Some men live their romances, and some men write them. It was given to Cervantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the impersonal order, it is scarcely possible to read his work without a desire to know more of the rich and imposing individuality which informs it. Posthumous legends are apt to form round men of the heroic type who have been neglected while alive, and posterity seems to enjoy this cheap form of atonement. Cervantes is a case in point. But the researches of the last few years have brought much new material to light, and have dissipated a cloud of myths concerning him: we are not yet able to see him as he was at every stage of his chequered career, but we are nearer him than we ever were before. We are passing out of the fogs of fable, and are learning that, in Cervantes’s case, facts are as strange as fiction—and far more interesting.

It is a foible with the biographers of great men to furnish their heroes with a handsome equipment of ancestors, and Cervantes’s descent has been traced back to the end of the tenth century by these amateur genealogists. We may admire their industry, and reject their conclusions. It is quite possible that Cervantes was of good family, but we cannot go further back than two generations. His grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, appears to have been a country lawyer who died, without attaining distinction or fortune, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Juan’s son was Rodrigo de Cervantes who married Leonor de Cortinas: and the great novelist was the fourth of their seven children. Rodrigo de Cervantes was a lowly precursor of Sangrado—a simple apothecary-surgeon, of inferior professional status, seldom settled long in one place, earning a precarious living by cupping and blistering. His son Miguel was born at AlcalÁ de Henares—possibly, as his name suggests, on St. Michael’s Day (September 29)—and he was baptized there on Sunday, October 9, 1547, in the church of Santa MarÍa la Mayor. There was a tradition that Cervantes matriculated at AlcalÁ, and his name was discovered in the university registers by an investigator who looked for it with the eye of faith. This is one of many pleasing, pious legends. Rodrigo de Cervantes was not in a position to send his sons to universities. A poor, helpless, sanguine man, he wandered in quest of patients and fortune from AlcalÁ to Valladolid, from Valladolid to Madrid, from Madrid to Seville, and it has been conjectured that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent some time in the Jesuit school at Seville. The dog Berganza, in the Coloquio de los Perros, recalls his edification at ‘seeing the loving-kindness, the discretion, the solicitude and the skill with which those saintly fathers and masters taught these lads, so that the tender shoots of their youth should not be twisted, nor take a wrong bend in the path of virtue which, together with the humane letters, they continually pointed out to them.’ But it is evident that Cervantes can have had little formal schooling. He was educated in the university of practical experience, and picked up his learning as he could.

He made the most of his casual opportunities. Obviously the man who wrote Don Quixote must have read the books of chivalry, the leading poets, the chronicles, dramatic romances like the Celestina, picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes, pastoral tales like the Diana, the cancioneros, and countless broadsides containing popular ballads; and he must have read them at this time, for his maturer years were spent in campaigning, or in the discharge of petty, exacting duties. In his early youth, too, he made acquaintance with the theatre, witnessing the performances of the enterprising Lope de Rueda, actor, manager and playwright, the first man in Spain to set up a travelling booth, and bid for public support. The impression was ineffaceable: from Cervantes’s account of his experience, given half a century later, it may be gathered that he listened and watched with the uncritical rapture of a clever, ardent lad, and that his ambition to become a successful dramatist was born there and then. In the meantime, while following his father in his futile journeys, he received a liberal education. Jogging along the high-road, lodging in wayside inns, strolling in market-places, he met men and women of all ranks, from nobles to peasants, and thus began to hoard his literary capital.

