Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/242

 his humble public office; he was doing something vastly more important for us all; he was contemplating the composition of the "Don Quixote." Legend has it that he wrote the "Don Quixote" in prison, but the legend is based on an unjustifiable interpretation of a passage in the Prologue to that novel. Still, the first thought of it may have occurred to him in the enforced leisure of some one of his incarcerations, although the chances are that the actual writing of the First Part extended over some years of the last decade of the sixteenth century and through the first three or four years of the seventeenth. In 1605 the first edition of the First Part appeared, and the story met with an acclaim which called forth speedily new editions at home and abroad, and no few translations into foreign languages.

THE EXEMPLARY TALES

But eleven years more of life remained for Cervantes, and during these, in so far as our knowledge goes, he met with no more worldly prosperity than in the past; although it is possible that his pecuniary distress was alleviated somewhat by modest returns from his books, and by the bounty of his patron, the Conde de Lemos. In one of the chapters of the First Part of the "Don Quixote" Cervantes mentions by name a little tale of roguish doings, the "Rinconete y Cortadillo." This, his own composition, reappears with eleven additional short stories in the collection entitled "Novelas ejamplares," which was issued from the press in 1612. Had he written nothing but the "Exemplary Tales," his fame would be secure in the annals of Spanish literature. They were the best-framed short stories so far produced in Spanish; they are interesting and realistic, although at times brutally offensive to morality. One of the proofs of the interest that they excited abroad is to be found in the fact that English dramatists like Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton, and Rowley drew upon them for the plots of some of their plays.

While composing these dramatic pieces, Cervantes was carrying on apace a sequel to the First Part of the "Don Quixote." This Second Part and conclusion of the story of the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza he completed hurriedly and published in 1615, upon learning that a spurious Second Part had been put forth at Tarragona in Aragon in 1614 by a person who