The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

"Wer nie sein Brod mit Thränen ass,

Wer nicht die kummervollen Nächte

Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,

Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Mächte."[5]

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 completing this new thing among books.

Don Quixote was probably finished by the beginning of 1604, though some further time elapsed, as it seems, before the author had courage to go to print. His genius had lain fallow for twenty years. He was now old, and had written nothing, or at least published nothing, since Galatea. What fame was left to him he had earned as a poet among many poets. As an author, if he was remembered at all, it was in a line wholly different from that which he now essayed. There is reason to believe that the manuscript of the new book was in circulation among those who called themselves the author's friends, as was the custom of the age, before he found a patron and a publisher.[6] The publisher was got at last in Francisco Robles, the King's printer, to whom the copyright was sold for ten years.[7] The patron appeared in the person of the Duque de Bejar, a nobleman described by a writer of that age—Cristobal de Mesa—as himself both a poet and a valiant soldier. The choice was not altogether a happy one, for the Duke of Bejar might be said to have an ancestral claim to be regarded as a patron of books of chivalries. It was to his great-grandfather that one of the silliest and most extravagant of the romances had been dedicated by the author, Feliciano de Silva, who is the writer specially ridiculed by Cervantes—the very book which is the subject of a parody in the opening chapter of Don Quixote.[8] The Duke of Bejar was noted, moreover, for his own uncommon affection for the books of chivalries then in fashion, and it is probable that he at first understood Don Quixote to be one such as he was in the habit of reading. Learning of his mistake, he refused, it is said, the dedication, and withdrew his patronage from the author. Then, according to the pleasant story first told by Vicente de los Rios, was enacted that scene which has been so favorite a subject with modern artists. Cervantes begged of the Duke to give him a hearing before deciding against his book; upon which he was permitted to read a chapter, which the Duke found so much to his taste that he graciously readmitted the author into his favor and consented to receive the dedication. There is another tradition which imputes to the Duke's confessor—an ecclesiastic who must have had a cleaner nose for heterodoxy than most of his fellows—the original rejection of the dedication by the Duke, the alteration in its wording, and the subsequent neglect of the author.[9] The dedication which now does duty at the opening of the First Part of Don Quixote I have shown to have been tampered with by someone bearing no good-will to Cervantes.