-1902). Cp. M. Alfred Morel-Fatio's interesting monograph, _Ambrosio de Salazar et l'étude de l'espagnol sous Louis XIII_. (Paris and Toulouse, 1901).

[98] It may be interesting to read the address _A los estudiosos y amadores de las lenguas estrangeras_ at the beginning of his reprint: "Llevome la curiosidad a España el año passado, y mouiome la misma estando allí, a que yo buscasse libros de gusto y entretenimiento, y que fuessen de mayor prouecho, y conformes a lo que es de mi profession, y también para poder contentar a otros curiosos. Ya yo sabia de algunos que otras vezes auian sido traydos por acá, pero como tuuiesse principalmente en mi memoria a este de la Galatea, libro ciertamente digno (en su género) de ser acogido y leydo de los estudiosos de la lengua que habla, tanto por su eloquente y claro estilo, como por la sutil inuencion, y lindo entretenimiento, de entricadas auenturas y apazibles historias que contiene. De más desto por ser del author que inuento y escriuio, aquel libro, no sin razón, intitulado _El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote_. Busquelo casi por toda Castilla y aun por otras partes, sin poderle hallar, hasta que passando a Portugal, y llegando a vna ciudad fuera de camino llamada Euora, tope con algunos pocos exemplares: compre vno dellos, mas leyendole vi que la impression, que era de Lisboa, tenía muchas erratas, no solo en los caracteres, pero aun faltauan algunos versos y renglones de prosa enteros. Corregilo y remendelo, lo mejor que supe; también lo he visto en la presente impression, para que saliesse vn poco más limpio y correcto que antes. Ruego os pues lo recibays con tan buena voluntad, como es la que tuue siempre de seruiros, hasta que y donde yo pueda. C. Oudin."

[99] The following statement occurs in _Miguel de Cervantes, his life & works by Henry Edward Watts_ (London, 1895), p. 179, _n._ 1: "This French ambassador, called by the Spanish commentators the _Duque de Umena_, must have been the Duc de Mayenne, who was sent by the Regent Anne of Austria, to conclude the double marriage of the Prince of Asturias (afterwards Philip IV.) with Isabelle de Bourbon, and of Louis XIII. of France with the Infanta Ana, eldest daughter of Philip III."

The familiar formula--"must have been"--is out of place here. The necessity does not exist. It seems unlikely that Márquez Torres can have met the members of Mayenne's suite on February 25, 1615; for Mayenne's mission ended two and a half years previously. Mayenne and his attachés left Madrid on August 31, 1612: see Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, _Relaciones de las cosas sucedidas en la Córte de España, desde 1599 hasta 1614_ (Madrid, 1857), p. 493, and François-Tommy Perrens, _Les Mariages espagnols sous le règne de Henri IV. et la régence de Marie de Médicis, 1602-1615_ (Paris, 1869), pp. 403 and 416-417. "Umena" is, as everybody knows, the old Spanish form of Mayenne's title; but no Spaniard ever dreamed of applying this title to the ambassador of whom Márquez Torres speaks. As appears from a letter (dated February 18, 1615) to "old Æsop Gondomar," the special envoy to whom Márquez Torres refers was known as "Mr. de Silier": see Navarrete, _op. cit._, pp. 493-494. Mr. de Silier was the brother of Nicolas Brûlart, Marquis de Sillery, Grand Chancellor of France from September, 1607, to May, 1616. The special envoy figures in French history as the Commandeur Noel Brûlart de Sillery: he and his suite reached Madrid on February 15, 1615 (Navarrete, _op. cit._, p. 493), and they left that city on March 19, 1615 (Perrens, _op. cit._, p. 519). One might have hoped that, as M. de Sillery founded the mission of Sillery near Quebec, his name would be known to all educated Englishmen. His death on September 26, 1640, is mentioned by his confessor, St. Vincent de Paul, in a letter to M. Codoing, dated November 15, 1640. See _Lettres de S. Vincent de Paul_ (Paris, 1882), vol. i., p. 100.

I do not know who the above-mentioned "Regent Anne of Austria" is supposed to be. The French Regent who sent Mayenne and Sillery to Spain was Marie de Médicis, mother of Louis XIII. Her regency ended in 1615. In 1615 Anne of Austria, sister of Philip IV., became the wife of Louis XIII. Her regency began in 1643. It would almost seem as though the earlier French Queen-Regent had been mistaken for her future Spanish daughter-in-law, or, as though the writer were unaware of the fact that the "Regent Anne of Austria" and the "Infanta Ana" were really one and the same person. But the whole passage indicates great confusion of thought, as well as strange misunderstanding of Navarrete's words and of the document printed by him.

An old anecdote, concerning Cervantes and a French Minister at the Spanish Court, is inaccurately reproduced in _Camoens: his Life and Lusiads. A Commentary by Richard F. Burton_ (London, 1881), vol. i., p. 71: "Cervantes, who had been excommunicated, whispered to M. de Boulay, French Ambassador, Madrid, 'Had it not been for the Inquisition, I should have made my book much more amusing.'" Sir Richard Burton evidently quoted from memory, and, as his version is incorrect, it may be advisable to give the idle tale as it appeared originally in _Segraisiana ou Mélange d'histoire et de littérature. Recueilli des Entretiens de Monsieur de Segrais de l'Académie Françoise_ (La Haye, 1722), p. 83: "Monsieur du Boulay avoit accompagné Monsieur * * * dans son Ambassade d'Espagne dans le tems que Cervantes qui mourut en 1618 vivoit encore: il m'a dit que Monsieur l'Ambassadeur fit un jour compliment à Cervantes sur la grande réputation qu'il s'étoit acquise par son _Dom Quixotte_, au de-là des monts: & que Cervantes dit à l'oreille à Monsieur l'Ambassadeur, sans l'Inquisition j'aurois fait mon Livre beaucoup plus divertissant."

It will be observed that M. du Boulay was not Ambassador; that he does not pretend to have heard Cervantes's remark; that he merely repeats the rumour of what Cervantes was alleged to have whispered to M. * * * (who may, or may not, be M. de Sillery); and that he does not mention the Ambassador as his authority for the story. Moreover, Jean Regnauld de Segrais was born in 1624, and died in 1701. Assuming that he was no more than thirty when he met M. du Boulay, this would mean that the story was told nearly forty years after the event. If the volume entitled _Segraisiana_ was compiled towards the end of Segrais' life, we are at a distance of some eighty years from the occurrence. In either case, there is an ample margin for errors of every kind.

[100] Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar suggests (_op. cit._, vol. i., pp. 28-29) that the _Aprobación_, though signed by Márquez Torres, was really written by Cervantes himself: "57 ... Pensarà el Letor que quien dijo èsto, fué el Licenciado Màrquez Torres; no fué sino el mismo Miguèl de Cervantes Saavedra: porque el estilo del Licenciado Màrquez Torres, es metaforico, afectadillo, i pedantesco; como lo manifiestan los _Discursos Consolatorios que escriviò a Don Christoval de Sandoval i Rojas, Duque de Uceda en la Muerte de Don Bernardo de Sandoval i Rojas, su hijo, primer Marquès de Belmonte_; i al contrario el estilo de la _Aprovacion_, es puro, natural, i cortesano, i tan parecido en todo al de Cervantes, que no ai cosa en él que le dístinga. El Licenciado Màrquez era Capellán, i Maestro de Pages de Don Bernardo Sandoval i Rojas, Cardenal, Arzobispo de Toledo, Inquisidor General; Cervantes era mui favorecido del mismo. Con que ciertamente eran entrambos amigos.

