rd, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor on
the roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history.
In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do with
the author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that have
given to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above
mentioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriation
by his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, for
though nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived from
the ancient territorial possession of the family, and as a set-off, and
to distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a
surname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building
of which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a
share.

Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity;
it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia,
and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in the
service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son of
his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gave
Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in the
kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of the
noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,
magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two
cardinal-archbishops.

Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of
the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias
de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,
Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches of
the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor de
Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and
Miguel, our author.

The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." A
man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant
extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was
likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of
the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one
place about families that have once been great and have tapered away
until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his
own.

He was