The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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Title: The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes

Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Release Date: December 22, 2004 [EBook #14420]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BOHN'S STANDARD LIBRARY.

THE EXEMPLARY NOVELS

OF

CERVANTES.

THE
EXEMPLARY NOVELS

OF

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA.

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH

BY

WALTER K. KELLY.

LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
1881.

LONDON:
PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.

PREFACE.

It seems to be generally admitted that in rendering the title of a book
from one language into another, the form of the original should be
retained, even at the cost of some deviation from ordinary usage.
Cicero's work _De Officiis_ is never spoken of as a treatise on Moral
Duties, but as Cicero's Offices. Upon the same principle we have not
entitled the following collection of tales, Instructive or Moral; though
it is in this sense that the author applied to them the epithet
_exemplares_, as he states distinctly in his preface. The Spanish word
_exemplo_, from the time of the archpriest of Hita and Don Juan Manuel,
has had the meaning of _instruction_, or _instructive story_.

The "Novelas Exemplares" were first published in 1613, three years
before the death of Cervantes. They are all original, and have the air
of being drawn from his personal experience and observation. Ticknor, in
his "History of Spanish Literature," says of them, and of the
"Impertinent Curiosity," inserted in the first part of Don Quixote:--

"Their value is different, for they are written with different views,
and in a variety of style greater than he has elsewhere shown; but most
of them contain touches of what is peculiar in his talent, and are full
of that rich eloquence and of those pleasing descriptions of natural
scenery which always flo