Note 9 — INTRODUCTION TO THE GALATEA.

See Sr. D. José María Asensio y Toledo's Nuevos documentos para ilustrar la vida de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, con algunas observaciones y articulos sobre la vida y obras del mismo autor y las pruebas de la autenticidad de su verdadero retrato (Seville, 1864), pp. 51-52. Sr. Asensio y Toledo, who repeats his view as to the date of composition in his Cervantes y sus obras (Barcelona, 1901), p. 195, relies mainly on an expression in the preface: "Huyendo destos dos inconvenientes no he publicado antes de ahora este libro." Taken by itself, this phrase certainly implies that the book had been completed some time before; but the passage is too rhetorically, and too vaguely, worded to admit of safe deductions being drawn from it. The idea that the Galatea was written in Portugal was thrown out long ago by Eustaquio Fernández de Navarrete: see his Bosquejo histórico sobre la novela española in Manuel Rivadeneyra, Biblioteca de autores españoles, (Madrid, 1854), vol. xxxiii., p. xxiv.