Father Juan Gil, of the Order of Mercy, then resided at Algiers, as agent for the redemption of prisoners. This officer made extraordinary exertions in behalf of Cervantes, and offered to advance whatever might be necessary, together with the contributions already received from his family in Spain, to procure his liberty. The Dey had now raised his price to five hundred gold ducats, but the ransom was paid, and Cervantes returned to his native country, in 1581.

nature.

But, although once more a free man, the prospects of Cervantes were by no means encouraging He was thirty-four years of age, maimed, poor, and without friends among the wealthy and powerful. Yet he had spent ten years of manhood among such scenes of travel, adventure, enterprise and suffering, as could not fail to enlarge and strengthen the powerful understanding with which he had been gifted by His lively temper and the strength of his imagination were very little abated by his adversities and forlorn condition. His wound had disabled him as a soldier, and he had now no resource for a living but his pen. The first work which he published appears to have been a pastoral romance, entitled Galatea. This performance exhibits grace and beauty of style, but very few indications of that originality of invention, and nothing of that great power in delineating human character, which afterwards distinguished him. It is written in prose and verse, and it is supposed by some critics, that the prose narrative was designed expressly for the purpose of embodying the miscellaneous contents of a poetical common-place book, which he had been filling up in the long period of his absence

from Spain, and particularly during the many weary and idle hours of his captivity.

Shortly after the publication of Galatea, Cervantes married a young lady, whose charms are supposed to have inspired the amatory effusions which abound in that work. The dowry of his wife was not ample, but, like the author of Tom Jones, he lived upon it in idleness, until it was exhausted, and he then found himself obliged to resume the pen. For three years, he seems to have applied himself closely to dramatic composition; his plays, according to the fashion of the day, were sold as fast as they were written, to the managers of the different theatres in Madrid, Seville and other cities. Lope de Vega, the greatest dramatic writer of that age, received but ten dollars for a comedy; and his unsuccessful rival Cervantes, without doubt, was content with still smaller compensation, and realized a bare subsistence from the theatre. He obtained at Seville, however, some small office, which preserved him from absolute want during the reign of Philip II. Thirty of his comedies were never printed, and are now lost. Cervantes mentions his dramatic efforts in the following terms: "All of them were represented without a single cucumber, or orange, or any other missile usually aimed at bad comedians, being thrown at the actors. They proceeded through their parts without hisses, without confusion, and without clamor. I was at length occupied with other matters, and I laid down my pen and forsook the drama. In the mean time appeared that prodigy, Lope de Vega, who immediately assumed the dramatic

crown."

U

Two of the plays of Cervantes have been preserved; they are entitled Numantia Avenged, and Life in Algiers. These pieces have all the wildness and irregularity of Shakspere; they may be considered as a series of pictures, connected by the chain of historical interest, though varying in subject. Patriotism is the predominant sentiment in Numantia, and the fine story of the heroism and devotion of the inhabitants of that famous city, is told with a power and effect quite worthy of the genius of Cervantes. In his Life in Algiers, sympathy for captives is strongly excited, but this piece has no dramatic action, plot, catastrophe or adherence to the unities. He collects into one point of view the various sufferings, sorrows and humiliations which attend slavery among the Moors. His object was to rouse the nation and the king himself against the Mussulmans, and to preach a sort of crusade for the deliverance of all Christian captives. The truth of the picture, the proximity of the scene, and the immediate interest of the spectators, supplied the want of art which is visible in this drama, and exerted, as we may easily believe, a powerful influence over the audience.

A vague tradition has prevailed, that Cervantes had been sent into La Mancha for the purpose of collecting some debts due to a mercantile house in Seville; that he was ill-treated by the inhabitants of that district, and on some pretence imprisoned for several months in the jail of Argasamilla, and that during this imprisonment he wrote the first part of Don Quixote. We know from Cervantes himself that it was written in a prison, and the accuracy with which

the country and the manners and customs of La Mancha are described by him, warrants the conjecture that he resided some time there. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

ten.

The success of this work was unexampled in that day. It was read eagerly by all classes, high and low, learned and ignorant. Four editions were published within a year, and the fame of it spread at once into foreign countries. All were delighted with its inimitable humor, bold invention, keen satire, and the unequalled grace of the style in which it was writThe historian of Philip III. relates the following anecdote. The king, standing one day in the balcony of the palace at Madrid, observed a certain student sitting with a book in his hand on the opposite bank of the river. He was reading, but every now and then broke off, and gave himself violent blows on the forehead, accompanied with innumerable motions of ecstasy and mirthfulness. "That fellow," said the king, " is either out of his wits, or reading Don Quixote." But neither Philip nor any of his courtiers condescended to grant any assistance to the indigent author, who had written a work so full of comic talent, within the walls of a prison. The same year, it appears from the records of the court at Valladolid, that Cervantes was residing at that city, in a state of poverty. Owing to his literary reputation, he was in the habit of receiving frequent visits from persons of rank and the learned men of the university; yet he was lodged, with his wife, two sisters and a niece, in shabby apartments in the fourth story of a mean-looking house, in the worst part of the city, and with but a single domestic.

The publication of Don Quixote excited a host of enemies against the author. The pungent satire of the work irritated a great number of cotemporary authors, some of them men of high rank, whose reputation depended on the very books which he exposed to ridicule. Another numerous and active class, the writers for the stage, were no less seriously offended by the freedom with which he had criticised many of the popular pieces which at that time retained possession of the Spanish theatre. He was in consequence assailed by all the arts of individual spleen, envy and detrac tion. Cervantes endured this very calmly; but he was more provoked by the impudence and malignity of an anonymous writer, who, under the assumed name of Avellaneda, published a continuation of Don Quixote, full of invective and abuse against the original author. This probably hastened the composition of the second part of the genuine work, which he published in 1615.

The remains of his patrimony, with the profits of the first part of Don Quixote, and perhaps some assistance from his patrons, the Count de Lemos and the Cardinal of Toledo, appear to have been sufficient to support him in the humble style of life to which he had been accustomed, for he now allowed eight years to pass before he sent any new work to the press. In 1613, he published his Exemplary Novels, most of which had been written many years previous. These tales were received with great applause, and are for the most part very happy imitations of Boccaccio. Their morality is uniformly pure, and many of them are full of interest, so that to this hour they have kept