ned in a way the
unreality of the fairy tale with the bombast of the melodrama.

Cervantes had apparently read these books with avidity, and was not
without a great sympathy with the kind of imagination they embodied.
His own last and most carefully written book, the 'Travails of
Persiles and Sigismunda,' is in many respects an imitation of them;
it abounds in savage islands, furious tyrants, prodigious feats of
arms, disguised maidens whose discretion is as marvelous as their
beauty, and happy deliverances from intricate and hopeless situations.
His first book also, the 'Galatea,' was an embodiment of a kind of
pastoral idealism: sentimental verses being interspersed with
euphuistic prose, the whole describing the lovelorn shepherds and
heartless shepherdesses of Arcadia.

But while these books, which were the author's favorites among his own
works, expressed perhaps Cervantes's natural taste and ambition, the
events of his life and the real bent of his talent, which in time he
came himself to recognize, drove him to a very different sort of
composition. His family was ancient but impoverished, and he was
forced throughout his life to turn his hand to anything that could
promise him a livelihood. His existence was a continuous series of
experiments, vexations, and disappointments. He adopted at first the
profession of arms, and followed his colors as a private soldier upon
several foreign expeditions. He was long quartered in Italy; he fought
at Lepanto against the Turks, where among other wounds he received one
that maimed his left hand, to the greater glory, as he tells us, of
his right; he was captured by Barbary pirates and remained for five
years a slave in Algiers; he was ransomed, and returned to Spain only
to find official favors and recognitions denied him; and finally, at
the age of thirty-seven, he abandoned the army for literature.

His first thought as a writer does not seem to have been to make
direct use of his rich experience and varied observation; he was
rather possessed by an obstinate longing for that poetic gift which,
as he confesses in one place, Heaven had denied him. He began with the
idyllic romance, the 'Galatea' already mentioned, and at various times
during the rest of his life wrote poems, plays, and stories of a
romantic and sentimental type. In the course of these labors, however,
he struck one vein of much richer promise. It was what the Spanish
call the _picaresque_; that is, the de