an opinion which Childe Harold found in Spain when he was there, and could have found at any time for two hundred years before.
[98] The “Menina e Moça” is the graceful little fragment of a prose pastoral, by Bernardino Ribeyro, which dates from about 1500, and has always been admired, as indeed it deserves to be. It gets its name from the two words with which it begins,—“Small and young”; a quaint circumstance, showing its extreme popularity with those classes that were little in the habit of referring to books by their formal titles.
[99] “Estas primicias de mi corto ingenio.” Dedicatoria.
[100] “Muchos de los disfrazados pastores della lo eran solo en el hábito.”
[101] “Cuyas razones y argumentos mas parecen de ingenios entre libros y las aulas criados que no de aquellos que entre pagizas cabañas son crecidos.” (Libro IV. Tomo II. p. 90.) This was intended, no doubt, at the same time, as a compliment to Figueroa, etc.
[102] The chief actors in the Galatea visit the tomb of Mendoza, in the sixth book, under the guidance of a wise and gentle Christian priest; and when there, Calliope strangely appears to them and pronounces a tedious poetical eulogium on a vast number of the contemporary Spanish poets, most of whom are now forgotten. The Galatea was abridged by Florian, at the end of the eighteenth century, and reproduced, with an appropriate conclusion, in a prose pastoral, which, in the days when Gessner was so popular, was frequently reprinted. In this form, it is by no means without grace.
[103] In the Dedication to “Persiles y Sigismunda,” 1616, April 19th, only four days before his death.
[104] Parte Primera, cap. 6.
[105] He alludes, I think, but twice in all his works to Esquivias; and, both times, it is to praise its wines. The first is in the “Cueva de Salamanca,” (Comedias, 1749, Tom. II. p. 313), and the last is in the Prólogo to “Persiles y Sigismunda,” though in the latter he speaks, also, of its “ilustres linages.”
[106] See the end of Pellicer’s Life of Cervantes, prefixed to his edition of Don Quixote (Tom. I. p. ccv.). There seems to have been an earlier connection between the family of Cervantes and that of his bride, for the lady’s mother had been named executrix of his father’s will, who died while Cervantes himself was a slave in Algiers.