books of chivalry, and but for Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to Barataria.
From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field, and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his task and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. The conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of work—the last chapter, indeed, is a curiosity of slovenly writing—and the frequent repetition of the scoldings administered to Avellaneda becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusion, and for that we must thank Avellaneda.
The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put together the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years, and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, and published them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, in which he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his own attempts as a dramatist. As for the interludes (eutremeses) they are mere farcical scenes without any pretence to a plot, but not without a certain amount of life and humor. With regard to the comedies, the unanimity of opinion is remarkable. Every one seems to approach them with the hope of finding them not altogether unworthy of Cervantes, not altogether the poor productions the critics have pronounced them, and every reader is compelled in the end reluctantly to give them up, and own, in the words of M. Emile Chasles, that "on se croirait à mille lieues du bon sens viril qui éclatera dans 'Don Quichotte.'" Nothing, perhaps, gives a better idea of their character and quality than that Bias de Nasarre, who published the second edition in 1749, should have, in perfect seriousness, advanced the theory that Cervantes wrote them with an object somewhat similar to that of "Don Quixote," in fact as burlesques upon the silly senseless plays of the day; and indeed had the "Rufian Dichoso" been written forty years later there would be nothing primâ facie absurd in supposing it a caricature of Calderon's mystic devotional dramas. It is needless to say
