the
South, engaged in his humble occupation of gathering rents, of buying
grain for the use of the fleet, with intervals perhaps of social
enjoyment among such friends as he had made at Seville; among whom is
reckoned the painter Francisco de Pacheco. This was for our hero the
darkest hour before the dawn. For already, according to my calculation,
he must have begun to write _Don Quixote_, being now (1602) in his
fifty-fifth year.[4] He had duly qualified himself, by personal
experience, to tell the story of the adventures of him who sought to
revive the spirit of the ancient chivalry. His own romance was ended. The
pathetic lines of Goethe might seem to be written for his own case:

"Wer nie sein Brod mit Thraenen ass,
Wer nicht die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Maechte."[5]

[4] That _Don Quixote_ could not have been written before 1591 is
proved by the mention in chapter vi of a book published in that
year. That it must have been written subsequently to 1596 is proved
by the reference in chapter xix to an incident which was not ended
till September, 1596 (see Navarrete). There are other hints and
allusions in the story which, I think, show that it could scarcely
have been begun while Philip II was alive.

[5] From _Wilhelm Meister, Lehrjahre_, chapter xii, thus Englished
by Thomas Carlyle:

"Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping and watching for the morrow,
He knew you not, ye unseen Powers."

Never had any man of letters to go through a severer ordeal. At last his
genius found the true path for which it had been beating about so many
years; but not until his prime of life had passed, when even that brave
heart must have been chilled and that gay spirit deadened.

In 1601 Philip III, at the instance of the Duke of Lerma, removed the
court to the old capital of Castile, Valladolid--by nature far better
situated for a metropolis than Madrid, which had been the choice of his
grandfather, Charles V. Thither Cervantes repaired, in 1603, doubtless
with some hope of gleaning some crumbs of the royal favor. He was no more
fortunate with the new King than he had been with the old. Despairing of
place or patronage, he turned, with his brave spirit unquenched as by the
record sufficiently appears, to compl