"58. Supuesta la amistad, no era mucho, que usase Cervantes de semejante libertad. Contèntese pues el Licenciado Màrquez Torres, con que Cervantes le hizo partícipe de la gloria de su estilo. I veamos que moviò a Cervantes a querer hablar, como dicen, por boca de ganso. No fué otro su designio, sino manifestar la idea de su Obra, la estimacion de ella, i de su Autor en las Naciones estrañas, i su desvalimiento en la propia."

Navarrete protests (_op. cit._, pp. 491-493) against the theory put forward by Mayáns, notes that Márquez Torres published his _Discursos_ in 1626 when _culteranismo_ was in full vogue, and contends that he may have written in much better style eleven years earlier.

It would be imprudent to give great importance to arguments based solely on alleged differences of style. That Márquez Torres was in holy orders, and that he was appointed chaplain to a prelate so virtuous and clear-sighted as the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo are strong presumptions in his favour. Nothing that is known of him tends to discredit his testimony. It would be most unjustifiable to assume of any one in his responsible position that he was capable of inventing an elaborate story from beginning to end, and of publishing a tissue of falsehoods to the world. Nor can we lightly suppose that Cervantes would lend himself to such trickery. The probability surely is that there is some good foundation for the anecdote, though perhaps the tale may have lost nothing in the telling.

Still, the history of literature furnishes analogous examples of persons who tampered with preliminary matter--dedications and the like--and stuffed these pages with praises of themselves. Le Sage evidently refers to a recent incident in real life when he interpolates the following passage into the revised text of _Le Diable boiteux_ (Rouen, 1728), pp. 37-38: "A propos d'Epîtres Dédicatoires, ajoûta le Démon, il faut que je vous raporte un trait assez singulier. Une femme de la Cour aiant permis qu'on lui dédiât un ouvrage, en voulut voir la Dédicace avant qu'on l'imprimât, & ne s'y trouvant pas assez bien loüée à son gré, elle prit la peine d'en composer une de sa façon & de l'envoier à l'Auteur pour la mettre à la tête de son ouvrage."

A somewhat similar instance is afforded by La Rochefoucauld, who asked Madame de Sablé to review his _Pensées_ in the _Journal des Savants_. The lady thoughtfully submitted the manuscript of her article to the author, and the result is recorded by Hippolyte Cocheris, _Table méthodique et analytique des articles du Journal des Savants depuis sa réorganisation en 1816 jusqu'en 1858 inclusivement précédée d'une notice historique sur ce journal depuis sa fondation jusqu'à nos jours_ (Paris, 1860), pp. vi.-vii. "Larochefoucauld prit au mot Mme de Sablé; il usa très-librement de son article, il supprima les critiques, garda les éloges, et le fit insérer dans le _Journal des Savants_ (1665, p. 116 et suiv.), ainsi amendé et pur de toute prétention à l'impartialité."

[101] The full title of d'Urfé's book is _L'Astrée, où par plusieurs histoires et sous personnes de bergers et d'autres sont déduits les divers effects de l'Honneste Amitié_. The date of publication has long been doubtful; it is now, apparently, established that the First Part, consisting of twelve books, was originally issued in 1607. Only one copy of this edition is known to exist. For a description of this unique volume, discovered by M. Edwin Trossat at Augsburg in 1869, see the _Catalogue des livres du baron James de Rothschild_ (Paris, 1887), vol. ii. p. 197, no. 1527.

D'Urfé had been preceded by Nicolas de Montreux who, under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Olenix du Mont-Sacré, had published the five volumes entitled _Les Bergeries de Juliette_ at Paris between 1585 and 1598: see Heinrich Koerting, _Geschichte des französichen Romans im XVII. Jahrhundert_ (Oppeln und Leipzig), vol. i., pp. 66-68. But, though Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac declares (_Œuvres complètes_, Paris, 1665, vol. ii. p. 634) that _Les Bergeries de Juliette_ was long preferred to _Astrée_ by French provincials during the seventeenth century, Montreux found so little favour in Paris, that he abandoned pastoralism, and took to writing a history of the Turks instead: see Émile Roy, _La Vie et les œuvres de Charles Sorel, sieur de Souvigny, 1602-1674_ (Paris, 1891), pp. 115-116. It was d'Urfé who made the pastoral fashionable. Part of his immediate vogue may be attributed to the fact that his Euric, Galatée, Alcidon and Daphnide were supposed to represent Henri IV., Marguerite de Valois, the Duc de Bellegarde, and the Princesse de Conti. These dubious identifications, however, would not explain the enthusiasm of readers so different in taste and character, and so far apart in point of time, as St. François de Sales, Madame de Sévigné, Prévost (the author of _Manon Lescaut_), and Rousseau. There is no accounting for tastes, and perhaps Márquez Torres's polite Frenchman sincerely admired the _Galatea_; but indeed he had left a far better pastoral at home. _Astrée_ greatly exceeds the _Galatea_ in achievement, importance, and significance. M. Paul Morillot is within the mark in saying: "_L'Astrée_ de d'Urfé est vraiment notre premier roman; elle est l'ancêtre, la source de tous les autres" (_Le Roman en France_, p. 1). He perhaps grants too much by his admission (p. 27) that "de nos jours _L'Astrée_ est tout à fait oubliée." A useful _Index de "L'Astrée"_ by Saint-Marc Girardin proves that the book has had passionate admirers down to our time: see the _Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France_ (Paris, 1898), vol. v., pp. 458-483 and 629-646. The _Index_ has an interesting prefatory note by M. Paul Bonnefon.

[102] Besides (1) the _princeps_, published at Alcalá de Henares by Juan Gracián in 1585 there are the following editions of the _Galatea_: (2) Lixboa, Impressa con licencia de la Sancta Inquisición, 1590; (3) Paris, Gilles Robinot, 1611; (4) Valladolid, Francisco Fernández de Cordona, 1617; (5) Baeza, Juan Bautista Montoya, 1617; (6) Lisboa, Antonio Álvarez, 1618; (7) Barcelona, Sebastián de Cormellas, 1618; (8) Madrid, Juan de Zúñiga (Francisco Manuel de Mena), 1736; (9) Madrid, la Viuda de Manuel Fernández, 1772; (10) Madrid, Antonio de Sancha, 1784; (11) Madrid, Imprenta de Vega, 1805; (12) Madrid, los hijos de Da. Catalina Piñuela, 1829; (13) Paris, Baudry, 1835; (14) Paris, Baudry, 1841; (15) Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1846; (16) Madrid, Rivadeneyra, 1863; (17) Madrid, Gaspar y Roig, 1866; (18) Madrid, Álvarez hermanos, 1875; (19) Madrid, Nicolás Moya, 1883.

It may be well to state that in Nos. (12), (13), (14), (15), (16) and (17) the _Galatea_ is not printed separately, but forms part of collections of Cervantes's works.

