Cervantes is admittedly a wonderful creator; but the pastoral of his time--a pastiche or mosaic of conventional figures--gave him no opportunity of displaying his powers as an inventor. He is also a very great prose-writer, ranging with an easy mastery from the loftiest rhetoric to the quick thrust-and-parry of humoristic colloquy. Still, as has often been remarked, his attention is apt to wander, and vigilant grammarians have detected (and chronicled) slips in his most brilliant chapters. In the matter of correctness, the _Galatea_ compares favourably with _Don Quixote_, and its style has been warmly eulogized by the majority of critics. And, on the whole, the praise is deserved. The _Galatea_ is (one fancies) the result of much deliberation--the preliminary essay of a writer no longer young indeed, but abounding in hope, in courage, and in knowledge of the best literary models which his country had produced. The First Part of _Don Quixote_ was dashed off at odds and ends of time by a man acquainted with rebuffs, poverty, disastrous failure of every kind. Purists may point to five grammatical flaws in _Don Quixote_ for one in the _Galatea_, and naturally the latter gains by this comparison. But, whatever the technical weaknesses of _Don Quixote_, that book has the supreme merit of allowing Cervantes to be himself. In the _Galatea_ he is, so far as his means allow, Virgil, Longus, Boccaccio, Petrarch, León Hebreo, Sannazaro, Montemôr--even the unhappy Pérez--every one, in fact, but himself. Hence, in the very nature of things, the smoothly filed periods of this first romance cease to be characteristic of the writer, and have even led some to charge him with being a corrupter of the language, a _culto_ before _culteranismo_ was invented.[78]