[192] Conde, the learned author of the “Dominacion de los Árabes en España,” undertakes, in a pamphlet published in conjunction with J. A. Pellicer, to show that the name of this pretended Arabic author, _Cid Hamete Benengeli_, is a combination of Arabic words, meaning _noble, satirical, and unhappy_. (Carta en Castellano, etc., Madrid, 1800, 12mo, pp. 16-27.) It may be so; but it is not in character for Cervantes to seek such refinements, or to make such a display of his little learning, which does not seem to have extended beyond a knowledge of the vulgar Arabic spoken in Barbary, the Latin, the Italian, and the Portuguese. Like Shakspeare, however, Cervantes had read and remembered nearly all that had been printed in his own language, and constantly makes the most felicitous allusions to the large stores of his knowledge of this sort. [193] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 54. [194] The criticism on Avellaneda begins, as we have said, Parte II. c. 59. But this is not all. As if still further to accumulate contradictions and incongruities, the very details of the story he has invented are often in whimsical conflict with each other, as well as with the historical facts to which they allude. Thus, on one occasion, the scenes which he had represented as having occurred in the course of a single evening and the following morning are said to have occupied two days;[195] on another, he sets a company down to a late supper, and, after conversations and stories that must have carried them nearly through the night, he says, “It began to draw towards evening.”[196] In different places he calls the same individual by different names, and--what is rather amusing--once reproaches Avellaneda with a mistake which was, after all, his own.[197] And finally, having discovered the inconsequence of saying seven times that Sancho was on his mule after Gines de Passamonte had stolen it, he took pains, in the only edition of the First Part that he ever revised, to correct two of his blunders,--heedlessly overlooking the rest; and when he published the Second Part, laughed heartily at the whole,--the errors, the corrections, and all,--as things of little consequence to himself or any body else.[198] [195] Parte I. c. 46. [196] “Llegaba ya la noche,” he says in c. 42 of Parte I., when all that had occurred from the middle of c. 37 had happened after they were set down to supper. [197] Cervantes calls Sancho’s wife by three or four different names (Parte I. c. 7 and 52, and Parte II. c. 5 and 59); and Avellaneda having, in some degree, imitated him, Cervantes makes himself very merry at the confusion; not noticing that the mistake was really his own.