Like most young men of literary ambition, Cervantes began by versifying, and, as he never grew old in heart, he versified as long as he lived. A sonnet, written between 1560 and 1568, has come to light recently, and is interesting solely as the earliest extant work of Cervantes. By 1566 he was settled in Madrid, and two years later he wrote a series of elegiacs on the death of the Queen, Isabel de Valois: these were published in a volume edited by Juan LÓpez de Hoyos, a Madrid schoolmaster, who refers to Cervantes as his ‘dear and beloved pupil.’ As the pupil was twenty before LÓpez de Hoyos’s school was founded, the meaning of the phrase is obscure. Perhaps Cervantes had been a pupil under LÓpez de Hoyos elsewhere: perhaps he was an usher in LÓpez de Hoyos’s new school: frankly, we know nothing of his circumstances. He makes his formal entry into literature, and then vanishes out of sight, and apparently out of Spain. What happened to him at this time is obscure. We know on his own statement that he was once camarero to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva; we know that Acquaviva, not yet a Cardinal, was in Madrid during the winter of 1568, and that he started for Rome towards the end of the year; and we know from documentary evidence that Cervantes was in Rome at the end of the following year. How he got there, how and when he entered Acquaviva’s service, or when and why he left it—these, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, are all ‘matters of probable conjecture.’

While Cervantes was in Rome, a league was forming by Spain, Venice and the Holy See against the Sultan Selim: war was in sight, and every high-spirited young Spaniard in Italy must have felt that his place was in the ranks. It has been thought that Cervantes served as a supernumerary before he joined Acquaviva’s household; but we do not reach solid ground till 1571 when Cervantes is discovered as a soldier in a company commanded by Diego de Urbina, ‘a famous captain of Guadalajara,’ as the Captive in Don Quixote called him thirty-four years later. Urbina’s company belonged to the celebrated tercio of Miguel de Moncada, and in September 1571 it was embarked at Messina on the Marquesa, one of the galleys under the command of Don John of Austria. At dawn on Sunday, October 7, Don John’s armada lay off the Curzolarian Islands when two sail were sighted on the horizon, and soon afterwards the Turkish fleet followed. Cervantes was ill with fever, but refused to listen to his comrades who begged him to stay below: death in the service of God and the King, he said, was preferable to remaining under cover. The Marquesa was in the hottest of the fight at Lepanto, and when the battle was won Cervantes had received three wounds, two in the chest, and one in the left hand. Like most old soldiers, he loved to fight his battles over again, and, to judge from his writings, he was at least as proud of having been at Lepanto as of creating Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

He was in hospital for seven months at Messina, received an increase of pay, and returned to duty in April 1572. This throws light upon a personal matter. Current likenesses of Cervantes, all imaginary and most of them mere variants of the portrait contrived in the eighteenth century by William Kent, usually represent him as having lost an arm. This is manifestly wrong: a one-armed private would have been discharged as not worth his pay and rations. Cervantes was appointed to Manuel Ponce de LeÓn’s company in the tercio of Lope de Figueroa—the vehement martinet who appears in CalderÓn’s Alcalde de Zalamea—and took part in three campaigns; he was present at the fiasco of Navarino in 1572, at the occupation of Tunis in 1573, and at the attempted relief of the Goletta in 1574. He had already done garrison duty in Genoa and Sardinia, and was now stationed successively at Palermo and Naples. It was clear that there was to be no more fighting for a while, and, as there was no opening for Cervantes in Italy, he determined to seek promotion in Spain. Don John of Austria recommended him for a company in one of the regiments then being raised for Italy, and laid stress upon his ‘merits and services,’ and a similar recommendation was made by the Duke of Sesa, Viceroy of Sicily. These flattering credentials and testimonials were destined to cause much embarrassment and suffering to the bearer; but they encouraged him to make for Spain with a confident heart.

His optimism was to be put to the proof. On September 26, 1575, the Sol, with Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo on board, was separated from the rest of the Spanish squadron in the neighbourhood of Les Saintes Maries near Marseilles, and was captured by Moorish pirates. The desperate resistance of the Spaniards was unavailing; they were overcome by superior numbers and were carried off to Algiers. What follows would seem extravagant in a romance of adventures, but the details are supported by irrefragable evidence. As Algiers was at this time the centre of the slave-trade, the prisoners cannot have felt much doubt as to what was in store for them. Cervantes’s first owner was a certain Dali Mami, a Greek renegade, and captain of a galley. He read the recommendatory letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sessa, and (not unnaturally) jumped at the conclusion that he had drawn a prize: his slave might not be of great use so far as manual labour was concerned, but any one who was personally acquainted with two such personages as Don John and the Duke must presumably be a man of consequence, and would assuredly be worth a heavy ransom. The first result of this fictitious importance was that Cervantes was put in irons, and chains; and, when these were at last removed, he was carefully watched.

