eared towards the end of 1615.
No book more signally contradicts the maxim, quoted by the Bachelor
Carrasco, that "no second part was ever good." It is true that the last
fourteen chapters are damaged by undignified denunciations of
Avellaneda; but, apart from this, the second part of _Don Quixote_ is an
improvement on the first. The humour is more subtle and mature; the
style is of more even excellence; and the characters of the bachelor and
of the physician, Pedro Recio de Aguero, are presented with a more vivid
effect than any of the secondary characters in the first part. Cervantes
had clearly profited by the criticism of those who objected to "the
countless cudgellings inflicted on Senor Don Quixote," and to the
irrelevant interpolation of extraneous stories in the text. Don Quixote
moves through the second part with unruffled dignity; Sancho Panza loses
something of his rustic cunning, but he gains in wit, sense and manners.
The original conception is unchanged in essentials, but it is more
logically developed, and there is a notable progress in construction.
Cervantes had grown to love his knight and squire, and he understood his
own creations better than at the outset; more completely master of his
craft, he wrote his sequel with the unfaltering confidence of a renowned
artist bent on sustaining his reputation.

The first part of _Don Quixote_ had been reprinted at Madrid in 1608; it
had been produced at Brussels in 1607 and 1611, and at Milan in 1610; it
had been translated into English in 1612 and into French in 1614.
Cervantes was celebrated in and out of Spain, but his celebrity had not
brought him wealth. The members of the French special embassy, sent to
Madrid in February 1615, under the Commandeur de Sillery, heard with
amazement that the author of the _Galatea_, the _Novelas exemplares_ and
_Don Quixote_ was "old, a soldier, a gentleman and poor." But his trials
were almost at an end. Though failing in health, he worked assiduously
at _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_, which, as he had jocosely
prophesied in the preface to the second part of _Don Quixote_, would be
"either the worst or the best book ever written in our tongue." It is
the most carefully written of his prose works, and the least animated or
attractive of them; signs of fatigue and of waning powers are
unmistakably visible. Cervantes was not destined to see it in print. He
was attacked by dropsy, and, on the 18th of April 1616, receiv