Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/53

 Rh no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time Avellaneda's volume was no doubt written.

In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless, accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness, and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason for this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he had the impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself, supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably. It has been suggested that he was Luis de Aliaga, the King's confessor; Andres Perez, the author of the "Picara Justina;" Bartolome de Argensola, the poet; Cervantes' old enemy, Blanco de Paz; Alarcon, the dramatist; even the great Lope himself; but the wildest surmise of all was that of the late Rawdon Brown, who put in a claim for the German scholar Gaspar Scöppe, or Scioppius, apparently because he was quarrelsome and happened to be in Spain about this time.

Neither the question nor the book would ever have been heard of outside the circle of bookworms had Cervantes only behaved as Aleman did when his continuation of "Guzman de Alfarache" was forestalled by Juan Marti. But the persistence and the vehemence of his invective sent readers to the book who would otherwise never have troubled themselves about it. In its own day it fell dead from the press, for the second edition in 1615 mentioned by Ebert is purely imaginary. But Blas de Nasarre, an early specimen of a type of littérateur now common, saw in Cervantes' vituperation a sufficient