Cervantes found means to baffle his sentries. His first attempt to escape was made in 1576: it was an ignominious failure. He and his fellow-prisoners set out on foot to walk to OrÁn, the nearest Spanish outpost; their Moorish guide played them false, and there was nothing for it but to go back to Algiers. In 1577 Rodrigo de Cervantes was ransomed—he was reckoned cheaper than his brother—and he undertook to send a vessel to carry off Miguel and his friends. Meanwhile Cervantes enlisted the sympathies of a Spanish renegade, a gardener from Navarre named Juan; between them they dug out a cave in a garden near the sea, and smuggled into it one by one fourteen Christian slaves who were secretly fed during several months with the help of another renegade from Melilla, a scoundrel known as El Dorador. It is easier to say that the scheme was a bad one than to suggest anything better: it was within an ace of succeeding. The vessel sent by Rodrigo de Cervantes drew near the shore on September 28, and was on the point of embarking those hidden in the cave when a Moorish fishing-boat passed by and scared the crew, who stood out to sea again. A second attempt at a rescue was made, but it was too late. The plot had been revealed by El Dorador to Hassan Pasha, the Dey of Algiers, and, when some of the crew landed to convey the fugitives on board, the garden was surrounded by Hassan’s troops. The entire band of Christians was captured, and Cervantes at once avowed himself the sole organiser of the conspiracy. Brought bound before Hassan, he adhered to his statement that his comrades were innocent, and that he took the entire responsibility for the plot. The gardener was hanged; after some hesitation, Hassan decided to spare Cervantes’s life, and finally bought him from Dali Mami for five hundred crowns.

It is difficult to account for this act of relative mercy in a man who is described in Don Quixote as the murderer of the human race, a hÆmatomaniac who delighted in murder for murder’s sake, one who hanged, impaled, tortured and mutilated his prisoners every day. It may be that he was genuinely struck by Cervantes’s unflinching courage; it may be that he expected an immense ransom for a man who was plainly the leader of the captives. What is certain is that Cervantes was now Hassan’s slave; though imprisoned in irons, he soon showed that his heroic spirit was unbroken. He sent a letter to MartÍn de CÓrdoba, the governor of OrÁn, asking for aid to enable himself and three other captives to escape; the messenger seemed likely to fulfil his mission, but was arrested close to OrÁn, sent back, and impaled. For writing the letter Cervantes was sentenced to two thousand blows, but the sentence was remitted, and it would almost seem as though Cervantes completely forgot the incident, for in Don Quixote he goes out of his way to record that un tal Saavedra—a certain Saavedra, Something-or-Other Saavedra (who can be nobody but himself)—was never struck by Hassan, and was never threatened by Hassan with a blow. This may appear perplexing, but as the writer goes on to say that Hassan never addressed a harsh word to this Saavedra, it is plain that the whole passage is an idealistic arabesque; the discrepancy between the gloss and the facts shows the danger of seeking exact biographical data in any imaginative work, however heavily freighted with personal reminiscences.

Hassan remitted the sentence, and, remarking that ‘so long as he had the maimed Spaniard in custody, his Christians, ships and the entire city were safe,’ he redoubled his vigilance. For two years the prisoner made no move, but plainly he was not resigned nor disheartened, for he conceived the idea of inducing the Christian population of Algiers to rise and capture the city. It was no mad, impossible project; a similar rising had been successful at Tunis in 1535, and there were over twenty thousand Christians in Algiers. Once more Cervantes was betrayed, and once more he escaped death. A less ambitious scheme also miscarried. In 1579 he took into his confidence a Spanish renegade and two Valencian traders, and persuaded the Valencians to provide an armed vessel to rescue him and some sixty other Christian slaves; but before the plan could be carried out it was revealed to Hassan by a Dominican monk, Juan Blanco de Paz. Very little is known of Blanco de Paz, except that he came from MontemolÍn near Llerena, and that he gave himself out as being a commissary and familiar of the Inquisition. Why he should turn informer at all, is a mystery: why he should single out Cervantes as the special object of his hatred is no less a mystery. The Valencian merchants got wind of his treachery, and, dreading lest they might be implicated, begged Cervantes to make his escape on a ship which was about to start for Spain. To accept this proposal would have been to desert his friends and to imperil their lives: Cervantes rejected it, assuring the alarmed Valencians that he would not reveal anything to compromise them, even if he were tortured. He was as good as his word. Brought into Hassan’s presence with his hands tied behind him and the hangman’s rope round his neck, he was threatened with instant death unless he gave up the names of his accomplices. But he was undaunted and immovable, asserting that the plot had been planned by himself and four others who had got away, and that no one else had any active share in it. Perhaps there was a certain economy of truth in this statement, but it served its immediate purpose: though Cervantes was placed under stricter guard, Hassan spared the other sixty slaves involved.

