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The Galatea survives as the first timorous experiment of a daring genius. It had no great vogue in Spain, and it is a mistake to say that "seven editions were called for in the author's lifetime."ssss1 At least, bibliographers know that, if they were called for, they certainly did not appear. As a matter of fact the book was only twice reprinted while Cervantes was alive, and, as neither of these editions was published in Spain, it is possible that he was unaware of their existence. In 1590 the Galatea was reproduced at Lisbon, expurgated of all heathenish allusions by Frey Bertholameu Ferreyra, acting for the Portuguese Inquisition; and this incomplete Portuguese reprint helped to make the pastoral known outside the Peninsula. It so happened that César Oudin, a teacher of Spanish at Paris—where he had already (1608) reprinted the Curioso impertinente,ssss1—travelled through Spain and Portugal during 1610, and in the course of his journey he unsuccessfully endeavoured to obtain a copy of the Alcalá Galatea. He had to be content with a copy of the mutilated Lisbon edition, and this he reprinted in 1611 at Paris,ssss1 probably with an eye to using it as a text-book for his French pupils who were passing through an acute crisis of the pastoral fever. M. Jourdain had not yet put his embarrassing question to his music and dancing masters:—"Pourquoi toujours des bergers?" At all events, there is some evidence to prove that the Galatea was popular in fashionable Parisian circles while Cervantes still lived. In his Aprobación to the Second Part of Don Quixote, the Licenciado Francisco Márquez Torres records that when, on February 25, 1615, he visited the French embassy, he was beset by members of the Envoy's suitessss1 who, taking fire at the mention of Cervantes's name, belauded the First Part of Don Quixote, the Novelas exemplares, and the Galatea—which one of them knew almost by heart.ssss1 It is unlikely that the author himself knew much of the Galatea by heart; but at about this period Honoré d'Urféssss1 had restored the vogue of pastoralism in France, and Márquez Torres's ecstatic Frenchman (if he really existed) only shewed the tendency to exaggeration characteristic of recent converts. He was, very possibly, among the last of the elect in Madrid. One edition—some say two editions—of the Galatea appeared posthumously in 1617: two more editions (provincial, like their immediate predecessor or predecessors) were issued in 1618. Then the dust of a hundred years settled down on all copies of the forgotten book. Three reprints during the eighteenth century, ten reprints during the nineteenth century, satisfied the public demand.ssss1

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