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pains to extract a meaning from these lines. The truth is they have none, and were not meant to have any. If it were not profanity to apply the word to anything coming from Cervantes, they might be called mere pieces of buffoonery, mere idle freaks of the author's pen. The verse in which they are written is worthy of the matter. It is of the sort called in Spanish de piés cortados, its peculiarity being that each line ends with a word the last syllable of which has been lopped off. The invention has been attributed to Cervantes, but the honor is one which no admirer of his will be solicitous to claim for him, and in fact there are half a dozen specimens in the Picara Justina, a book published if anything earlier than Don Quixote. I have here imitated the tour de force as well as I could, an experiment never before attempted and certainly not worth repeating. The "Urganda" verses are written in the same fashion, but I did not feel bound to try the reader's patience—or my own—by a more extended reproduction of the puerility.