This was Cervantes’s last attempt to escape. His family were doing what they could to procure his release. They were miserably poor, and poverty often drives honest people into strange courses. To excite pity, and so obtain a concession which would help towards ransoming her son, Cervantes’s mother passed herself off as a widow, though her husband was still alive, a superfluous old man, now grown incurably deaf, and with fewer patients than ever. By means of such dubious expedients some two hundred and fifty ducats were collected and entrusted to Fray Juan Gil and Fray AntÓn de la Bella, two monks engaged in ransoming the Christian slaves at Algiers. The sum was insufficient. Hassan curtly told Fray Juan Gil that all his slaves were gentlemen, that he should not part with any of them for less than five hundred ducats, and that for JerÓnimo de Palafox (apparently an Aragonese of some position) he should ask a ransom of a thousand ducats. Fray Juan Gil was specially anxious to release Palafox, and made an offer of five hundred ducats; but Hassan would not abate his terms. The Dey and the monk haggled from spring till autumn. Hassan then went out of office, and made ready to leave for Constantinople to give an account of his stewardship. His slaves were already embarked on September 19, 1580, when Fray Juan Gil, seeing that there was no hope of obtaining Palafox’s release by payment of five hundred ducats, ransomed Cervantes for that sum. It is disconcerting to think that, if the Trinitarian friar had been able to raise another five hundred ducats, we might never have had Don Quixote. Palafox would have been set at liberty, while Cervantes went up the Dardanelles to meet a violent death in a last attempt at flight.

He stepped ashore a free man after five years of slavery, but his trials in Algiers were not ended. The enigmatic villain of the drama, Juan Blanco de Paz, had been busy trumping up false charges to be lodged against Cervantes in Spain. It was a base and despicable act duly denounced by the biographers; but we have reason to be grateful to Blanco de Paz, for Cervantes met the charges by summoning eleven witnesses to character who testified before Fray Juan Gil. Their evidence proves that Cervantes was recognised as a man of singular courage, kindliness, piety and virtue; that his authority among his fellow-prisoners had excited the malicious jealousy of Blanco de Paz who endeavoured to corrupt some of the witnesses; and—ludicrous detail!—that the informer had been rewarded for his infamy with a ducat and a jar of butter. This testimony, recorded by a notary, is confirmed by the independent evidence of Fray Juan Gil himself, and by Doctor Antonio de Sosa, a prisoner of considerable importance who answered the twenty-five interrogatories in writing. The enquiry makes us acquainted with all the circumstances of Cervantes’s captivity, and shows that he was universally regarded as an heroic leader by those best able to judge.

