' most humble to be commanded,

"RICH. WALSH."

[28] November 8th.

CERVANTES' "DON QUIXOTE" REFORMS LITERATURE

A.D. 1605

HENRY EDWARD WATTS

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is the most celebrated of Spanish
authors; but his fame rests upon a far more solid basis than merely
that of having written the most readable and tender of humorous
romances. He reformed literature. He tilted at windmills as truly as
ever his hero did, and overthrew the false taste for wordy pomp and
emptiness which was characteristic of his times. It was not only
Spanish literature that felt the impulse of his warm, frank honesty
and insight into life. All Europe was his debtor.

Cervantes was an impoverished nobleman, that too common product of
Spain in those days when her American gold fleets had begun to fail
her. In his early manhood he was an author and then a soldier of
fortune in Italy. He fought as a common soldier on one of the Genoese
galleys in the great sea-fight of Lepanto, distinguished himself
there by his heroism, and was three times wounded, crippled in one
arm for life. Later he was captured by Algerian pirates, and was for
five years a slave, ever planning and attempting escapes, a daring,
dashing hero, the life and admiration of his fellow-captives.

After his ransom and return to Spain, Cervantes once more took up
literature, the amusement of his youth. He became a playwright and
romancer. The government gave him a small position as a tax-collector,
but with such good-natured carelessness did he handle this
uncongenial employ that he had repeatedly to make good from his own
pocket the losses he entailed upon the government. Even this
unsatisfactory labor failed the impractical author about the period
of the death of King Philip II (1598). He was imprisoned for debt,
and sank into such abject poverty that he depended on his friends
for bread. How much the gloomy Philip II is satirized in Cervantes'
masterpiece has always been a disputed question.

The accession of the new King, which had been hailed as "the light after
darkness," had little effect on Cervantes' fortunes. Philip III, though
he had some taste for letters, and was not without sprouts of kindliness
in his heart, had been by education and by an over-strict