Note 150 — Chapter XI

See the early part of the “Prólogo del que hace imprimir.” I am not certain that Blas de Nasarre was perfectly fair in all this; for he printed, in 1732, an edition of Avellaneda’s continuation of Don Quixote, in the Preface to which he says that he thinks the character of Avellaneda’s Sancho is more natural than that of Cervantes’s Sancho; that the Second Part of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is taken from Avellaneda’s; and that, in its essential merits, the work of Avellaneda is equal to that of Cervantes. “No se puede disputar,” he says, “la gloria de la invencion de Cervantes, aunque no es inferior la de la imitacion de Avellaneda”; to which he adds afterwards, “Es cierto que es necesario mayor esfuerzo de ingenio para añadir á las primeras invenciones, que para hacerlas.” (See Avellaneda, Don Quixote, Madrid, 1805, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 34.) Now, the Juicio, or Preface, from which these opinions are taken, and which is really the work of Nasarre, is announced by him, not as his own, but as the work of an anonymous friend, precisely as if he were not willing to avow such opinions under his own name. (Pellicer’s Vida de Cervantes, ed. Don Quixote, I. p. clxvi.) In this way a disingenuous look is given to what would otherwise have been only an absurdity; and what, taken in connection with this reprint of Cervantes’s poor dramas and the Preface to them, seems like a willingness to let down the reputation of a genius that Nasarre could not comprehend.

It is intimated, in an anonymous pamphlet, called “Exámen Crítico del Tomo Primero del Antiquixote,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), that Nasarre had sympathies with Avellaneda as an Aragonese; and the pamphlet in question being understood to be the work of J. A. Pellicer, the editor of Don Quixote, this intimation deserves notice. It may be added, that Nasarre belonged to the French school of the eighteenth century in Spain;—a school that saw little merit in the older Spanish drama.