One of the most attractive characteristics of _Don Quixote_ is its maturity; it may not have taken more than three or four years to write, but it embodies the experience of a lifetime, and it breathes an air of urbanity and leisure. Cervantes was not an exceptionally rapid writer, and—if he thought about the matter at all—probably knew that masterpieces are seldom produced in a hurry. His great rival Lope de Vega easily surpassed him in brilliant facility: Cervantes’s mind was weightier, less fleet but more precise. In the closing sentences of _Don Quixote_ he had half promised a continuation, and no doubt it occupied his thoughts for many years. He had set himself a most formidable task—the task of equalling himself at his best—and he may well have shrunk from it, for he was risking his hard-won reputation on a doubtful hazard. He was in no haste to put his fortune to the touch. He sank into a pregnant silence, pondered over the technique of his great design, and, with the exception of an occasional sonnet, published nothing for eight years. At last in 1613 he issued his _Novelas Exemplares_, twelve short stories, the composition of which was spread over a long space of time. One of these, _Rinconete y Cortadillo_, is mentioned in _Don Quixote_, and must therefore date from 1602 or earlier; a companion story, the _Coloquio de los Perros_, is assigned to 1608; and the remaining ten are plausibly believed to have been written between these dates. The two tales just mentioned are the gems of the collection, but _La Gitanilla_ and _El Celoso extremeño_ are scarcely less striking, and certainly seven out of the dozen are models of realistic art. Cervantes was never troubled by mock-modesty, and ingenuously asserts that he was ‘the first to attempt novels in the Castilian tongue, for the many which wander about in print in Spanish are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen.’ There were earlier collections of stories (from one of which—Eslava’s _Noches de Invierno_—Shakespeare contrived to borrow the plot of _The Tempest_), but they are eclipsed by the _Novelas Exemplares_. These, in their turn, are overshadowed by _Don Quixote_, but they would suffice to make the reputation of any novelist by their fine invention and engaging fusion of truth with fantasy. The harshest of native critics yielded to the spell, and the _Novelas Exemplares_ were skilfully exploited by John Fletcher and by Middleton and Rowley in England, as well as by Hardy in France.