His vindication being complete, he left Algiers for Denia on October 24, and reached Madrid at some date previous to December 18. His position was lamentable. He was in his thirty-fourth year, and had to begin life again. Perhaps if Don John had lived, Cervantes might have returned to the army; but Don John was dead, and his memory was not cherished at court. Cervantes had no degree, no profession, no trade, no craft except that of sonneteering: his life had been spent in the service of the King, and he endeavoured to obtain some small official post. Accordingly he made for Portugal, recently annexed by Philip II., tried to find an opening, and was sent as King’s messenger to OrÁn with instructions to call at Mostaganem with despatches from the Alcalde. The mission was speedily executed, and Cervantes found himself adrift. He settled in Madrid, made acquaintance with some prominent authors of the day, and, in default of more lucrative employment, betook himself to literature. He was always ready to furnish a friend with a eulogistic sonnet on that friend’s immortal masterpiece, and thus acquired a certain reputation as a facile, fluent versifier. But sonnets are expensive luxuries, and Cervantes wanted bread. He earned it by writing for the stage: to this period no doubt we must assign the Numancia and Los Tratos de Argel, as well as many other pieces which have not survived. Cervantes was like the players in Hamlet. Seneca was not too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him: he was ready to supply ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.’ It was a hard struggle to keep the wolf from the door, but perhaps this was the happiest period of Cervantes’s life. He was on friendly terms with poets like Pedro de Padilla and Juan Rufo GutiÉrrez; managers did not pay him lavishly for his plays, but at least they were set upon the stage, and the applause of the pit was to him the sweetest music in the world. Moreover, following the example of his friend Luis GÁlvez de Montalvo, he was engaged upon a prose pastoral, and, with his optimistic nature, he easily persuaded himself that this romance would make his reputation—and perhaps his fortune. He was now nearing the fatal age of forty, and it was high time to put away the follies of youth. Breaking off a fugitive amour with a certain Ana Franca (more probably Francisca) de Rojas, he married a girl of nineteen, Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, daughter of a widow owning a moderate estate at Esquivias, a small town near Toledo, then famous for its wine, as Cervantes is careful to inform us. Doubtless his courtship was like Othello’s.

This to hear would Catalina seriously incline, yet there is reason to think that the members of her family were less susceptible, and regarded Cervantes as an undesirable suitor. He undoubtedly was, from a mundane point of view; but the marriage took place on December 12, 1584, and next spring the First Part of La Galatea (which had been licensed in the previous February) was published. It is perhaps not without significance that the volume was issued at AlcalÁ de Henares: it would have been more natural and probably more advantageous to publish the book at Madrid where Cervantes resided, but his name carried no weight with the booksellers of the capital, and no doubt he was glad enough to strike a bargain with his fellow-townsman Blas de Robles. Robles behaved handsomely, for he paid the author, then unknown outside a small literary circle, a fee of 1336 reales—say £30, equal (we are told) to nearly £150 nowadays. Perhaps some modern novelists have received even less for their first work. With this small capital the newly-married couple set up house in Madrid: the bride had indeed a small dowry including forty-five chickens, but the dowry was not made over to her till twenty months later. The marriage does not seem to have been unhappy, as marriages go; but, owing to Cervantes’s wandering existence, the pair saw little of each other till the last ten or twelve years of their married life.

By the death of his father on June 13, 1585, Cervantes became the head of the family, and the position was no sinecure. His sister Luisa had entered the convent of Barefooted Carmelites at AlcalÁ de Henares twenty years before this date, and his brother Rodrigo had been promoted to a commission in the army for his signal gallantry at the Azores. But Cervantes’s mother and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena, were unprovided for, and looked to him for help. He resumed writing for the stage, and is found witnessing a legal document at the request of InÉs Osorio, wife of the theatrical manager JerÓnimo VelÁzquez, with whose name that of Lope de Vega is unpleasantly associated. Now, if not earlier,—as a complimentary allusion in the Galatea might suggest—Cervantes must have met that marvellous youth who was shortly to become the most popular dramatist of the age. Meanwhile Cervantes’s affairs were going ill. According to his own statement he wrote from twenty to thirty plays between 1582 and 1587; but these plays cannot have brought him much money, for there are proofs that some of his family sold outright to a pawnbroker certain articles which Cervantes had left in pledge two years before. Clearly he was hard pressed. He eked out his income by accepting other work unconnected with literature, executed business commissions as far away as Seville, and looked around for permanent employment. He found it as commissary to the Invincible Armada which was then fitting out, and in the autumn of 1587 he took up his new duties in Andalusia. This amounts to a confession of defeat. If a man of exceptional literary genius can thrive on literature, he does not abandon it for a less agreeable occupation. It is a fine thing to write masterpieces, but in order to write them you must contrive to live. Cervantes’s masterpieces lay in the future, and in the meantime he felt the pinch of hunger.

