While Cervantes was writing the fifty-ninth chapter of _Don Quixote's Second Part_, he learned that a spurious continuation had appeared (1614) at Tarragona under the name of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. This has given rise to much angry writing. Avellaneda is doubtless a pseudonym. The King's confessor, Aliaga, has been suspected, on the ground that he was once nicknamed Sancho Panza, and that he thus avenged himself: the idea is absurd, and the fact that Avellaneda makes Sancho more offensive and more vulgar than ever puts the theory out of court. Lope de Vega is also accused of being Avellaneda, and the charge is based on this: that (in a private letter) he once spoke slightingly of _Don Quixote_. The personal relations between the two greatest Spanish men of letters were not cordial. Cervantes had ridiculed Lope in the Prologue to _Don Quixote_, had belittled him as a playwright, and had shown hostility in other ways. Lope, secure in his high seat, made no reply, and in 1612 (in another private letter) he speaks kindly of Cervantes. "Cervantophils" insist upon being too clever by half. They first assert that the outward form of Avellaneda's book was an imitation of _Don Quixote_, and that the intention was "to pass off this spurious Second Part as the true one"; they then contend that Avellaneda's was "a deliberate attempt to spoil the work of Cervantes." These two statements are mutually destructive: one must necessarily be false. It is also argued, first, that Avellaneda's is a worthless book; next, that it was written by Lope, the greatest figure, save Cervantes, in Spanish literature. Lope had many jealous enemies, but no contemporary hints at such a charge, and no proof is offered in support of it now. Indeed the notion, first started by Máinez, is generally abandoned. Other ascriptions, involving Blanco de Paz, Ruiz de Alarcón, Andrés Pérez, are equally futile. The most plausible conjecture, due to D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, is that Avellaneda was a certain Aragonese, Alfonso Lamberto. Lamberto's very obscurity favours this surmise. Had Avellaneda been a figure of great importance, he had been unmasked by Cervantes himself, who assuredly was no coward.