On this point, as on most details affecting Cervantes, Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly is emphatic in his conclusion, and he accepts the decision by Máinez, that if the hand is the hand of Avellaneda, the voice is the voice of Lope de Vega. He finds in the character of the celebrated dramatist the temperamental fitness for such a task, and he locates the incentive in his unsupportable jealousy. “Till _Don Quixote_ appeared no rival had ever dared to come within the shadow of his throne, and its lasting success was torment to his soul. It was too plain that the world had gone stark mad, captivated by the book of the poverty-stricken, maimed wanderer who, after a life of squalid failure, had had the assurance to produce a masterpiece. It was no longer possible to kill _Don Quixote_ by the cheap sneer that no one was such an ass as to praise it. Lope had played that card, and no longer cherished any such delusion.... But it was still possible to injure; still possible to defame; still possible to rob the old man of a few doubloons; still possible to deride him, to wound his pride, to forestall his market by writing a continuation of the accursed volume which had dared to thrust itself [Illustration: DON QUIXOTE ABSORBED IN THE READING OF BOOKS ON KNIGHT ERRANTRY. _Paris, 1845._ _41st Edition._] between Lope and the public;” and so, though other biographers may canvass every contemporary writer and weigh the relative qualifications and provocations of envious poets and resentful prelates, Mr. Kelly refuses to look beyond Lope de Vega for the author of the false Second Part of _Don Quixote_. Germond de Lavigne, with a sophistry, inspired, we may suppose, by admiration of Vega, declared that we owe a debt to Avellaneda, seeing that but for him _Don Quixote_ would have remained a mere _torso_, instead of a complete work. Such a piece of special pleading is, of course, fallacious, since Cervantes had pledged himself to produce a second part, and the book must have been nearing completion, in 1614, when Avellaneda’s travesty was published. It is evident that he had progressed as far as the nineteenth chapter, and was within ten chapters of the end, when the Tarragonese bastard was put into circulation, and Cervantes, changing his published plan of procedure, turns Don Quixote from his purpose of entering the lists at Zaragoza and hurries him off to Barcelona. With this counterfeit upon the market Cervantes could no longer pursue the leisurely tenor of his way, and the injury he had received spurred him to new flights of pungent humour. But although our author in this Second Part of _Don Quixote_ deals with his enemy with dignified restraint, and introduces him in person to drub him with the jester’s bladder, rather than becudgel him with his own club, we descry in the dedication of his last book of comedies (1615) how keenly he felt the smart.