Juan de Timoneda, already noticed as one of the founders of the popular theatre in Spain, was also an early writer of Spanish tales. Indeed, as a bookseller who sought to make profit of whatever was agreeable to the general taste, and who wrote and published in this spirit several volumes of ballads, miscellaneous poetry, and farces, it was quite natural he should adventure in the ways of prose fiction, now become so attractive. His first attempt seems to have been in his “Patrañuelo,” or Story-teller, the first part of which appeared in 1576, but was not continued.[140] [140] Rodriguez, Biblioteca, p. 283. Ximeno, Bib., Tom. I. p. 72. Fuster, Bib., Tom. I. p. 161, Tom. II. p. 530. The “Sobremesa y Alivio de Caminantes,” by Timoneda, printed in 1569, and probably earlier, is merely a collection of a hundred and sixty-one anecdotes and jests, in the manner of Joe Miller, though sometimes cited as a collection of tales. They are preceded by twelve similar anecdotes, by a person who is called Juan Aragones. In all the editions of the “Patrañuelo,” I believe, except the first and that in Aribau’s Biblioteca, there are only twenty-one tales;--the eighth, which is a coarse one borrowed from Ariosto, being omitted. It is a small work, which draws its materials from widely different sources, some of them being found, like the well-known story of Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, in the “Gesta Romanorum,” and some in the Italian masters, like the story of Griselda in Boccaccio, and the one familiar to English readers in the ballad of “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” which Timoneda probably took from Sacchetti.[141] Three or four--of which the first in the volume is one--had already been used in the construction of dramas by Alonso de la Vega and Lope de Rueda. All of them tend to show, what is proved in other ways, that such popular stories had long been a part of the intellectual amusements of a state of society little dependent on books; and, after floating for centuries up and down through the different countries of Europe,--borne by a general tradition or by the minstrels and _Trouveurs_,--were about this period first reduced to writing, and then again passed onward from hand to hand, till they were embodied in some form that became permanent. What, therefore, the _Novellieri_ had been doing in Italy for above two hundred years, Timoneda now undertook to do for Spain. The twenty-two tales of his “Patrañuelo” are not, indeed, connected, like those of the “Decamerone,” but he has given them a uniform character by investing them all with his own easy, if not very pure, style; and thus, without anticipating it, sent them out anew to constitute a part of the settled literature of his country, and to draw after them a long train of similar fictions, some of which bear the most eminent names known among those of Spanish prose-writers.