[487] Watt, in his Bibliotheca, art. _Quevedo_, cites an edition of “El Gran Tacaño,” at Zaragoza, 1626; but I do not find it mentioned elsewhere. I know of none earlier than that of 1627. Since that time, it has appeared in the original in a great number of editions, both at home and abroad. Into Italian it was translated by P. Franco, as early as 1634; into French by Genest, the well-known translator of that period, as early as 1644; and into English, anonymously, as early as 1657. Many other versions have been made since;--the last, known to me, being one of Paris, 1843, 8vo, by A. Germond de Lavigne. His translation is made with spirit; but, besides that he has thrust into it passages from other works of Quevedo, and a story by Salas Barbadillo, he has made a multitude of petty additions, alterations, and omissions; some desirable, perhaps, from the indecency of the original, others not; and winds off the whole with a conclusion of his own, which savors of the sentimental and extravagant school of Victor Hugo. There is, also, a translation of it into English, in a collection of some of Quevedo’s works, printed at Edinburgh, in 3 vols., 8vo, 1798; and a German translation in Bertuch’s Magazin der Spanischen und Portug. Litteratur (Dessau, 1781, 8vo, Band II.). But neither of them is to be commended for its fidelity. This, too, is the character of most of his other prose satires, which were chiefly written, or at least published, nearly at the same period of his life;--the interval between his two great imprisonments, when the first had roused up all his indignation against a condition of society which could permit such intolerable injustice as he had suffered, and before the crushing severity of the last had broken down alike his health and his courage. Among them are the treatise “On all Things and many more,”--an attack on pretension and cant; “The Tale of Tales,” which is in ridicule of the too frequent use of proverbs; and “Time’s Proclamation,” which is apparently directed against whatever came uppermost in its author’s thoughts when he was writing it. These, however, with several more of the same sort, may be passed over to speak of a few better known and of more importance.[488] [488] They are in Vols. I. and II. of the edition of his Works, Madrid, 1791, 8vo. The first is called the “Letters of the Knight of the Forceps,” and consists of two-and-twenty notes of a miser to his lady-love, refusing all her applications and hints for money, or for amusements that involve the slightest expense. Nothing can exceed their dexterity, or the ingenuity and wit that seem anxious to defend and vindicate the mean vice, which, after all, they are only making so much the more ridiculous and odious.[489]