Don Quixote | Page 6

edition published at Lord Carteret's
instance in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that
time disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed,
transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out,
and of other record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against
which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced
no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the
task was entrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, or
Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes
to himself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary
evidence bearing upon his life as they could find.
This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such
good purpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is
the chief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, and
methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously
brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under which
anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found. Navarrete has
done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no fault of his if
he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of Shakespeare
may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It is not the
register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the orthography of his
name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record of his

conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a contemporary has been
produced."
It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced to
make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture,
and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take
the place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate
what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to
the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or
not.
The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of
Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon,
Garcilaso de la Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient
families, and, curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their
origin to the same mountain district in the North of Spain. The family
of Cervantes is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and
unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early
date; but I think the balance of the evidence tends to show that the
"solar," the original site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west
corner of Old Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the
Asturias. As it happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes
family from the tenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the
title of "Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of
the Famous Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the
industrious genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of
a manuscript genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and
historiographer of John II.
The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost
as distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of
Alfonso VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of
Alfonso VI, and was rewarded by divers grants of land in the
neighbourhood of Toledo. On one of his acquisitions, about two
leagues from the city, he built himself a castle which he called Cervatos,
because "he was lord of the solar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the
mountain region extending from the Basque Provinces to Leon was

always called. At his death in battle in 1143, the castle passed by his
will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as territorial or local surnames
were then coming into vogue in place of the simple patronymic, took
the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son Pedro succeeded him in
the possession of the castle, and followed his example in adopting the
name, an assumption at which the younger son, Gonzalo, seems to have
taken umbrage.
Everyone who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember the
ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of
Alcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and
crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid
Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built,
or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his