"Say on," said I, listening to his talk; "how do you propose to make up for my diffidence, and reduce to order this chaos of perplexity I am in?"
To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptize them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.
"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;
and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it;[1] or, if you allude to the power of death, to come in with—
Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turres.
If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malæ. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich:
Donee eris felix nmltos numerabis amicos,
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.[2]
- ↑ Æsop, Fable of the Dog and the Wolf.
- ↑ The distich is not Cato's, but Ovid's; but Hartzenbusch points out that there is a distich of Cato's beginning Cum fueris felix which Cervantes may have originally inserted, substituting the other afterwards as more applicable. Lope de Vega's second name was Felix, and Hartzenbusch thinks the quotation was aimed at him. The Cato is, of course, Dionysius Cato, author of the Disticha de Moribus.
