Cervantes had now so unquestionably succeeded in prose that he was tempted to bid for fame as a poet. He mistrusted his own powers, and, as the event proved, with reason. His _Viage del Parnaso_, published in 1614, commemorated the most prominent versifiers of the day in a spirit of mingled appreciation and satirical criticism. It is very doubtful whether there have been so many great poets in the history of the world as Cervantes descried among his Spanish contemporaries, and his compliments are too effusive and too universal to be effective. A noble amateur, a potential patron, is lauded as extravagantly as though he were the equal of Lope or Góngora, and the occasional excursions into satire are mostly pointless. There are more wit, and pungency, and concentrated force in any two pages of _English Bards and Scotch Reviewers_ than in all the cantos of the _Viage del Parnaso_ put together. It cannot be merely owing to temperamental differences that Byron succeeds where Cervantes fails. There are splenetic passages in the _Viage_ relating to such writers as Bernardo de la Vega and the author of _La Pícara Justina_, but they miss their mark. The simple truth is—not that Cervantes was willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, but—that he had no complete mastery of his instrument. His instinct was right; he moves uneasily in the fetters of verse, and only becomes himself in the prose appendix to the _Viage_ which (as the internal evidence discloses) was written side by side with the Second Part of _Don Quixote_. His true vehicle was prose, but he was reluctant to abide by the limitations of his genius, and while the sequel to _Don Quixote_ was maturing, he produced a volume of plays containing eight formal full-dress dramas and eight sparkling interludes. By sympathy and by training Cervantes belonged to the older school of dramatists, and his attempts to rival Lope de Vega on Lope’s own ground are mostly embarrassed and, in some cases, curiously maladroit; yet he displays a happy malicious humour in the less ambitious interludes, and, when he betakes himself to prose, he captivates by the spontaneous wit and nimble gaiety of his dialogue. These thumbnail sketches, like the kit-cats of the _Novelas Exemplares_, may be regarded as so many studies for the Second Part of _Don Quixote_, at which Cervantes was still working.