[94] The first three editions, those of Madrid, Barcelona, and Saragossa, are well known, and are all of 1599; but most of the remaining three-and-twenty rest on the authority of Valdes, in a letter prefixed to the first edition of the second part, (Valencia, 1605, 12mo,) an authority, however, which there seems no sufficient reason to question, remarkable as the story is. Valdes says expressly, “The number of printed volumes exceeds fifty thousand, and the number of impressions that have come to my notice is twenty-six.” [95] This continuation, not quite so long as the first part of the original work, was printed at Madrid, 1846, 8vo, in the third volume of the “Biblioteca” of Aribau. Previously, it had been hardly known in literary history, and much overlooked by the bibliographers; Ebert, who had found some traces of it, attributing it to Aleman himself, and considering it as a true second part of the Guzman. But this is a mistake. Both Aleman himself and his friend Valdes are explicit on the subject, in their epistles prefixed to the first edition of the second part;--Valdes declaring that the author of the continuation in question was “a Valencian, who, falsifying his own name, called himself Mateo Luxan, to assimilate himself to Mateo Aleman.” Aleman himself says he was obliged to rewrite his second part, because he had, through a prodigal communication of his papers, been robbed and defrauded of the materials out of which he had originally composed it. The work of the Valencian was printed at Barcelona in 1603, at Brussels, 1604, etc. On the title-page to the first edition of the genuine second part Aleman says, “Let the reader take notice, that the second part published before this is none of mine, and that this is the only one I recognize.” Fuster, in his “Biblioteca,” Tom. I. p. 198, gives strong reasons for supposing the spurious second part was written by Juan Marti, a Valencian advocate. In 1605, the genuine second part appeared.[96] It begins with the life of Guzman in the house of the French ambassador at Rome, where he serves in some of the most dishonorable employments to which the great of that period degraded their mercenary dependants. But his own follies and crimes drive him away from a place for which he seems to have been in most respects well fitted, and he goes to Siena. At this point in his story, it seems to have occurred to Aleman to attack the Sayavedra who had endeavoured to impose upon the world with a false second part of the Guzman. He therefore introduces a person who is made thus to describe himself:--