Subjected to the interrogatories of the royal councillors, judges, and even alcaids, a servant to all merely for means to live, and always moving about, poor Cervantes appears at last to have given way. From 1594, when sent to collect arrears in Granada, to 1598, little can be gathered concerning him, but from this last date till 1603 nothing whatever is known of his fortunes. The probability is that he spent part of the time in a prison of Andaluçia or La Mancha, and there meditated on the vanity of human expectations, and wrote the first part of Don Quixote.
HIS LITERARY LIFE.
Wherever he spent this interval his brain had not been idle—he had passed in review the defects of the Spanish government and of the Spanish character. He had been unable to rouse the king to crush the power of the Algerine pirates, either by the memorials he had consigned to his friend the secretary, or by the vigorous pictures he had presented on the stage (after his return from captivity) of the cruelties inflicted by them on their unhappy captives. He had failed in his great and cherished object, but there remained one reformation yet to be made, namely, of taste among those Spaniards, ladies and gentlemen, to whom reading was a pleasure, and who could afford to purchase books. To substitute a relish for healthier studies was a darling object of our much worried poet for years. It was cherished in prisons, and the first part of his great work written, or nearly so, at the time when we find him again mixing with society in Valladolid, where Philip II. held his court. This was in the year 1603. The following extract concerning his residence and his mode of life in that city, is taken from the work of M. Chasles:
"There is at Valladolid a poor looking house, narrow and low, hemmed in among the taverns of a suburb, and near the deep and empty bed of a torrent called Esguéva. There Cervantes came to live in 1603, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. With an emotion which I cannot express I hare visited this dwelling, which stands outside the city, and which remains unmarked by stone or inscription. A well-used staircase conducts to the two modest chambers used by Cervantes. One, in which he slept, no doubt, is a square room with a low ceiling supported by beams. The other, a sort of ill-lighted kitchen looking on to the neighboring roofs, still holds his cantarelo or stone with three round hollows to hold water jars. Here lived with him his wife, Dona Catalina, his daughter Isabelle, now twenty years old, his sister Dona Andrea, his niece Constanza, and a relation named Dona Magdalena. A housekeeper increased the family. Where did all sleep? However that was arranged, they all did their work together. The ladies earned money by embroidering the court-dresses. Valladolid, adopted for abode by the new king and by the Duke of Lerma, was then incumbered, as was Versailles afterwards, with gentlemen, with the grandees, and with generals. Our impoverished family was supported by this affluence. The Marquis of Villafranca, returning from Algiers to the court, got his gala-suit made by the family of the soldier-poet, with whom he had erewhile been acquainted. Cervantes was occupied either with keeping the books of people in business, or regulating the accounts of some people of quality, or striving to bring his long lawsuit with the government lo a close.
"In the evening, while the needles of the women flew through the stuffs, he held the pen, and on the corner of the table he put his thoughts in writing. There it was he composed the prologue of that work which had been a labor of love in the composition, and in which he employed all the force of his genius. In bringing it with him to Valladolid, he experienced alternations of hope and fear, being fully sensible that it was his masterpiece. 'Idle reader,' said he in the first page, 'you may credit my word, for I have no need to take oath, that I wish this book, child of my brain, were the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most witty that any one could imagine.' He had published nothing since the Galatea, which had appeared twenty years before and was an amiable apology for the taste of the times. The book about to be printed was a flagrant attack on the same literature."
Those who despise the old books of chivalry, and have probably never opened one, are too ready to undervalue Cervantes' apprehension about bringing out his book, and the service it eventually rendered to society and literature. We recommend an indifferent individual of this way of thinking to peruse about the eighth of the contents of one of the condemned [{26}] volumes of Don Quixote's library, and work himself into the conviction that the body of the Spanish readers of 1603, ladies and gentlemen, not only admired such compositions more than living readers admire the most popular writings of our times, but in many instances believed the contents to be true.
Let us hope that there is some mistake about the non-accommodation afforded to the seven individuals of Cervantes' family, six of whom were of gentle blood. It is easy to imagine what delightful evenings they would have enjoyed if tolerably comfortable with regard to furniture and space, the soldier-poet reading out some passages from the Don, or the Exemplary Novels, or one of his plays, and the well-bred women plying their needles, listening with interest, and occasionally breaking out into silvery laughs at the comic misfortunes of the knight, or the naive pieces of roguery of the squire.
We can readily imagine the desolation of Cervantes' spirit during the troubled years of his official wanderings, his superiors urging him to grind the faces of his countrymen and fellow-subjects, and these entertaining most unfriendly feelings toward himself. The ladies of his family—where were they during this nomadic life of his, and how were they situated? Separation from their society and anxiety about their privations must have added much to the present suffering, and forebodings of things still worse, the companions of his lonely hours.
A pleasant interruption to the monotony and privations of the family life must have been the appearance of the first part of the Don in 1604, and the popularity it soon attained.
HIS LABORERS AND THEIR REQUITAL.
Some who merely neglected the author till found by fame, were soon ready to do him disservice by passing censure on the execution of the great work, and even searching for subjects of blame in his past career. Lope de Vega, as we have seen, had put it out of his power to turn his dramatic talents to account. Further, he did not act in a kind manner towards him in private, though outwardly friendly. But Lope's friends and admirers so deeply resented an honest and judicious criticism on the works of the prolific dramatist by Cervantes, that they ceased not during the remaining dozen years of his life to do him every unfriendly act in their power. One was so full of malice and so unprincipled, that towards the end of Cervantes' life he wrote a second part of the Adventures of Don Quixote, distinguished by coarseness, dullness, and inability to make the personages of the first part of the story act and speak in character. The impudent and talentless writer called himself Don Avellaneda of some town in La Mancha, but one of De Vega's admirers was supposed to be the real culprit. Suspicions fell on several, but the greater number centered in Pere Luis de Aliaga, a favorite of the Duke of Lerma, and the confessor of Philip III. He was call, meagre, and dark-complexioned, and had got the sobriquet of Sancho Panza, by antithesis.