It has hitherto been uncertain whether No. (5) really existed or not. It is noted by Nicolás Antonio (_op. cit._, vol. ii., p. 105). This Baeza edition is also mentioned under the heading of _Romans historiques_ by Gordon de Percel who, in all likelihood, simply copied the note from Antonio: see _De l'usage des romans où l'on fait voir leur utilité & leurs differens caracteres avec une_ _Bibliothèque des romans, accompagnée de remarques critiques sur leur choix et leurs éditions_ (Amsterdam, 1734), vol. ii., p. 108. Despite the imprint on the title-page, this work was actually issued at Rouen: see a valuable article in the _Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France_ (Paris, 1900, vol. vii., pp. 546-589) by M. Paul Bonnefon who describes Gordon de Percel--the pseudonym of the Abbé Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy--as an odious example of an odious type, carrying on the _métier d'espion sous couleur d'érudit_.

There can now, apparently, be no doubt that an edition of the _Galatea_ was printed at Baeza in 1617, for Rius (_op. cit._, vol. i., p. 104) states that he possesses a letter from the Marqués de Jerez, dated September 14, 1890, in which the writer explicitly says a copy of this edition was stolen from him at Irún. I do not at all understand what Rius can mean by the oracular sentence which immediately precedes this statement: "No tengo noticia de ejemplar alguno, ni sé que nadie la (_i.e._ la edición) haya visto."

It has been remarked in the text of this Introduction (p. xxxv) that Cervantes applies the word _discreta_ with distressing frequency to his heroine and her sister shepherdesses. The repetition of this adjective appears to have produced a considerable impression on the Lisbon publisher, Antonio Álvarez, for his edition--No. (6) in the above list--is entitled _La discreta Galatea_. No. (5) is also said to be entitled _La discreta Galatea_. But on this point no one, save the Marqués de Jerez de los Caballeros, can speak with any certainty.

[103] Koerting (_op. cit._, vol. i., p. 65) states that d'Audignier translated the _Galatea_ into French in 1618. This is a mistake. Koerting was probably thinking of the _Novelas exemplares_. Six of these (_La Española inglesa_, _Las dos Doncellas_, _La Señora Cornelia_, _La Ilustre fregona_, _El Casamiento engañoso_, and the _Coloquio de los perros_) were translated by d'Audignier in 1618, the remaining tales being rendered by Rosset.

[104] Now best remembered, perhaps, by Giovanni Martini's setting of the _romance_--

Plaisir d'amour ne dure qu'un moment--

which, sung by that incomparable artist, Madame Pauline Viardot-Garcia (sister of Malibran, and wife of the well-known Spanish scholar, Louis Viardot), delighted our fathers and mothers. It may be worth noting that the song is assigned to the goatherd in _Célestine: Nouvelle Espagnole_. Readers of contemporary literature will remember the adaptation of the opening words by the Baron Desforges in M. Paul Bourget's _Mensonges_.

[105] _Causeries du lundi_ (Troisième édition, Paris), vol. iii., p. 236. Joubert's appreciation of Florian's talent is practically the same as Sainte-Beuve's. In his _Pensées_ (titre xxiv., art. xxxi.), he expresses himself thus, concerning Florian's extremely free rendering of _Don Quixote_, first published in 1799: "Cervantes a, dans son livre, une bonhomie bourgeoise et familière, à laquelle l'élégance de Florian est antipathique. En traduisant _Don Quichotte_, Florian a changé le mouvement de l'air, la clef de la musique de l'auteur original. Il a appliqué aux épanchements d'une veine abondante et riche les sautillements et les murmures d'un ruisseau: petits bruits, petits mouvements, très-agréables sans doute quand il s'agit d'un filet d'eau resserré qui roule sur des cailloux, mais allure insupportable et fausse quand on l'attribue à une eau large qui coule à plein canal sur un sable très-fin."

[106] _Causeries du lundi_ (Troisième Edition, Paris), vol. iii., p. 238. See also M. Anatole France, _La Vie littéraire_ (Paris, 1889), p. 194. "Longtemps, longtemps après la mort de Florian, Rose Gontier, devenue la bonne mère Gontier, amusait ses nouvelles camarades comme une figure d'un autre âge. Fort dévote, elle n'entrait jamais en scène sans faire deux ou trois fois dans la coulisse le signe de la croix. Toutes les jeunes actrices se donnaient le plaisir de lutiner celle qui jouait si au naturel _Ma tante Aurore_; elles l'entouraient au foyer et lui refaisaient bien souvent la même question malicieuse:

--Mais est-ce bien possible, grand'maman Gontier, est-il bien vrai que M. de Florian vous battait?

Et, pour toute réponse et explication, toute retenue qu'elle était, la bonne maman Gontier leur disait dans sa langue du dix-huitième siècle:

--C'est, voyez-vous, mes enfants, que celui-là ne payait pas."

[107] Rius (_op. cit._, vol. ii., 319) mentions three editions of Pellicer's translation, the latest being dated 1830. A reprint is said to have been issued at Paris in 1841. On p. xvii of the 1814 edition--the only one within my reach--Casiano Pellicer suggests that Cervantes introduced Diego Durán into the _Galatea_ under the name of Daranio: "Puedese presumir que el Daranio, cuyas bodas refiere tan menudamente, sea Diego Durán, á quien supone natural de Toledo ó de su tierra, y alaba también en su canto de Calíope de gran poeta."

[108] The title of this arrangement is _Los Enamorados ó Galatea y sus bodas. Historia pastoral comenzada por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Abreviada después, y continuada y últimamente concluida por D. Cándido María Trigueros_ (Madrid, 1798).

[109] The only translations of the _Galatea_ are the following:--

English (by Gordon Willoughby James Gyll), London, 1867, 1892.

German (by F. Sigismund), Zwickau, 1830; (by A. Keller and F. Notter), Stuttgart, 1840; (by F. M. Duttenhofer), Stuttgart, 1841.

[110] Gyll's name is very naturally omitted from the _Dictionary of National Biography_. His publications, so far as I can trace them, are as follows:

(1) _The Genealogy of the family of Gylle, or Gill, of Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, illustrated by wills and other documents_ (London, 1842). This pamphlet is an enlarged reprint of a contribution to _Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica_, vol. viii.

(2) _A Tractate on Language_ (London, 1859): a second revised edition appeared in 1860.

(3) _History of the Parish of Wraysbury, Ankerwycke Priory, and Magna Charta Island; with the History of Horton, and the Town of Colnbrook, Bucks._ (London, 1862.)

(4) _Galatea: A pastoral romance. By Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Literally translated from the Spanish_ (London, 1867). A posthumous reprint was issued in 1892.

(5) _The Voyage to Parnassus: Numantia, a Tragedy; The Commerce of Algiers, by Cervantes. Translated from the Spanish...._ (London, 1870).

Concerning the writer I have gathered the following particulars: they are to some extent derived from statements scattered up and down his works. For the references to _Notes and Queries_ I am particularly indebted to Mr. W. R. Morfill, the distinguished Reader in Slavonic at the University of Oxford.

