A sense of measure, of relative values, is the soul of criticism, and we may be appreciative without condescending to idolatry, or even to flattery. Cervantes was a rapid, facile versifier, and at rare intervals his verses are touched with poetry; but, for the most part, they are imitative, and no imitation, however brilliant, is a title to lasting fame. Imitation in itself is no bad sign in a beginner; it is a healthier symptom than the adoption of methods which are wilfully eccentric; but it is a provisional device, to be used solely as a means of attaining one’s originality. It cannot be said that Cervantes ever acquired a personal manner in verse: if he had, there would be far less division of opinion as to whether he is, or is not, the author of such and such poems. He finally acquired a personal manner in prose, but only after an arduous probation. There are few traces of originality in his earliest prose work, the First Part of _La Galatea_, the pastoral which Cervantes never found time to finish during more than thirty years. I do not think we need suppose that we have lost a masterpiece, though no doubt it would be profoundly interesting to see Cervantes trying to pour new wine into old bottles. The sole interest of the _Galatea_, as we have it, is that it is the first essay in fiction of a great creator who has mistaken his road. There does appear to have existed, long before the composition of the Homeric poems, a primitive pastoral which was popular in character. So historians tell us, and no doubt they are right. But the extant pastoral poetry of Sicily is the latest manifestation of Greek genius, an artistic revolt against the banal conventions of civilisation, an attempt to express a longing for a freer life in a purer air. In other words it is an artificial product. The Virgilian eclogues are still more remote from reality than the idyls of Theocritus: as imitations are bound to be. Artificiality is even more pronounced in the _Arcadia_ of Sannazaro who ‘prosified’ the Virgilian eclogue during the late Renaissance: what else do you expect in an imitation of an imitation? Neither in Sannazaro, nor in his disciple Cervantes, is there a glimpse of real shepherds, nor even of the Theocritean shepherds,— Such as sat listening round Apollo’s pipe, When the great deity, for earth too ripe, Let his divinity o’erflowing die In music, through the vales of Thessaly. What we find in the _Galatea_ is the imitation by Cervantes of Sannazaro’s prose imitation of Virgil’s imitation of Theocritus. To us who wish for nothing better than to read Cervantes himself, his ambition to write like somebody else seems misplaced, not to say grotesque. But then, for most of us, Sannazaro has only a relative importance: to Cervantes, Sannazaro was almost Virgil’s peer.