59th Edition.
pulse is keeping, which at the latest will end its reckoning this coming Sunday, I have to close my life’s account. Your worship has come to know me in a rude moment, since there is no time for me to show my gratitude for the goodwill you have shown me.’”
In a letter to his “very illustrious lord,” the Archbishop of Toledo, dated 26th March, 1616, Cervantes wrote: “If for the malady which affects me there could be any relief, the repeated marks of favour and protection which your illustrious person bestows on me would be sufficient to relieve me: but, indeed, it increases so greatly that I think it will make an end of me, although not of my gratitude.” In his valedictory dedication to the Conde de Lemos he speaks of himself as “with one foot in the stirrup, waiting the call of death.” “Yesterday,” he continues, “they gave me extreme unction, and to-day I am writing. The time is short, my agonies increase; my hopes diminish.” And then comes his brave, blithesome, parting message: “Good-bye, humours; good-bye, pleasant fancies; good-bye, merry friends; for I perceive I am dying, in the wish to see you happy in the other life.”
This was his last greeting to his patron, and to the world that had learned to love him so well. His dedication is dated 19th April, and on 23rd April, 1616—nominally on the same day that Shakespeare died—the illustrious Spaniard heard the summons of Death, and passed into the great beyond. He was buried as a member of the Franciscan Order in the graveyard of the Convent in the Calle del Humilladero, to which his daughter Isabel shortly afterwards retired. No stone marked the place where the body of Cervantes was laid, but we know that his widow, his daughters, and the other members of his family were laid to rest in the same hallowed ground, and that in 1635, when the Trinitarian sisters removed themselves to the Calle de Cantaranas, the remains of the departed members of their Order were collected into a common heap and carried by the sisterhood to their new Convent. The manuscripts, the pictures, even the bones of the author of Don Quixote are thus lost to the knowledge of the world. But the man lives again to-day in the commendations of his generals, in the testimony of his brothers-in-arms, in the evidence of his devoted fellow-captives in Algeria, and in his own modest biographical memoranda. We recognise him in the brilliant description of him that has been penned by the Spanish biographer, Aribau, as the man who “passed through the world as a stranger whose language was not understood,” announcing “the dawn of a civilisation which broke long afterwards.”
But even as Cervantes has given us the best picture of himself, he has given us also the best epithet that has ever been penned concerning him. He was thinking not of himself, but of Chrysostom, when he uttered the eulogy in which we may apostrophise the body of Cervantes: “This body ...
DEATH OF DON QUIXOTE.
Paris, 1858.
60th Edition.