Cervantes survived the publication of _Don Quixote_ some six months--long enough to see the false Second Part routed and extinguished by his own all-conquering creation. Inspired to renewed activity by the chorus of praise which greeted his latest production, we find him, in his 69th year, arranging his plans for the output of three more works--_The Weeks of the Garden_, the second part of the _Galatea_, and the _Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda_, which latter was to be “either the worst or the best of books of entertainment in our language.” The sequel to the _Galatea_ and the projected _Weeks of the Garden_ were probably never commenced, although he refers to them both again in the prologue to _Persiles_, which was written on his death-bed, and published by his widow in 1617. Although _Persiles and Sigismunda_ has been extravagantly praised by Valdivielso--“Of the many books written by Cervantes,” he says, “none is more ingenious, more cultured, or more entertaining”--and although it has gone into more editions than any of the minor works of its author, this return to the monstrous artificial style which he had been the means of destroying, is a paradoxical and incomprehensible variant of his genius. In the last chapter of _Don Quixote_ he had caused the Knight to aver: “I now declare myself an enemy to Amadis de Gaul, and his whole generation; all stories of knight-errantry I detest.” Yet within a few months of writing this passage he was engaged in completing a conglomeration of adventures, experienced by a pair of impossible lovers, under every kind of impossible condition. The Spanish critics admire the book for the beauty and correctness of the language, and the grace and charm of its style, but, as a work of creative art, it lacks invention and originality; and, as a piece of fiction--a “pastime for the melancholy and mopish soul”--it is tedious and ineffective.