Against all this may be urged the general simplicity and interesting details of the Letters themselves, so appropriate in their tone to the age they illustrate, and the fact, that for above two centuries they have been cited as the highest authority for the events of which they speak; a fact, however, whose importance is diminished when we recollect how rarely a spirit of criticism has shown itself in Spanish historical literature, and that even in Spanish poetry the case of the Bachiller de la Torre is, in some respects, as strong as that of the Bachiller de Cibdareal, and in others yet stronger. At any rate, all we know with tolerable certainty about the Bachelor Cibdareal is, that the first edition of his Letters is a forgery, intended to conceal something, and more likely, I think, intended to conceal the spuriousness of the whole than any thing else.
APPENDIX, D.
ON THE BUSCAPIÉ.
(See Vol. II. pp. 105, etc.)
A good deal has been said within the last seventy years, and especially of late, (1847-49,) about a pamphlet entitled “El Buscapié,”—“The Squib,” or “Search-foot,”—supposed by some persons to have been written by Cervantes, soon after the publication of the First Part of his Don Quixote. The subject, though not one of great consequence, is certainly not without interest, and the facts in relation to it are, I believe, as follows.
In the Life of Cervantes, by Vicente de los Rios, prefixed to the magnificent edition of the Don Quixote published by the Spanish Academy in 1780, (see, ante, Vol. II. p. 52,) it is stated, that, on the appearance of the First Part of that romance, in 1605, the public having, according to a tradition not, I think, earlier recorded, received it with coldness or censure, the author himself published an anonymous pamphlet, called “The Squib,” in which he gave a pleasant critique on his Don Quixote, insinuating that it was a covert satire on sundry well-known and important personages, without, however, in the slightest degree intimating who those personages were; in consequence of which, the public curiosity became much excited, and the Don Quixote obtained such attention as it needed in order to insure its success. (Tom. I. p. xvii.)
In a note appended (p. cxci.) to this statement of the tradition, we have a letter of Don Antonio Ruydiaz,—a person of whom little or nothing is now known, except that Don Vicente declares him to have been a man of learning worthy of credit,—in which letter, under date of December 16, 1775, Don Antonio asserts, that, about sixteen years earlier, he had seen a copy of the Buscapié at the house of the Count of Salceda, and had read it;—that it was a small anonymous volume, printed at Madrid with a good type and on poor paper;—that it pretended to be written by a person who had neglected to buy or read the Don Quixote for some time after its first appearance, but who, having at last bought and read it, had been filled with admiration at its merits and resolved in consequence to make them known;—that this Buscapié declared the characters in the Don Quixote to be, in the main, imaginary, but yet insinuated that they had certain relations to the designs and gallantries of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and of some of the principal personages in his government;—and that the Count de Salceda being dead, and the copy of the Buscapié in question having been only lent to that nobleman by some person unknown to the writer of the letter, he could give no further account of the matter.
This statement, differing, it will be noted, from the tradition recorded in the text to which it is appended, in what relates to the Emperor Charles the Fifth, was not, on the whole, deemed satisfactory. Pellicer, besides other strong doubts, doubted whether Cervantes wrote the pamphlet, even if all the rest related of it were true, (Don Quixote, ed. 1797, Tom. I. p. xcvii.,) and Navarrete inclined to the opinion, that there was some mistake about the whole affair, and that Cervantes could never have intended to allude to the Emperor in the way intimated (Vida de Cervantes, 1819, § 105, etc.); to which Clemencin has since added the suggestion, that the copy of the Buscapié, alleged to have been seen by Ruydiaz, might have been a forgery cunningly imposed on the Count of Salceda, who was “rich and greedy”—rico y goloso—in such matters (ed. D. Quixote, Tom. IV., 1835, p. 50). Indeed, the intimations concerning Charles the Fifth were so absurd in themselves, and the fact,—unknown when the Academy published their edition of 1780,—that four editions of the First Part of Don Quixote were, within a year from the date of its appearance, demanded in order to satisfy the impatient curiosity of the public, is so decisive of its popular success from the outset, that men were, before long, disposed to believe that there never was a Buscapié written by any body. After a time, therefore, the discussion about it ceased, except among those who were interested in the smallest details of the life of Cervantes.