The pragmatical cant and the moral reflections which weary us as much as they wearied the French translator, Le Sage, were clearly to the liking of Ben Jonson and his contemporaries. Guzmán's experiences as boots at an inn, as a thief in Madrid, as a soldier at Genoa, as a jester at Rome, are told with a certain impudent spirit; but the "moral intention" of the author obtrudes itself with an insistence that defeats its own object, and the subsidiary tales of Dorido and Clorinia, of Osmín and Daraja—a device imitated in _Don Quixote_—are digressions of neither interest nor relevancy. The popularity of the book was so great as to induce imitation. While Alemán was busied with his devout _Vida de San Antonio de Padua_ (1604), or perhaps with his fragmentary versions of Horace, a spurious sequel was published (1601) by a Valencian lawyer, Juan Martí, who took the pseudonym of Mateo Luján de Sayavedra. Martí had somehow managed to see Alemán's manuscript of the Second Part, and, in so much, his trick was far baser than Avellaneda's. Alemán's self-control under greater provocation contrasts most favourably with Cervantes' petulance. In the true Second Part he good-humouredly acknowledges his competitor's "great learning, his nimble wit, his deep judgment, his pleasant conceits"; and he adds that "his discourses throughout are of that quality and condition that I do much envy them, and should be proud that they were mine." And having thus put his rival in the wrong, Alemán proceeds to introduce among his personages a Sayavedra who would pass himself off as a native of Seville:—"but all were lies that he told me; for he was of Valencia, whose name, for some just causes, I conceal." Sayavedra figures as Guzmán's bonnet and jackal till he ends by suicide, and he is made to supply whatever entertainment the book contains. Far below _Lazarillo de Tormes_ in caustic observation and in humour, _Guzmán de Alfarache_ is a rapid and easy study of blackguardism, forcible and diverting despite its unctuousness, and written in admirable prose.