Nothing remains, therefore, but to confess--what seems, indeed, to be quite incontestable--that Cervantes wrote several plays which fell seriously below what might have been hoped from him. Passages, indeed, may be found in them where his genius asserts itself. “The Labyrinth of Love,” for instance, has a chivalrous air and plot that make it interesting; and the Entremes of “The Pretended Biscayan,” contains specimens of the peculiar humor with which we always associate the name of its author. But it is quite too probable that he had made up his mind to sacrifice his own opinions respecting the drama to the popular taste; and if the constraint he thus laid upon himself was one of the causes of his failure, it only affords another ground for our interest in the fate of one whose whole career was so deeply marked with trials and calamity.[153] [153] There can be little doubt, I think, that this was the case, if we compare the opinions expressed by the canon on the subject of the drama in the 48th chapter of the First Part of Don Quixote, 1605, and the opinions in the opening of the third _jornada_ of the “Baños de Argel,” 1615. But the life of Cervantes, with all its troubles and sufferings, was now fast drawing to a close. In October of the same year, 1615, he published the Second Part of his Don Quixote; and in its Dedication to the Count de Lemos, who had for some time favored him,[154] he alludes to his failing health, and intimates that he hardly looked for the continuance of life beyond a few months. His spirits, however, which had survived his sufferings in the Levant, at Algiers, and in prisons at home, and which, as he approached his seventieth year, had been sufficient to produce a work like the Second Part of Don Quixote, did not forsake him, now that his strength was wasting away under the influence of disease and old age. On the contrary, with unabated vivacity he urged forward his romance of “Persiles and Sigismunda”; anxious only that life enough should be allowed him to finish it, as the last offering of his gratitude to his generous patron. In the spring he went to Esquivias, where was the little estate he had received with his wife, and after his return wrote a Preface to his unpublished romance, full of a delightful and simple humor, in which he tells a pleasant story of being overtaken in his ride back to Madrid by a medical student, who gave him much good advice about the dropsy, under which he was suffering; to which he replied, that his pulse had already warned him that he was not to live beyond the next Sunday. “And so,” says he, at the conclusion of this remarkable Preface, “farewell to jesting, farewell my merry humors, farewell my gay friends, for I feel that I am dying, and have no desire but soon to see you happy in the other life.”