Don Quixote | Page 8

him so. The nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as
strenuously as they had fought the Moors, had been divested of all
political power, a like fate had befallen the cities, the free constitutions
of Castile and Aragon had been swept away, and the only function that
remained to the Cortes was that of granting money at the King's
dictation.
The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la
Vega and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had
brought back from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature,
which took root and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the
native growths. Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly
naturalised in Spain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for
investing with an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and
inflexible shepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical and
traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of
peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the
cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But
the most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was
the flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the
press ever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis
of Gaul" at the beginning of the century.
For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no

better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,
something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and
altogether a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted
Alcala the traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa.
Theology and medicine may have been the strong points of the
university, but the town itself seems to have inclined rather to the
humanities and light literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was
already beginning to compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos,
Salamanca and Seville.
A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings
might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that
time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where
the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,
what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,
that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"
could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at
one of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous
panoply and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances
loved to embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the
father of the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty
was lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the
true genesis of "Don Quixote."
For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But
why Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his
son to a university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at
his own door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing
that he did so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor
Tomas Gonzalez, that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of
a Miguel de Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen
again; but even if it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove
nothing, as there were at least two other Miguels born about the middle
of the century; one of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin,
no doubt, who was a source of great embarrassment to the biographers.

That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved
by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he
did, and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life- for
the "Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one- nothing, not even "a college
joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best.
All that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de
Hoyos, a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence,
calls him his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of
verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second
queen of Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which
Cervantes contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in
the form of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds
its way into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was