With this announcement the second part abruptly ends, not without promising a third, which was never published, though the author, in his Preface, says it was already written. The work, therefore, as it has come to us, is imperfect. But it was not, on that account, the less favored and admired. On the contrary, it was translated and printed all over Europe, in French, in Italian, in German, in Portuguese, in English, in Dutch, and even in Latin; a rare success, whose secret lies partly in the age when the Guzman appeared, and still more in the power and talent of the author.[98] The long moralizing discourses with which it abounds, written in a pure Castilian style, with much quaintness and point, were then admired, and saved it from censures which it could otherwise hardly have failed to encounter. These are, no doubt, the passages that led Ben Jonson to speak of it as “The Spanish Proteus, which, though writ But in one tongue, was formed with the world’s wit, And hath the noblest mark of a good booke, That an ill man doth not securely looke Upon it; but will loathe or let it passe, As a deformed face doth a true glasse.”[99] [98] The common bibliographers give lists of all the translations. The first English is by Mabbe, and is excellent. (See Wood’s Athenæ, ed. Bliss, Tom. III. p. 54, and Ret. Review, Tom. V. p. 189.) It went through at least four editions, the fourth being printed at London, 1656, folio; besides which there has been a subsequent translation by several hands, taken, however, I think, from the French of Le Sage. The Latin translation was by Gaspar Ens, and I have seen editions of it referred to as of 1623, 1624, and 1652. Every thing, indeed, shows that the popular success of the Guzman was immense throughout Europe. [99] See the verses prefixed to the translation of Mabbe, and signed by Ben Jonson. This, however, is not its real, or at least not its main character. The Guzman is chiefly curious and interesting because it shows us, in the costume of the times, the life of an ingenious, Machiavellian rogue, who is never at a loss for an expedient; who always treats himself and speaks of himself as an honest and respectable man; and who sometimes goes to mass and says his prayers just before he enters on an extraordinary scheme of roguery, as if on purpose to bring it out in more striking and brilliant relief. So far from being a moral book, therefore, it is a very immoral one, and Le Sage spoke in the spirit of its author, when, in the next century, undertaking to give a new French version of it, he boasted that he “had purged it of its superfluous moral reflections.”[100]