Nor does he himself permit us to give to his romance any such secret meaning; for, at the very beginning of the work, he announces it to be his sole purpose to break down the vogue and authority of books of chivalry, and, at the end of the whole, he declares anew, in his own person, that “he had had no other desire than to render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry”;[169] exulting in his success, as an achievement of no small moment. And such, in fact, it was; for we have abundant proof that the fanaticism for these romances was so great in Spain, during the sixteenth century, as to have become matter of alarm to the more judicious. Many of the distinguished contemporary authors speak of its mischiefs, and among the rest the venerable Luis de Granada, and Malon de Chaide, who wrote the eloquent “Conversion of Mary Magdalen.”[170] Guevara, the learned and fortunate courtier of Charles the Fifth, declares that “men did read nothing in his time but such shameful books as ‘Amadis de Gaula,’ ‘Tristan,’ ‘Primaleon,’ and the like”;[171] the acute author of “The Dialogue on Languages” says that “the ten years he passed at court he wasted in studying ‘Florisando,’ ‘Lisuarte,’ ‘The Knight of the Cross,’ and other such books, more than he can name”;[172] and from different sources we know, what, indeed, we may gather from Cervantes himself, that many who read these fictions took them for true histories.[173] At last, they were deemed so noxious, that, in 1553, they were prohibited by law from being printed or sold in the American colonies, and in 1555 the same prohibition, and even the burning of all copies of them extant in Spain itself, was earnestly asked for by the Cortes.[174] The evil, in fact, had become formidable, and the wise began to see it.