Our Gyll was born on August 1, 1803 (_History of Wraysbury_, p. 100), being the third son of William Gill (at one time an officer in the army), and the grandson of a City alderman. William Gill, the elder, was a partner in the firm of Wright, Gill, and Dalton, wholesale stationers in Abchurch Lane, London. He was elected alderman in 1781, served as Sheriff in 1781-1782, was appointed Treasurer of Christ's Hospital in 1784-1785, and in due course became Lord Mayor for 1788-1789. He died in the Treasurer's house at Christ's Hospital on March 26, 1798, being then seventy-four years of age: his brother-in-law and partner, Thomas Wright, died on April 9, 1798. An obituary note in _The Gentleman's Magazine_ (vol. lxviii., p. 264) states that the elder William Gill "was a respectable tradesman and died immensely rich." The younger William Gill died on February 16, 1806, at the age of thirty-one. I do not know to what school Gordon Willoughby James Gill was sent. He speaks of himself as "a member of the University of Oxford" (_A Tractate on Language_, First Edition, p. iii.). This is confirmed by the appended note in the Matricula Book, which am enabled to print through the kindness of my friend Mr. H. Butler Clarke:--

"From the Register of Matriculations of the University of Oxford. 1822 Jan. 15. Coll. Pemb. Gordon Willoughby Jacobus Gill, 18, Gulielmi, de par. S. Mariæ bonæ Arm. fil. 3^{ius}.

A true extract, made 30 Jan^{y.}, 1903 by T. Vere Bayne, Keeper of the Archives."

Unfortunately, this entry is not an autograph: all the other entries on the page which contains it are, as the Keeper of the Archives informs me, in the same handwriting. The _Oxford University Calendar_ for 1823 gives (p. 275) our author's names in this form and sequence: James Willoughby Gordon Gill. This form and order are repeated in the _Oxford University Calendar_ for the years 1824 and 1825. In the alphabetical index to the _Calendar_ for 1823-1824-1825 this Pembroke undergraduate is entered as: _Gill, James G. W._ As the editors of the semi-official _Calendar_ derive their information from the College authorities, we may take it that, from 1822 to 1825 inclusive, the future author passed as James Gill at Pembroke, and amongst those who knew him best. It cannot be supposed that the Master and Fellows of Pembroke made a wrong return for three consecutive years, nor that they wilfully reversed the order of Gill's Christian names with the express object of annoying him. Had they done either of these things, Gill was the very man to protest energetically: his conduct in later years snows that he was punctilious in these matters. However, it is right to bear in mind that the Matricula Book gives Gill's Christian names in the same order as they appear on his title-pages. I have failed to obtain any details of his career at Pembroke. Mr. Wood, the present Librarian at Pembroke, states that there is "no proper record" of the Commoners at that College in Gill's time. On this point I have only to say that the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was in residence at Pembroke with Gill, and that information concerning Beddoes's undergraduate days is apparently not lacking. Possibly more careful research might discover some trace of Gill at Oxford. He seems to have taken no degree, and to have left no memory or tradition at Pembroke. He himself tells us (_A Tractate on Language_, First Edition, p. iii) that when at Oxford "he formed an acquaintance with a gentleman of considerable erudition, but not of either University, who had made the English tongue his peculiar care." To this association we owe _A Tractate on Language_, and, perhaps, the peculiarities of style which Gill afterwards developed. But, in the latter respect, a serious responsibility may attach to Milton; for, in his _Tractate_, Gill refers to the poet and laments (p. 224) that, at the period of which he speaks, "the Allegro and Penseroso were confined to the closets of the judicious." The inference is that Gill modelled his diction on both these poems.

His name disappears from the _Oxford University Calendar_ in 1826. He visited Mexico in 1832 (_History of Wraysbury_, p. 49), and perhaps during this journey he picked up a queer smattering of Spanish. On August 29, 1839, he married "Anne Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Bowyer-Smijth, Bt.," and this seems to have given a new direction to what he calls his "studious tendencies."

The founder of his wife's family was plain William Smith, who died in 1626; this William Smith's son developed into Thomas Smyth, and died a baronet in 1668; Sir Thomas Smyth's great-great-grandson, the seventh baronet, was known as Sir William Smijth, and died in 1823. Gill's father-in-law,--Vicar of Camberwell and Chaplain to George IV.--was the ninth baronet. On June 10, 1839, he assumed the name of Bowyer by royal license, and was styled Sir Edward Bowyer-Smijth. In this the Vicar was practically following the lead of his younger brother, a captain in the 10th Hussars, who assumed the name of Windham by royal license at Toulouse on May 22, 1823, and thenceforth signed himself Joseph Smijth-Windham. The contagion infected Gill.

After his marriage to Miss Bowyer-Smijth, third daughter of the ninth baronet, Gill became a diligent student of genealogy, heraldry and county-history. It might be excessive to say that he was attacked by the _folie des grandeurs_; but he does appear to have felt that, since the Smiths had blossomed into Bowyer-Smijths and Smijth-Windhams, a man of his ability was bound to do something of the same kind for the ancient house of Gill. And something was done: a great deal, in fact. The first-fruits of Gill's enterprise are garnered in _The genealogy of the family of Gylle, or Gill, of Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, illustrated by wills and other documents_ which he printed in 1842. At this first stage he acted with praiseworthy caution, signing his pamphlet with the initials G. G. If he was ever known by so vulgar a name as James--the name of the patron-saint of Spain--he had evidently got rid of it by 1842. At Pembroke in 1823 his initials were J. G. W. G., according to the _Oxford University Calendar_: nineteen years later they were G. G. This advancement passed unnoticed, and the delighted investigator continued his researches. These were so successful that, according to Gill's shy confession wrung from him long afterwards, "as the old annals, parish registers, tombs, wills. &c., wrote our name Gyll, we, by sign manual, returned to that orthography in 1844": (see _Notes and Queries_, March 24, 1866, vol. ix., p. 250). The English of this avowal is bad, but the meaning is clear. Henceforward Gill is transfigured into Gyll. These easy victories led him to enlarge his plan of campaign, and thus we find in the 1846 edition of _Burke's Landed Gentry_ the pedigree of the family of Gyll of Wyrardisbury, which contains the statement that on October 13, 1794, the head of the house (of the Gylls of Wyrardisbury), "William Gyll, Esquire, Captain 2nd Regiment Life Guards, and Equerry to H. R. H. the Duke of Sussex" married "Lady Harriet Flemyng, only child of the Right Hon. Hamilton Flemyng, last Earl of Wigtoun, and had issue" our author, and other children with whom we are not concerned here.

