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The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower

Unfinished must remain.ssss1

The pastorals lived on for many years in Spainssss1 and out of it; but Don Quixote, the Novelas exemplares, Guzmán de Alfarache, and the growing crowd of picaresque realistic tales had so completely supplanted them in popular favour that Cervantes himself could scarcely have worked the miracle of restoring their former vogue among his countrymen.

Sr. D. Ramón León Máinez,ssss1 whose honourable enthusiasm for all that relates to Cervantes forbids his admitting that there are spots on his sun, considers the Galatea to be the best of pastorals, and other whole-hearted admirers (such as August and Friedrich von Schlegel)ssss1 have said as much. This, however, is not the general verdict of those who have read the Galatea from beginning to end, and really such readers are not many. Prescottssss1 cautiously observes that it is "a beautiful specimen of an insipid class." Hazlitt, who may be taken as the honest representative of a numerous constituency, confesses that he does not know the book, and offers an ingenious apology for his remissness. Cervantes, he declares, claims the highest honour which can belong to any author—"that of being the inventor of a new style of writing." But, after this ingratiating prelude, he continues:—"I have never read his Galatea, nor his Loves of Persiles and Sigismunda, though I have often meant to do it, and I hope to do so yet. Perhaps there is a reason lurking at the bottom of this dilatoriness. I am quite sure that the reading of these works could not make me think higher of the author of Don Quixote, and it might, for a moment or two, make me think less." And no doubt it might: just as the reading of Hours of Idleness, of Zastrozzi, and of Clotilde de Lusignan ou le beau Juif might, for a moment or two, make us think less of the authors of Don Juan, of Epipsychidion, and of Eugénie Grandet.