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Not only does he despise the novel of complicated plot, and everywhere prefer 'Don Quixote' to 'Persiles and Sigismunda, but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favor with the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers "novelists of the world," and he says that more than any others they have the rage of effectism.
The Persiles and Sigis-munda, the Exemplary Novels, and that most masterly and perfect work, the Second Part of Quixote, were written by the flickering glimmer of a life burnt out. It would be incorrect to infer that the scanty dole of his patron sustained him in comfort. Nothing more clearly proves his straitened circumstances than his frequent change of lodgings.
May Your Excellency return in such health that is wished you; Persiles will be ready to kiss your hand and I your feet, being as I am, Your Excellency's most humble servant. From Madrid, this last day of October of the year one thousand six hundred and fifteen. At the service of Your Excellency: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA
Very well; the same Cervantes, mischievously influenced afterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively proof of his inventive talent, and wrote the 'Persiles and Sigismunda, where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it really fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine," says Seflor Valdes, "the place that Cervantes would now occupy in the heaven of art, if he had never written 'Don Quixote," but only 'Persiles and Sigismund!
And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now and again, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda" which, as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and the rival of "Theagenes and Chariclea" or finishing off one of his darling comedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, the answer no doubt was: En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that.
He was in the expeditions to the Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscript of his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge by internal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles and Sigismunda."
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