According to George Lipscomb's _History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham_ (London, 1847, vol. iv., p. 605, _n._ 1.), it was on December 17, 1844, that "Her Majesty was pleased ... to permit the family of Gyll of Wyrardisbury, to resume the ancient orthography of their name." The enthusiastic Gyll (as we must now call him) interpreted the privilege in a generous fashion. It galled the patrician to think that his grandfather had been a lowly alderman, and to know that this lamentable fact was on record at Wraysbury. There were epitaphs in Wraysbury Church describing his grandfather as "Alderman of the City of London"; describing his father as "only son of Alderman Gill"; describing his aunt, Mrs. Paxton, as "daughter of William Gill, Esq., Alderman of the City of London." Our Gyll had all these odious references to the aldermanship removed; in their stead he introduced more high-sounding phrases; he interpolated the statement that his grandfather was "of the family of Gyll of Wyddial, Herts"; and on all three monuments he took it upon himself to change Gill into Gyll. The changes were made clumsily and unintelligently, but one cannot have everything. Gordon Gyll was indefatigable in his pious work, and, within three years, he somehow induced Lipscomb (_op. cit._, vol. iv., p. 604) to insert a pedigree connecting the family of "Gyll of Buckland and Wyddial Hall, co. Herts, Yeoveny Hall, co. Middlesex, and Wyrardisbury Hall, co. Bucks," with certain Gylls established in Cambridgeshire during the reign of Edward I. It is impossible not to admire the calm courage with which the still, strong man swept facts, tombstones, epitaphs, and obstacle's of all kinds from the path of his nobility.

His proceedings passed unnoticed during fourteen happy years. At last attention was drawn to them in _Notes and Queries_ (May 11, 1861, p. 365) by a correspondent who signed himself "A Stationer." "A Stationer" remarked sarcastically on the erasure of all references to the aldermanship from the monuments in Wraysbury Church, noted that the dead Gills had been glorified into Gylls, deplored Gordon Gyll's ingratitude towards the ancestors to whom he owed everything, censured Gyll's conduct as "silly," and protested against such tampering as improper. The editor of _Notes and Queries_ supported "A Stationer's" view on the ground that monuments had hitherto been accepted as testimony in suits at law, and that their evidential value would be completely destroyed if Gyll's example were generally followed. Gyll put on his finest county manner, and replied in an incoherent letter (_Notes and Queries_, May 26, 1861, p. 414) which breathes the haughty spirit of a great territorial chieftain. He denounced the insolence of "A Stationer" in daring to criticize "a county family," branded the intruder as a "tradesman," a "miserable citizen critic," and pitied the poor soul's "confined education." But he failed to explain his conduct satisfactorily, and laid himself open to the taunts of Dr. J. Alexander (_Notes and Queries_, June 8, 1861, p. 452), who declared that Gyll had "proved himself unable to write English, and ignorant of some of the simplest rules of composition." Dr. Alexander added that,--if a licence obtained in 1844 could justify changing the spelling of the name of a man who died in 1798,--by parity of reasoning, "had the worthy alderman accepted the proferred baronetcy, all his ancestors would, _ipso facto_, become baronets. I believe China is the only country where this practice obtains." In the same number of _Notes and Queries_, "A Stationer" returned to the subject, and posed a number of very awkward questions. "Are the Gylls really a county family? And when did they become so? Has any member of the house ever filled the office of Knight of the shire, or even that of sheriff for the county of Buckingham?" And, after reproaching Gyll for his repudiation of his hard-working grandfather, "A Stationer" ended by assuring the proud squire that "the Stationers of London have a more grateful recollection of their quondam brothers and benefactors--for benefactors they were to a very unequal extent. From Alderman Wright, the Stationers received 2000_l._ 4 per cents.: from Alderman Gill (who left a fortune of £300,000) 30_s._ a year to be added to Cator's dinner. However, their portraits are still to be seen in the counting-house of the Company, placed in one frame, side by side. "_Par nobile fratrum!_" Gyll dashed off a reply which the editor of _Notes and Queries_ (June 29, 1861, p. 520) declined to insert: "as we desire to avoid as much as possible any intermixture of personal matters into this important question." At this the blood of all the Gylls boiled in the veins of Gordon Willoughby James. He was not to be put off by a timorous journalist, and he secured the insertion in _Notes and Queries_ (July 27, 1861, p. 74) of an illiterate letter which, says the editor, "we have printed ... exactly as it stands in the original." The letter seems to have been written under the influence of deep emotion, for the aristocratic Gyll twice speaks of his grandfather as a "party." He demanded an ample apology, and ended with the announcement that "if I do not hear from you I shall send the family lawyer to meet the charge." Gyll did not obtain the apology, did not attempt to answer "A Stationer's" string of questions, did not accept the editor's offer to print the suppressed letter, did not "send the family lawyer to meet the charge." In fact he did nothing that he threatened to do, and nothing that he was asked to do. If he consulted his solicitor, the latter probably joined with the editor and told him not to make a fool of himself.

But Gyll had no idea of abandoning his pretensions, and he renewed them with abundant details in his _History of Wraysbury_, a quarto which contains more than its title implies. He is not content to note (p. 153) that "occasionally those dreary landmarks in the vast desert of human misery, called Coroner's inquests, arise in Wraysbury." He also proves, to his own satisfaction, that "the family of Ghyll, Gyll, Gylle, Gille, Gill, for it is recorded in all these ways, is derived from that one which resided in the North, temp. Edward the Confessor, 1041, at Gille's Land in Cumberland" (p. 99), and that "in 1278 Walter le Gille served as a juryman at Tonbridge" (p. 98). The arms of the Gylls are duly given: "Sable, two chevrons argent, each charged with three mullets of the field, on a dexter Canton, or; a lion passant at guard, gules. Also Lozenges or and vert; a lion rampant at guard, gules." Heralds whom I have consulted have jeered at the Gyll escutcheon, but I cannot bring myself to give their ribald remarks in print. Apparently, the main purpose of the _History of Wraysbury_ is to shew that the Gylls (with a _y_) are very Superior Persons, and that the Gills (with an _i_) are People of No Importance. Gyll admits that the latter produced a worthy man in the person of John Gill, "a Baptist divine"; and the historian, when writing of his poor relations (p. 125), emphasizes the fact that John Gill was not an Anabaptist. Anabaptists were evidently an inferior set.

It will be seen that Gyll traced back his pedigree to a period earlier than the Norman Conquest: six centuries before his wife's ancestors (then known as Smith) were first heard of. It was a great achievement and henceforth no Gyll need fear to look a Bowring-Smijth in the face. And Gyll's ambition grew. He could not prove that he was the child of a baronet, and, in so much, he was in a position of social inferiority to his wife. But he did the next best thing by declaring that, if he was not the son of a baronet, he easily might have been. In his _History of Wraysbury_, he states (p. 97) that his grandfather was Lord Mayor of London when George III. went to St Paul's to give thanks for his recovery from his first attack of insanity, that the usual patent "was prepared and announced in all the public papers, 18th and 19th April, 1789, to create him a Baronet, which is usual when the King honours the city on any great occasion, but the profered advancement was not accepted for family reasons. Nor was the claim revived until his son "William Gyll, Captain 2nd Life Guards, who had in 1803 at his own expense raised two troops of cavalry at the threat of invasion, solicited the favour which his father had injudiciously declined, when he too unfortunately died prematurely, and the expected honour has not since been conferred." This is a repetition of a favourite phrase: for Lipscomb (_op. cit._, vol. iv., p. 605, _n._ 3) states that the younger William Gyll "unfortunately died suddenly, and the expected honour has not since been conferred." One can guess the source of Lipscomb's information.

I regret to say that Gyll throws all the blame for this catastrophe on his grandmother, as may be seen by an intemperate foot-note which follows the passage just quoted from the _History of Wraysbury_: "His (the Lord Mayor's) wife Mary induced him to forego the honour, because there was a son by his first wife, who only survived a few years and died unmarried. Women may be very affectionate but not discreet. They have a fibre more in their hearts, and a cell less in their brains than men." This is most improper, no doubt. Still, great allowance should be made for the exasperation of a man who longed to be a baronet's son, who might have been one, and who was not.

