l, or the
orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record
of his conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a contemporary has
been produced."

It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced
to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture,
and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the
place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate
what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to
the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or
not.

The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanish
literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la
Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and,
curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin to
the same mountain district in the North of Spain. The family of Cervantes
is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably it
was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I think
the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original
site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old
Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it
happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the
tenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the title of
"Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous
Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious
genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript
genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John
II.

The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost as
distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso
VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI, and
was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of Toledo. On
one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built
himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because "he was lord of the
solar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the mountain region extending from
the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in
1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as
territorial or local surnames were then coming into vo