This was, probably, owing in part to the different direction of his original genius, and in part to the condition of the theatre, which in his youth he had found open to every kind of experiment and really settled in nothing. But whatever may have been the cause of his failure, the failure itself has been a great stumbling-block in the way of Spanish critics, who have resorted to somewhat violent means in order to prevent the reputation of Cervantes from being burdened with it. Thus, Blas de Nasarre, the king’s librarian,--who, in 1749, published the first edition of these unsuccessful dramas that had appeared since they were printed above a century earlier,--would persuade us, in his Preface, that they were written by Cervantes to parody and caricature the theatre of Lope de Vega;[150] though, setting aside all that at once presents itself from the personal relations of the parties, nothing can be more serious than the interest Cervantes took in the fate of his plays, and the confidence he expressed in their dramatic merit; while, at the same time, not a line has ever been pointed out as a parody in any one of them.[151] [150] See the early part of the “Prólogo del que hace imprimir.” I am not certain that Blas de Nasarre was perfectly fair in all this; for he printed, in 1732, an edition of Avellaneda’s continuation of Don Quixote, in the Preface to which he says that he thinks the character of Avellaneda’s Sancho is more natural than that of Cervantes’s Sancho; that the Second Part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is taken from Avellaneda’s; and that, in its essential merits, the work of Avellaneda is equal to that of Cervantes. “No se puede disputar,” he says, “la gloria de la invencion de Cervantes, aunque no es inferior la de la imitacion de Avellaneda”; to which he adds afterwards, “Es cierto que es necesario mayor esfuerzo de ingenio para añadir á las primeras invenciones, que para hacerlas.” (See Avellaneda, Don Quixote, Madrid, 1805, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 34.) Now, the _Juicio_, or Preface, from which these opinions are taken, and which is really the work of Nasarre, is announced by him, not as his own, but as the work of an anonymous friend, precisely as if he were not willing to avow such opinions under his own name. (Pellicer’s Vida de Cervantes, ed. Don Quixote, I. p. clxvi.) In this way a disingenuous look is given to what would otherwise have been only an absurdity; and what, taken in connection with this reprint of Cervantes’s poor dramas and the Preface to them, seems like a willingness to let down the reputation of a genius that Nasarre could not comprehend.