Gyll had certainly played his part gallantly. Considering the material that he had to use, he worked wonders. He had (perhaps) transformed himself from James to Gordon; he had (unquestionably) evolved from Gill to Gyll. He had wiped out the horrid memory of the aldermanship, and had buried the old stationer's shop miles beneath the ground-floor of limbo. And there is testimony to his social triumphs in the list of subscribers that precedes his _History of Wraysbury_, which is dedicated "by permission" to the late Prince Consort. Among the subscribers were two dukes, two earls, five barons, ten baronets: and these great personages were followed by Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Milner Gibson, the Dean of Windsor, the Provost of Eton, and other commoners of distinction.

It was a glorious victory which Gyll enjoyed in peace for four years. Then his hour of reckoning came. A correspondent of _Notes and Queries_, signing himself "Anglo-Scotus," pointed out (February 24, 1866, p. 158) that the statement concerning the Gylls in _Burke's Landed Gentry_ was erroneous; that no officer named Gyll ever held a commission in either regiment of the Life Guards; that Hamilton Flemyng was not the last (or any other) Earl of Wigtoun; and that consequently no such person as Lady Harriet Flemyng ever existed. Gyll pondered for a month and then, at last, nerved himself to write to _Notes and Queries_ (March 24, 1866, p. 250) asserting that Hamilton Flemyng was "_per legem terrae_, 9th and last Earl of Wigton." His letter was thought to be too rambling for insertion: the editor confined himself to printing this crucial passage, and referred Gyll to the report of the Committee for Privileges which set forth that "the claimant (Hamilton Flemyng) hath no right to the titles, honours, and dignities claimed by his petition." This report was quoted in the same number of _Notes and Queries_ (pp. 246-247) by an Edinburgh correspondent signing himself G., and G. went on to say that, though no Gyll ever held a commission in the Life Guards, a certain William Gill figures in the Edinburgh Almanacs for 1794-5-6 as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Life Guards. I have since verified this statement, and I find that William Gill was gazetted to the 2nd Life Guards on September 26, 1793. In spite of the interest that he took in his family history, Gyll had no accurate knowledge of his father's doings. William Gill was transferred to the Late 2nd Troop of Horse Grenadier Guards (a reduced corps receiving full pay) on March 23, 1796, and he retired on March 19, 1799 (see _The London Gazette_, Nos. 13,878 and 15,116). But Gyll was ever a muddler and a bungler. He informed Lipscomb that his father had "died suddenly" (_op. cit._, vol. iv., p. 605); while, in the _History of Wraysbury_ (p. 121), he copies an epitaph recording William Gill's death "after a long and painful illness."

It was thus established that the family name was Gill; that the younger William Gill did not marry the daughter of the last Earl of Wigton (or Wigtoun); that he was never a Captain in the 2nd Life Guards; and that in 1803, when he was alleged to have raised two troops of cavalry, he had already resigned his commission four years. Human nature being what it is, this exposure may have brought a smile to the lips of the Bowyer-Smijths who had listened to Gyll's stories of a cock and of a bull for a quarter of a century. Gyll collapsed at once when detected, and he published no more results of his genealogical researches. It is a pity, for who knows to what length of absurdity he might not have gone? Who knows, indeed, whether his little tale of the Lord Mayor and the baronetcy is not of a piece with the rest? I have searched the contemporary newspapers, and the nearest approach that I can find to a confirmation of Gyll's assertion is in _The Diary; or Woodfall's Register_ (Friday, April 24, 1789): "That the Lord Mayor will be a Baronet is now certain; and that Deputies Seekey and Birch will be knighted is extremely probable." I do not know what happened to Seekey and Birch. The Gylls are enough for a lifetime. Years afterwards a correspondent to _Notes and Queries_ (December 26, 1876, p. 512) derisively observed that "the Gyll family, however, quarter the Flemyng arms, and also the Flemyng crest." But the badger was not to be drawn a third time: Gyll endured the affront in the meekest silence.

The versatile man had relieved his severe antiquarian studies by excursions into light literature. _A Tractate on Language_ was published because, as the author avows (p. iii), "he thought (perhaps immaturely) that some occult treasures and recondite truths in philology were eliminated, and were worthy public consideration." When Gyll wrote these words (1859) he was in his fifty-seventh year, and was as mature as he was ever likely to be. The work, which contains the alarming statement (p. 171) that "Noah taught his descendants his matricular tongue," seems to have been rudely handled by critics. In the second edition of his _Tractate_ Gyll replies with the ladylike remark that "as regards his opinions, it was not consistent with equity or delicacy that they should have been encountered with _savage phrenzy_;" and, with a proper contempt for reviewers, he adds that "while such reviews indulge thus indiscriminately, pourtraying sheer obliquity of mind and judgment in lieu of that _manly acumen_ to which they pretend, the critics must perceive how much below the dignity of the criticised it is to evince uneasiness or resentment--both as easily 'shaken off as dewdrops from the lion's mane.'" It is unlikely that Gyll is widely read nowadays, and this is my excuse for doing what I can to save two distinguished aphorisms from the wreck of his _Tractate_. There is nothing like them (it is safe to say) in Pascal or La Rochefoucauld.

(_a_) "As in religion what is bones to philosophy is milk to faith" (pp. iii-iv).

(_b_) "A literary man, however, is like a silkworm employed and wrapped up in his own work" (p. 163).

After his exposure in _Notes and Queries_ Gyll dropped genealogy, heraldry, and topography as though they were so many living coals. But, though he dreaded the fire, he was still bent on making the world ring with the name of Gyll. Spanish literature, which was at that time cultivated in these islands by such men as Chorley, FitzGerald, Archbishop Trench, Denis Florence Mac-Carthy and Ormsby, seemed to him a promising field in which he should find no dangerous rivals. In the _History of Wraysbury_ (p. 146) he included his own name among the "names of literary and distinguished characters of Wraysbury," and under the date 1860, he mentions his "Translation from the Spanish of Don Guzmán de Alfarache." I presume this was a version of Mateo Alemán's picaresque novel, but I can find no trace of it. At the age of sixty-four the extraordinary Gyll furbished up the few words of Spanish which he had learned in Mexico thirty-five years earlier, and courageously started as a translator of Cervantes. His versions are the worst ever published in any tongue. But criticism was impotent against his self-complacency. A true literary man, he lived--to use his own happy phrase--"like a silkworm employed and wrapped up in his own work." On the whole his was a prosperous career. Carpers might do their worst, but the solid facts remain. Gyll had practically blotted out the stain of the stationer's shop and the aldermanship; he had obtained permission to write his name with a _y_: he had elbowed his way into county-histories, into Burke's _Landed Gentry_ and into Burke's _General Armory_; he had published such works as, in all probability, the world will never see again. He appreciated these performances to the full, and he revelled in gazing on the south window in Wraysbury Church, of which he writes (_History of Wraysbury_, p. 123): "At the summit are two small openings of painted glass, and in the centre is a quatrefoil in which the letters G. W. J. G. are convoluted.... The play of colours on the monuments when the sun is brilliant, affords a pleasing variegation." What more could the mind of man desire? Gordon Willoughby James Gyll died on April 6, 1878.