He appears to have obtained his appointment through the influence of a judge in the High Court of Seville, Diego de Valdivia, a namesake of the affable captain in El Licenciado Vidriera; and, after a few months’ probation, his appointment was confirmed anew in January 1588. He had already discovered that there were serious inconveniences attaching to his post, for he had incurred excommunication for an irregular seizure of wheat at Écija. It would be tedious to follow him in his professional visits to the outlying districts of Andalusia. Everything comes to an end at last—even the equipment of the Invincible Armada: when the fleet sailed to meet the enemy Cervantes cheered it on to victory with an enthusiastic ode, and in a second ode he deplored the great catastrophe. He continued in the public service as commissary to the galleys, collecting provisions at a salary of twelve reales a day, making Seville his centre, and lodging in the house of TomÁs GutiÉrrez. Weary of the sordid life, he applied in 1590 for a post in America, but failed to obtain it. At the end of the petition, Doctor NÚÑez Morquecho wrote: ‘Let him seek some employment hereabouts.’ Blessings on Doctor NÚÑez Morquecho, the conscientious official! If he had granted the petitioner’s request, Cervantes might have been more prosperous, but he would not have written Don Quixote. He was forced to remain where he was, engulfed in arid and vexatious routine.

Still one would imagine that he must have discharged his duties efficiently, for he was one of four commissaries specially commended to the King in January 1592 by the new Purveyor-General Pedro de Isunza. Meanwhile his condition grew rather worse than better: his poverty was extreme. The financial administration was thoroughly disorganised, and in 1591 Cervantes had not yet received his salary for 1588. He seems (not unnaturally) to have lost interest in his work, and to have become responsible for the indiscreet proceedings of a subordinate at Teba. Henceforward he was in constant trouble with the authorities. In August 1592 his accounts were found to be irregular, and his five sureties were compelled to pay the balance; he was imprisoned at Castro del RÍo in September for alleged illegal perquisitioning at Écija, but was released on appeal. Now and then he was tempted to return to literature. He signed a contract at Seville early in September 1592 undertaking to furnish the manager, Rodrigo Osorio, with six plays at fifty ducats apiece: the conditions of the agreement were that Osorio was to produce each play within twenty days of its being delivered to him, and that Cervantes was to receive nothing unless the play was ‘one of the best that had been acted in Spain.’ The imprisonment at Castro del RÍo a fortnight later interfered with this project: no more is heard of it, and Cervantes resumed his work as commissary. Two points of personal interest are to be noted in the ensuing years: in the autumn of 1593 Cervantes lost his mother, and in the autumn of 1594 he visited Baza, where (as Sr. RodrÍguez MarÍn has shown recently in an open letter addressed to me99) his old enemy Blanco de Paz was residing. As the population of Baza amounted only to 1537 persons at the time, the two men may easily have met: the encounter would have been worth witnessing, for Cervantes was a master of pointed expression.

He passed on his dreary round to MÁlaga and Ronda, returning to his headquarters at Seville, where, most likely, he wrote the poem in honour of St. Hyacinth which won the first prize at Saragossa on May 7, 1595. As the prize consisted of three silver spoons, it did not greatly relieve his financial embarrassments. These rapidly grew worse. Cervantes had deposited public moneys with a Portuguese banker in Seville; the banker failed and fled, and, as Cervantes was unable to refund the amount, he was suspended. There is a blank in his history from September 1595 to January 1597, when the money was recovered from the bankrupt’s estate. Cervantes, however, was not restored to his post. This is not surprising; for, though most of us regard him with an affection as real as can be felt for any one who has been in his grave nearly three hundred years, even our partiality stops short of calling him a model official. He was not cast in the official mould. Cervantes, collecting oil and wrangling over corn in Andalusia, is like Samson grinding in the prison house at Gaza. Misfortune pursued him. The treasury accountants called upon him to furnish sureties that he would attend the Exchequer Court at Madrid within twenty days of receiving a summons dated September 6, 1597. Unable to find bail, he was imprisoned till the beginning of December, when he was released with instructions to present himself at Madrid within thirty days. He does not appear to have left Seville, and he neglected a similar summons in February 1599. This may seem like contempt of court, but no doubt the real explanation is that he had not the money to pay for the journey.

