IS INSCRIBED BY THE TRANSLATOR. [Illustration] PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR. This Romance was the last work of Cervantes, the dedication to the Count de Lemos was written the day after he had received extreme unction; he died four days after, on the 23rd of April 1616, aged 67. On that same day in that same year England lost her Shakespeare.[A] In the Preface to this edition, the Editor says, "Not a few are there among the wise and learned, who, notwithstanding the well-known merit of all the works of the famous Spaniard, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and in spite of the oft repeated praises lavished especially upon the Life and Deeds of Don Quixote de la Mancha, which has ever held the foremost place in the estimation of the public, yet give the preference above all to The Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda, which I am about to present to the public anew in this edition." It seems, too, that this was the opinion of Cervantes himself; for in his dedication to the Count de Lemos, which is affixed to the second part of Don Quixote, he says, "offering to your Excellency the Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda, a book I hope to finish in about four months (Deo volente), which is to be either the very best or the very worst hitherto composed in our language, I speak of books of entertainment, and indeed I repent of having said, the very worst, because, according to the opinion of my friends, it will reach the extreme of goodness." Sismondi also says the same in speaking of this work, and of its estimation in Spain; but he goes on to observe, "a foreigner will not, I should imagine, concede to it so much merit: it is the offspring of a rich, but at the same time of a wandering imagination, which confines itself within no bounds of the possible or the probable, and which is not sufficiently founded on reality. He has entitled this Romance 'A Northern Story,' and his complete ignorance of the North, in which his scene is laid, and which he imagines to be a land of Barbarians, Anthropophagi, Pagans, and Enchanters, is sufficiently singular." The truth of this cannot be denied; but I believe that it has never yet been translated into English,[B] and, as it certainly possesses great merits in spite of the absurdities, and a good deal of imagination as well as beauty (though I fear much of the latter will be lost in a translation) as a work of Cervantes it appears to me worthy of being introduced to English readers. The plan of the story is plainly imitated from Heliodorus, Bishop of Tricca, in Thessaly, who in his youth wrote a Romance in the Greek language, called The Æthiopian History; or, the Adventures of two Lovers, Chariclea, the daughter of the King of Ethiopia, and Theagenes, a noble Thessalian. He lived in the reigns of Theodosius and Arcadius, about the end of the fourth century.