[111] See p. viii. of Gyll's version: "Dedicated by Cervantes, to his Excellency Don Joseph Moniño, Count of Florida Blanca, Knight of the Grand Cross of the Royal Order of K. Charles III." The fact is, of course, that Gyll translated from _Los seis libros de Galatea_, reprinted in 1784 by Antonio de Sancha with a dedication to Floridablanca. The words--"Dedicated by Cervantes"--are interpolated by Gyll. Floridablanca died in 1808, nearly two hundred years after Cervantes.

[112] Evidently a misprint for Silena.

[113] In justice to Gyll, the polemist, I reprint his two letters contributed to _Notes and Queries_ (May 25, 1861, and July 27, 1861):--

(_a_) "A STATIONER writes his remarks on the subject of some alterations on lapidary inscriptions in Wraysbury Church: and pray, Sir, by what right does this tradesman ask any family why they choose to change a monumental reading, provided nothing is inserted which militates against truth?

What has the world to do with family arrangements? And whether is the article to be taken for a _charge_ or a _lament_? I only wish this busy citizen to employ his time more profitably--while I wonder that any periodical should condescend to introduce the subject, without notice being given to members of the family, and an inquiry made. If they had reasons good for it, what on earth does the public care about it? Certain words on certain monuments were not approved by a county family, and they were omitted: and lo! a citizen rises to impeach the _proprietary_ of it. The case stands thus, Monument No. 1:

This was an unusually large slab, on which the simple record of the deaths of Wm. Gyll, Esq., and his wife, were only inscribed. The family thought the space might be occupied by the addition of other family names, &c.--and it was done. And now the slab is full.

No. 2. Wm. Gyll, Esq., was styled here Equerry to H.R.H. Duke of Sussex; but that he was also Captain in the 2nd Life Guards was omitted. It was deemed expedient to make room for its insertion, and it was done.

No. 3. On Mrs. Paxton's monument, a daughter of Wm. Gyll, Esq., the latter gentleman is styled _of this parish_; and as he had considerable property here, it was his proper designation. Room was made to effect this, and it was done.

There are thirteen monuments to the family of Gyll, or relations, in the chancel of Wraysbury Church; and where the patronymic was spelt with an _i_ as formerly, instead of _y_ as latterly, a change was made that these names might correspond with the same orthography on other monuments (see Chauncey & Clutterbuck, _Herts_), and with antique deeds (see _Collectanea Topographica_, vol. viii.).

The family for many years had returned to the _original_ mode of spelling their patronymic, to distinguish them from other families similarly called; and for this privilege a permission was obtained by _sign manual_ in 1844. And if a correspondent change was made on the monuments, what has anyone in the world to do with it but the family?

In one case a mistaken date was inscribed, 17th for 26th March. This is made a _charge and a crime_ by this miserable citizen critic, as if these mistakes were made purposely.

In two cases Dr. Lipscomb's monumental inscriptions give _widow_ for wife, and _Sept._ for April. Had the STATIONER, who is so wonderfully correct, and turns all things to wrongs, gone or sent to Wraysbury, he would have found _his_ improvements already on the monuments.

But his candid soul converts all this to _vanity_: and, no doubt, vanity finds endless occupation for ingenuity and invention. Suggests that a family ought to be proud of civic honours. Many thanks to the _suggestive_ STATIONER; but if this family is not, what cares the world about it? It may have gained nothing by the position; but if he will be _obtrusive_, let him tell the next editor who is in want of matter another _secret_--for he uses _this term_ in his disquisition--that Mr. Gyll, in 1789, refused to be created a Baronet, and that the patent was made out and was ready for execution. See the newspapers _passim_, 18th and 23rd April, 1789.

It may be the family desires no remembrance of the honours conferred, or the honours proffered; and if so, what daring presumption gives a STATIONER a plea to impugn any act done by A. or B., and parade it before the public in an accommodating journal? His confined education may preclude his knowing that a Lord Stanhope doffed his title and removed his arms from all his carriages; and that Horace Walpole remarked, that calling him "My Lord," was calling him _names_ in his old age. Many have not assumed honours to which they were entitled.

As the STATIONER, or the poor malice of the writer under this name, has made a _charge_, I trust, Sir, in your _equity_, that you will insert this explanation in your next number; and I also trust to read in your most interesting and useful publication, for the future, more that _concerns_ the curious world than that a family substituted on a monument a _y_ for an _i_, and withheld altogether the naming of an honour which might have appeared there.

GORDON GYLL.

7, Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square."

(_b_) "As you have not published the letter I sent to your office in answer to that of A STATIONER, and also to an LL.D., who, instead of quietly confining himself to an opinion on a point of law, rushed into _personalities_ quite unjustified by circumstances, for no letter was addressed to him unless he be the STATIONER in disguise, who, in his arrogance dared to say that I was ignorant of the first principles of composition--I wish to know whether the LL.D. or STATIONER mean to assert that by our improving certain monuments in Wraysbury Church (which we, as a family acting in unison, were entitled to do without the interference of anyone) we have falsified them.

If that be intended, we consider the allegation _false and injurious_, and unless we have an unequivocal denial, we shall refer the case to our legal adviser. The entire object of the STATIONER was to insult our family, and to impute motives, which was enough to incite to resentment.

If he had politely said that we had caused one letter to be substituted for another, which did not change the sound of the name, and had put in a Christian name where the title of a civic honour was inscribed, whereby the party was more _clearly_ identified--for Mr. Alderman A. may be anybody--it had been well and harmless, and no such letter, which he terms acrimonious, had been written.

You gave, in a note to my letter, an opinion that the question was _not touched_. Now, Sir, I wish to ask you or the LL.D. if any LAW is violated, and if a family has a right to inscribe on a monument that A. or B. were Deputy-Lieut., Magistrates, M.P., or High Sheriffs? and if so, if a party is termed Alderman where his proper description would be Lord Mayor, the family may not legally and judiciously alter it?

We stand impeached with _breaking a law_, and by implication with, _falsifying_ a lapidary inscription. We wish to know if _these imputations_ are meant either by LL.D. or the STATIONER, for if they are, let the case be tried before proper tribunal, or else let us have a denial. If I do not hear from you I shall send the family lawyer to meet the charge.

GORDON GYLL.

7, Lower Seymour Street, Portman Square."

The above are reproduced exactly as printed in _Notes and Queries_. As already observed (p. lii. _n._), Gyll did not carry out his threats.

FIRST PART OF THE GALATEA

DIVIDED INTO SIX BOOKS

WRITTEN BY MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

DEDICATION TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS LORD, ASCANIO COLONNA,[114] ABBOT OF SANTA SOFIA.

