It is not without significance that his first book should be a specimen of pastoral romance. The _Galatea_ bears no closer relation to workaday life than Sir Philip Sidney's _Arcadia_. This old soldier began his career as a man of letters by trying to settle upon an estate in Arcady, the very country whose cardboard foliage he was afterwards to ridicule, and the last book he wrote, in spite of the humaner work that had preceded it, was a romance not dissimilar from his first. Partly this must have been due to the fashion of the time; but it is not extravagant to find in it an illustration of the wistful manner in which men write about their opposites. Men like Stevenson, caged in sick rooms, may love to be buccaneers on paper. The real adventurers set the balance even by imagining themselves tending sheep on a smooth grassy slope. [_Don Quixote_ no parody.] Cervantes' _Galatea_ is not a great work. Its shepherds weep more than Sir Philip Sidney's, and sing considerably worse. But it had its success, and Cervantes was never anything but proud of it, a fact that should not be forgotten in remembering his _Don Quixote_. _Don Quixote_ has often been described as a parody of the heroic and pastoral romances, which indeed had become a little foolish. But Cervantes was not the man to jeer at what he loved. Instead, he fills the old skins that had held the wine of dreams with the new wine of experience. He did not parody the old romances, but re-wrote them in a different way. Parody laughs and writes a full stop; the art of Cervantes, Fielding, and Rabelais ends always in a hyphen, a sign that allows all manner of developments. [Illustration: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA] [The picaresque form.]