On July 2, 1600, Rodrigo de Cervantes, then an ensign serving under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, was killed in action; but Miguel de Cervantes probably did not hear of this till long afterwards. He now vanishes from sight, for there is another blank in his record from May 1601 to February 1603. We may assume that he lived in extreme poverty at Seville, and when next heard of—at Valladolid in 1603—his circumstances had not greatly improved. His sister Andrea was employed as needlewoman by the MarquÉs de Villafranca, and her little bill is made out in Cervantes’s handwriting: clearly every member of the family contributed to the household expenses, and every maravedÍ was welcome. Presumably Cervantes had come to Valladolid in obedience to a peremptory mandamus from the Exchequer Court. A brief enquiry must have convinced the registrars that, with the best will in the world, he was not in a position to make good the sum which (as they alleged) was due to the treasury, and they left him in peace for three years with a cloud over him. He had touched bottom. He had valiantly endured the buffets of fortune, and was now about to enter into his reward.

His mind to him a kingdom was, and during the years of his disgrace in Seville he had lived, unhindered by squalid circumstance, in a pleasaunce of reminiscence and imagination. All other doors being closed to him, he returned to the house of literature, took pen and paper, gave literary form to his experiences and imaginings, and, when drawing on to sixty, produced the masterpiece which has made his name immortal. It may well be, as he himself hints, that Don Quixote was begun in Seville jail: perhaps it was finished there. At any rate there was little to be added to it when the author reached Valladolid in 1603—little beyond the preface and burlesque preliminary verses. By the summer of 1604 Cervantes had found a publisher, and it had leaked out that the book contained some caustic references to distinguished contemporaries. This may account for Lope de Vega’s opinion, expressed in August 1604 (six months before the work was published), that ‘no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so silly as to praise Don Quixote.’ This was not precisely a happy forecast. Don Quixote appeared early in 1605, was hailed with delight, and received the dubious compliment of being pirated in Lisbon. Cervantes was the man of the moment, in the first flush of his popularity, when chance played him an unpleasant trick. On the night of June 27, 1605, a Navarrese gallant named Gaspar de Ezpeleta was wounded while in the neighbourhood of the Calle del Rastro, called for aid at the door of No. 11 where Cervantes lodged, was helped into the house, and died there two days later. The inmates were arrested on suspicion, examined by the magistrate, and released on July 1. The minutes of the examination were unpublished till recent years, and these furtive tactics gravely injured the memory of Cervantes, for they suggested the idea that the examination revealed something to his discredit. It reveals that Cervantes’s natural daughter, Isabel de Saavedra (whose mother, Ana Franca de Rojas, had died in 1599 or earlier), was now residing with her father; it proves that Cervantes was still poor, and that calumnious gossip was current in Valladolid; but there is not a tittle of evidence to show that any member of the Cervantes family ever heard of Ezpeleta till he came by his death.

Cervantes had made for himself a great reputation, but Don Quixote did not apparently enrich him: otherwise he would not have asked his publisher for an advance of 450 reales, as we know that he did at some date previous to November 23, 1607. However, we must renounce the pretension to understand Cervantes’s financial affairs. His daughter Isabel, who was unmarried in 1605, reappears in 1608 as the widow of Diego Sanz del Aguila, and as the mother of a daughter: in 1608 she married a certain Luis de Molina, and there are complicated statements respecting a house in the Red de San Luis from which it is impossible to gather whether the house belonged to Isabel, to her daughter, or to her father. We cannot wonder that Cervantes was the despair of the Treasury officials: these officials did, indeed, make a last attempt to extract an explanation from him on November 6 of this very year of 1608, and thenceforward left him in peace.