Your Lordship's worth has prevailed with me so much as to take away from me the fear I might rightly feel in venturing to offer you these first-fruits of my poor genius. Moreover, considering that your August Lordship came to Spain not only to illumine her best Universities, but also to be the pole-star by which those who profess any real science (especially those who practise that of poetry) may direct their course, I have not wished to lose the opportunity of following this guidance, since I know that in it and by it all find a safe haven and a favourable reception. May your Lordship be gracious to my desire, which I send in advance to give some kind of being to this my small service; and if I do not deserve it for this, I may at least deserve it for having followed for several years the conquering banners of that Sun of warfare whom but yesterday Heaven took from before our eyes, but not from the remembrance of those who strive to keep the remembrance of things worthy of it, I mean your Lordship's most excellent father. Adding to this the feeling of reverence produced in my mind by the things that I, as in prophecy, have often heard Cardinal de Acquaviva tell of your Lordship when I was his chamberlain at Rome; which now are seen fulfilled, not only by me, but by all the world that delights in your Lordship's virtue, Christian piety, munificence, and goodness, whereby you give proof every day of the noble and illustrious race from which you descend; which vies in antiquity with the early times and leaders of Rome's greatness, and in virtues and heroic works with equal virtue and more exalted deeds, as is proved to us by a thousand true histories, full of the renowned exploits of the trunk and branches of the royal house of Colonna, beneath whose power and position I now place myself to shield myself against the murmurers who forgive nothing; though, if your Lordship forgive this my boldness, I shall have naught to fear, nor more to desire, save that our Lord may keep your Lordship's most illustrious person with the increase of dignity and position that we your servants all desire.

Most Illustrious Lord, Your humblest servant kisses your Lordship's hands, MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA.

FOOTNOTES:

[114] (Son of Marc Antonio Colonna, Duke of Paliano, whose share in the famous battle is set forth in P. Alberto Guglielmotti's _Marcantonio Colonna alla bataglia di Lepanto_ (Firenze, 1862). Marc Antonio Colonna, then Viceroy of Sicily, was summoned to Spain by Philip II. in 1584. He died suddenly at Medinaceli on August 1, 1584. The dedication is a compliment paid to the son of the author's old commander. J. F.-K.)

PROLOGUE.

CURIOUS READERS,

The occupation of writing eclogues, at a time when poetry is generally regarded with such little favour, will not, I fancy, be counted as so praiseworthy a pursuit, but that it may be necessary especially to justify it to those who, following the varying tastes of their natural inclination, esteem every taste differing from it as time and labour lost. But since it concerns no man to justify himself to intellects that shut themselves up within bounds so narrow, I desire only to reply to those who, being free from passion, are moved, with greater reason, not to admit any varieties of popular poetry, believing that those who deal with it in this age are moved to publish their writings on slight consideration, carried away by the force which passion for their own compositions is wont to have on the authors. So far as this is concerned, I can urge for my part the inclination I have always had for poetry, and my years, which, having scarcely passed the bounds of youth, seem to permit pursuits of the kind. Besides, it cannot be denied that studies in this art (in former times so highly esteemed and rightly) carry with them no inconsiderable advantages: such as enriching the poet (as regards his native tongue); and acquiring a mastery over the tricks of eloquence comprised in it, for enterprises that are loftier and of greater import; and opening a way so that the narrow souls that wish the copiousness of the Castilian tongue to be checked by the conciseness of the ancient speech, may, in imitation of him, understand that it offers a field open, easy, and spacious, which they can freely traverse with ease and sweetness, with gravity and eloquence, discovering the variety of acute, subtle, weighty, and elevated thoughts, which, such is the fertility of Spanish men of genius, Heaven's favourable influence has produced with such profit in different parts, and every hour is producing in this happy age of ours, whereof I can be a sure witness, for I know some men who, with justice and without the impediment I suffer, could safely cover so dangerous a course. But so common and so diverse are men's difficulties, and so various their aims and actions, that some, in desire of glory, venture, others, in fear of disgrace, do not dare, to publish that which, once disclosed, must needs endure the uncertain, and well-nigh always mistaken, judgment of the people. I have given proof of boldness in publishing this book, not because I have any reason to be confident, but because I could not determine which of these two difficulties was the greater: whether that of the man who, wishing to communicate too soon the talent he has received from Heaven, lightly ventures to offer the fruits of his genius to his country and friends, or that of him who, from pure scrupulousness, sloth, or dilatoriness, never quite contented with what he does and imagines, counting as perfect only that which he does not attain, never makes up his mind to disclose and communicate his writings. Hence, just as the daring and confidence of the one might be condemned, by reason of the excessive license which accompanies security; so, too, the mistrust and tardiness of the other is vicious, since late or never does he by the fruits of his intellect and study benefit those who expect and desire such aids and examples, to make progress in their pursuits. Shunning these two difficulties, I have not published this book before now, nor yet did I desire to keep it back longer for myself alone, seeing that my intellect composed it for more than for my pleasure alone. I know well that what is usually condemned is that no one excels in point of the style which ought to be maintained in it, for the prince of Latin poetry was blamed for having reached a higher level in some of his eclogues more than in others; and so I shall not have much fear that any one may condemn me for having mingled philosophical discourses with some loving discourses of shepherds, who rarely rise beyond treating of things of the field, and that with their wonted simplicity. But when it is observed (as is done several times in the course of the work) that many of the disguised shepherds in it were shepherds only in dress, this objection falls to the ground. The remaining objections that might be raised as regards the invention and ordering may be palliated by the fixed intention of him who reads, if he will do so with discretion, and by the wish of the author, which was to please, doing in this what he could and actually did, achieve; for even though the work in this part do not correspond to his desire, he offers others, yet to come, of better taste and greater art.

BY LUIS GÁLVEZ DE MONTALVO. TO THE AUTHOR.

SONNET.

What time thy neck and shoulders thou didst place, Submissive, 'neath the Saracenic yoke, And didst uphold, with constancy unbroke Amidst thy bonds, thy faith in God's own grace, Heaven rejoiced, but earth was for a space, Without thee, well-nigh widowed: desolate, Filled with lament and sadness for thy state, Was left the Muses' royal dwelling-place. But since that, from amidst the heathen host, Which kept thee close, thy manly soul and tongue Thou didst unto thy native land restore, Heaven itself of thy bright worth makes boast, The world greets thy return with happy song, And the lost Muses Spain receives once more.

BY DON LUIS DE VARGAS MANRIQUE. SONNET.

In thee the sovran gods their mighty power, Mighty Cervantes, to the world declared. Nature, the first of all, for thee prepared Of her immortal gifts a lavish store: Jove did his lightning on his servant pour, The living word that moves the rocky wall: That thou in purity of style mightst all With ease excel, Diana gave her dower: Mercury taught thee histories to weave: The strength Mars gave thee that doth nerve thine arm: Cupid and Venus all their loves bestowed: 'Twas from Apollo that thou didst receive Concerted song: from the Nine Sisters charm And wisdom: shepherds from the woodland god.

BY LÓPEZ MALDONADO. SONNET.

Out from the sea they issue and return Unto its bosom when their course is o'er, As to the All-Mother they return once more, The children who have left her long forlorn. She is not lesser made whene'er they go, Nor prouder when their presence they restore; For she remaineth whole from shore to shore, And with her waters aye her pools o'erflow. Thou art the sea, oh Galatea fair! The rivers are thy praises, the reward Whereby thou winnest immortality. The more thou givest to us, thou canst spare The more; though all before thy feet have poured Their tribute, yet thou canst not greater be.

GALATEA.