The volume of eight comedies and eight farces here referred to was published in the same year. A bookseller, being found, willing to take the risks of publishing them, Cervantes tells us in his preface that he “made the venture and sold them to the bookseller, who sent them to the Press. He paid me a reasonable sum for them; I took the money meekly, without making account of the quirks and quibbles of the players. I would they were the best in the world, or, at least, of fair worth.” But the pieces fared no better at the hands of the public than they had with the theatre-managers. Nor did they deserve a better fate, being unworthy of the author of _Don Quixote_, or even of the _Numancia_ of his earlier days. Cervantes, rendered desperate by want, has in these pages deviated from the principles that he had laid down for his own guidance, and his object would appear to be to woo the public by pandering to their debased taste. But as he had before been compelled to give place, as a playwright, to men who possessed a greater share of dramatic sense and fitness, so now he was competing vainly with men, less gifted than himself, who had more accurately gauged the public taste, and were more dexterous in catering for it. In letters, more often than in any other branch of the arts, the man of genius who writes down to his public falls short of success. It is the second-rate writers who undertake seriously the task which the master attempts, with his tongue in his cheek and contempt for his output in his heart, who achieve their object. So Cervantes failed again as a playwright, and he failed so conspicuously that Blas de Nasarre, who republished these poor farces and more inferior comedies in 1749, claimed that the author had written them in ridicule of Lope de Vega, just as he had written _Don Quixote_ in ridicule of the books of chivalry; while his always appreciative biographer, H. E. Watts, concludes that Cervantes “intended them as specimens of the drama which was in vogue in his day, rather than as [Illustration: DON QUIXOTE TILTING AGAINST THE ARMY OF ALIFANFARON. _El Haya, 1746._ _9th Edition._] models of that true art of which we know he had grasped the principles.”