But whatever he may have been, or whatever he may have suffered, his claims to be remembered are now centred in his “Guzman de Alfarache.” As it has reached us, it is divided into two parts, the first of which was published at Madrid, in 1599. Its hero, who supposed himself to be the son of a decayed and not very reputable Genoese merchant established at Seville, escapes, as a boy, from his mother, after his father’s ruin and death, and plunges into the world upon adventure. He soon finds himself at Madrid, though not till he has passed through the hands of the officers of justice; and there undergoes all sorts of suffering, serving as a scullion to a cook, and as a ragged errand-boy to whomsoever would employ him; until, seizing a good opportunity, he steals a large sum of money that had been intrusted to him, and escapes to Toledo, where he sets up for a gentleman. But there he becomes, in his turn, the victim of a cunning like his own; and, finding his money nearly gone, enlists for the Italian wars. His star is now on the wane. At Barcelona, he again turns sharper and thief. At Genoa and Rome, he sinks to the lowest conditions of a street beggar. But a cardinal picks him up in the last city and makes him his page; a place in which, but for his bold frauds and tricks, he might long have thriven, and which at last he leaves in great distress, from losses at play, and enters the service of the French ambassador. Here the first part ends. It was very successful; falling in with the vices and humors of the times, just as the loose court of Philip the Third, and the corrupting influences of his favorite, the Duke of Lerma, came to offer a sort of carnival to folly and vice, after the hypocrisy and constraints of the last dark years of Philip the Second. The Guzman, therefore, within a twelve-month after it appeared, passed through three editions; and, in less than six years, through twenty-six, besides being translated into French and Italian.[94] It was imitated, too, in a second part by some unknown person, probably by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate, who disguised himself under the name of Mateo Luxan de Sayavedra, and published in 1603 what he boldly called a continuation of the Guzman.[95] But it was a base attempt, which, though not without literary merit, brought upon its author the just reproaches of Aleman, who intimates that his own manuscripts had been improperly used in its composition, and the just sarcasm of Aleman’s friend, Luis de Valdes, who exposed the meanness of the whole fraud.