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At the expiration of the hour Don Caesar is led out to meet his fate, but Lazarillo has managed to abstract the balls from the guns.
The first fiction of this class was the "Lazarillo de Tormes" of Mendoza, already spoken of, published in 1554, a bold, unfinished sketch of the life of a rogue from the very lowest condition of society. Forty-five years afterwards this was followed by the "Guzman de Alfarache" of Aleman, the most ample portraiture of its class to be found in Spanish literature.
I was half blind with one of the headaches that tormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign, "J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers," which held me fascinated, and went home without at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused. I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in those days.
You must know, in the first place, that my name is Lazarillo de Tormes, and that I am the son of Thomas Gonzalez and Antonia Perez, natives of Tejares, a village of Salamanca.
"So good is it," replied Gines, "that a fig for 'Lazarillo de Tormes, and all of that kind that have been written, or shall be written compared with it: all I will say about it is that it deals with facts, and facts so neat and diverting that no lies could match them." "And how is the book entitled?" asked Don Quixote. "The 'Life of Gines de Pasamonte," replied the subject of it.
Don Diego de Mendoza, born early in 1503, was educated at the University of Salamanca, and spent most of the rest of his days in courts and camps. He died at Madrid in April 1575. Although written during Mendoza's college days, "Lazarillo de Tormes" did not appear until 1533, when it was published anonymously at Antwerp.
I was half blind with one of the headaches that tormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign, "J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers," which held me fascinated, and went home without at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused. I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in those days.
The Renaissance took up the old epic-romantic materials and made out of them works of art; but works of art which, as I said before, were playthings gets written for its delectation the comic-tragic novels of rapscallions, panders, prostitutes, and card-sharpers, which, from "Lazarillo de Tormes" to "Gil Bias," and from "Gil Bias" to "Tom Jones," finally replace the romances of the Launcelots, Galahads, Rinaldos, and Orlandos.
Taken altogether, his physiognomy resembled one of those vagabond heads which Murillo delighted to paint, and for which Guzman d'Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes, or Estevanillo Gonzalez might have sat: faces that almost make one in love with roguery, they seem so full of vivacity and enjoyment.
This place is famous in the ancient novels of Spain, of that class called Picaresque, or those devoted to the adventures of notorious scoundrels, the father of which, as also of all others of the same kind, in whatever language, is Lazarillo de Tormes. Cervantes himself has immortalized this strand in the most amusing of his smaller tales, La Ilustre Fregona.
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