Excerpt from the Preface: “The "Novelas Exemplares" were first published in 1613, three years before the death of Cervantes. They are all original, and have the air of being drawn from his personal experience and observation. Ticknor, in his ‘History of Spanish Literature,’ says of them, and of the ‘Impertinent Curiosity,’ inserted in the first part of Don Quixote:—‘Their value is different, for they are written with different views, and in a variety of style greater than he has elsewhere shown; but most of them contain touches of what is peculiar in his talent, and are full of that rich eloquence and of those pleasing descriptions of natural scenery which always flow so easily from his pen.’”