He settled in Madrid to pass his serene old age. An atmosphere of devotion began to reign in the house in the Calle de la Magdalena where he lived with his wife and his sisters, Andrea and Magdalena. In 1609 he was among the first to join the newly founded Confraternity of the Slaves of the Most Blessed Sacrament; in the same year his wife received the habit of the Tertiaries of St. Francis, as also did Andrea who died four months later (October 9); in 1610 his wife and his surviving sister Magdalena both became professed Tertiaries of St. Francis. It would appear that Cervantes had been aided by the generosity of the Conde de Lemos, and he could not hide his deep chagrin at not being invited to join the household when Lemos was nominated to the viceroyalty of Naples in 1610. The new viceroy chose better than he knew. Cervantes applied himself more closely to literature which he had neglected (so far as publication goes) for the last five years, and, after the death of his sister Magdalena in 1611, the results of his renewed activity were visible. In 1612, when he became a member of the Academia Selvaje (where we hear of his lending a wretched pair of spectacles to Lope de Vega), he finished his Novelas Exemplares which appeared next year. He published his serio-comic poem, the Viage del Parnaso, in 1614; in 1615 he issued a volume containing eight plays and eight interludes, and also published the Second Part of Don Quixote. It is curious that so many things which must have seemed misfortunes to Cervantes have proved to be a gain to us. In 1614 an apocryphal Don Quixote was published at Tarragona by Alonso FernÁndez de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should not have had the first Don Quixote; if he had gone to Naples with Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel. Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, on a play entitled El EngaÑo Á los ojos, the long-promised continuation of the Galatea, and two works which he proposed to call Las Semanas del JardÍn and El famoso Bernardo. All are lost to us except Persiles y Sigismunda which appeared posthumously in 1617.

We catch interesting glimpses of Cervantes in the last phase. He has left a verbal portrait of himself as he looked when he was sixty-six, and it is the only authentic portrait of him in existence. He was ‘of aquiline features, with chestnut hair, smooth and unclouded brow, bright eyes, and a nose arched, though well proportioned, silver beard, once golden twenty years ago, long moustache, small mouth, teeth of no consequence, since he had only six and these in ill condition and worse placed, inasmuch as they do not correspond to one another; stature about the average, neither tall nor short, ruddy complexion, fair rather than dark, slightly stooped in the shoulders, and not very active on his feet.’ Two years later Noel BrÛlart de Sillery came to Madrid on a special mission from the French Court, and his suite were intensely curious to hear what they could of Cervantes; they learned that he was ‘old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.’ At this time, his health must have begun to fail: it was undoubtedly failing fast while he wrote Persiles y Sigismunda. He was apparently dependent on the bounty of Lemos and of Bernardo de Sandoval, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo. The hand of death was on him when he wrote to the Cardinal on March 26, 1616, a letter expressing his gratitude for a recent benefaction. On April 2 he was professed as a Tertiary of St. Francis, and the profession took place at the house in the Calle de LeÓn to which he had removed in 1611 or earlier. He was never to leave it again alive: on April 18 he received Extreme Unction; on April 19 he wrote the celebrated dedication of Persiles y Sigismunda to Lemos; on April 23 he died, and on April 24 he was buried in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns in the Calle del Humilladero—the street which now bears the name of his great rival Lope. His wife outlived him by ten years, and his daughter by thirty-six; we hear no more of his granddaughter after 1608. Presumably she died in infancy: if so, the family became extinct upon the death of Isabel de Saavedra in 1652.

Cervantes was no bloodless ascetic, no incarnation of dreary righteousness: we do him wrong, if we present him in that crude, intolerable light. With some defects of character and with some lapses of conduct, he is a more interesting and more attractive personality than if he were—what perhaps no one has ever been—a bundle of almost impossible perfections. He was even as we are, but far nobler—braver, more resigned to disappointment, more patient with the folly which springs eternal in each of us. This inexhaustible sympathy, even more than his splendid genius, is the secret of his conquering charm. He is one of ourselves, only incomparably greater.

But it is not for us to write his epitaph. He needs no marble sepulchre, and he has none, for the precise spot where he rests is unknown. He has built himself a lordlier and more imperishable monument than we could fashion for him—a monument which will endure so long as humour, wisdom, and romance enchant mankind.