We owe to Avellaneda a clever, brutal, cynical, amusing book, which is still reprinted. Nor is this our only debt to him: he put an end to Cervantes' dawdling and procured the publication of the second _Don Quixote_. Cervantes left it doubtful if he meant to write the sequel; he even seems to invite another to undertake it. Nine years had passed, during which Cervantes made no sign. Avellaneda, with an eye to profit, wrote his continuation in good faith, and his insolent Preface is explained by his rage at seeing the bread taken out of his mouth when the true sequel was announced in the Preface to the _Novelas_. Had not his intrusion stung Cervantes to the quick, the second _Don Quixote_ might have met the fate of the second _Galatea_—promised for thirty years and never finished. As it is, the hurried close of the Second Part is below the writer's common level, as when he rages at Avellaneda, and wishes that the latter's book be "cast into the lowest pit of hell." But this is its single fault, which, for the rest, is only found in the last fourteen chapters. The previous fifty-eight form an almost impeccable masterpiece. As an achievement in style, the Second excels the First Part. The parody of chivalresque books is less insistent, the interest is larger, the variety of episode is ampler, the spirit more subtly comic, the new characters are more convincing, the manner is more urbane, more assured. Cervantes' First Part was an experiment in which he himself but half believed; in the Second he shows the certainty of an accepted master, confident of his intention and his popularity. So his career closed in a blaze of triumph. He had other works in hand: a play to be called _El Engaño á los Ojos_, the _Semanas del Jardín_, the _Famoso Bernardo_, and the eternal second _Galatea_. These last three he promises in the Preface to _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_ (1617), a posthumous volume "that dares to vie with Heliodorus," and was to be "the best or worst book ever written in our tongue." Ambitious in aim and in manner, the _Persiles_ has failed to interest, for all its adventures and scapes. Yet it contains perhaps the finest, and certainly the most pathetic passage that Cervantes ever penned—the noble dedication to his patron, the Conde de Lemos, signed upon April 19, 1616. In the last grip of dropsy, he gaily quotes from a _romance_ remembered from long ago:— "_Puesto ya el pié en el estribo_"—