Approvals

APPROVAL

By commission and order of the lords of the Council, I have had the book contained in this petition examined: it contains nothing against the faith or good morals; rather, it is a book of much lawful entertainment, mixed with much moral philosophy; license may be given to print it. In Madrid, on the fifth of November, one thousand six hundred and fifteen.

Doctor Gutierre de Cetina.

APPROVAL

By commission and order of the lords of the Council, I have seen the Second Part of Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: it contains nothing against our holy Catholic faith or good morals; rather, it contains many things of decent recreation and agreeable diversion, which the ancients judged fitting for their commonwealths, since even in the stern commonwealth of the Lacedaemonians they raised a statue to laughter, and the people of Thessaly dedicated festivals to it, as Pausanias says, as cited by Bosius, book II of De signis Ecclesiae (On the Signs of the Church), chapter 10, for laughter revives withered minds and melancholy spirits, as Tully remembered in the first book of De legibus (On the Laws), and the poet too, when he says:

Interpone tuis interdum gaudia curis (Now and then set joys among your cares),

which the author does by mingling the earnest with the jest, the sweet with the profitable, and the moral with the witty, hiding the hook of reproof in the bait of wit, and carrying out the well-chosen aim by which he seeks the expulsion of the books of chivalry, for with his good diligence he is skillfully cleansing these kingdoms of their contagious disease; it is a work most worthy of his great genius, the honor and luster of our nation, the wonder and envy of foreign ones. This is my opinion, saving etc. In Madrid, on the 17th of March, 1615.

The master Josef de Valdivielso.

APPROVAL

By commission of the lord Doctor Gutierre de Cetina, vicar general of this town of Madrid, seat of His Majesty’s court, I have seen this book of the Second Part of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and I find in it nothing unworthy of Christian zeal, nor anything out of keeping with the decency owed to good example, or with the moral virtues; rather, much learning and profit, both in the restraint with which it pursues its well-followed aim of rooting out the vain and lying books of chivalry, whose contagion had spread further than was right, and in the smoothness of its Castilian language, not adulterated by tiresome and studied affectation, a vice rightly abhorred by sensible men; and in the correction of vices that it touches on in general, prompted by its sharp discourses, it keeps the laws of Christian reproof with such good judgment that whoever is touched by the illness it means to cure will, when he least imagines it, have gladly drunk down in the sweet and savory part of its medicines, without any qualm or disgust, the profit of loathing his vice, so that he will find himself, which is the hardest thing of all to achieve, both pleased and reproved. There have been many who, for not knowing how to temper or blend the useful with the sweet as they should, have brought all their tiresome labor tumbling to the ground; for, unable to imitate Diogenes as philosopher and man of learning, they boldly, not to say licentiously and blindly, try to imitate him as cynic, giving themselves over to slander and inventing cases that never happened, to make the vice they touch on a fit subject for their harsh reproof, and perhaps they open up ways of following it that were unknown until then, so that they end up, if not its reprovers, at least its teachers. They make themselves hateful to men of good understanding; with the common people they lose whatever credit they may have had for getting their writings accepted; and the vices that they would rashly and imprudently correct they leave in a far worse state than before; for not all abscesses are ready at the same moment to take prescriptions or cauteries; on the contrary, some take much better to gentle and soothing medicines, by the application of which the careful and learned physician achieves his end of dispersing them, an outcome often better than the one reached by the rigor of the knife. Very differently have both our nation and foreign ones judged the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, for they long to see, as a marvel, the author of books which Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and Flanders have received with general applause, as much for their propriety and decency as for the gentleness and mildness of their discourse. I certify in truth that on the twenty-fifth of February of this year of six hundred and fifteen, when the most illustrious lord Don Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas, cardinal archbishop of Toledo, my lord, went to return the visit paid to His Illustrious Lordship by the ambassador of France, who had come to treat of matters touching the marriages of his princes and those of Spain, many French gentlemen, of those who had come in the ambassador’s company, as courteous as they were intelligent and fond of good letters, came up to me and to other chaplains of the cardinal my lord, wishing to know which books of wit were most in favor; and, the talk happening to touch on this one that I was censoring, they had scarcely heard the name of Miguel de Cervantes when they began to sing his praises, extolling the esteem in which his works were held both in France and in the kingdoms bordering on it: the Galatea, the first part of which one of them has almost by heart, and the Novels. So many were their praises that I offered to take them to see the author of these works, an offer they welcomed with a thousand signs of eager desire. They questioned me in great detail about his age, his profession, his rank, and his means. I found myself obliged to say that he was old, a soldier, a hidalgo, and poor, to which one of them answered in these very words: “Then does Spain not keep such a man very rich and maintained from the public treasury?” Another of those gentlemen took up this thought and said, with great sharpness: “If it is necessity that obliges him to write, God grant he may never have abundance, so that with his works, poor as he is, he may make the whole world rich.” I well believe that, for a censure, this is a little long; someone will say that it touches the limits of flattering praise; but the truth of what I say so briefly undoes the suspicion in the critic and the worry in me; besides, these days no one flatters a man who has nothing with which to feed the flatterer’s beak, for the flatterer, though he speaks fondly and falsely in jest, expects to be rewarded in earnest. In Madrid, on the twenty-seventh of February, one thousand six hundred and fifteen.

The licentiate Márquez Torres.