Some men live their romances, and some men write them. It was given to Cervantes to do both, and, as his art was not of the impersonal order, it is scarcely possible to read his work without a desire to know more of the rich and imposing individuality which informs it. Posthumous legends are apt to form round men of the heroic type who have been neglected while alive, and posterity seems to enjoy this cheap form of atonement. Cervantes is a case in point. But the researches of the last few years have brought much new material to light, and have dissipated a cloud of myths concerning him: we are not yet able to see him as he was at every stage of his chequered career, but we are nearer him than we ever were before. We are passing out of the fogs of fable, and are learning that, in Cervantes’s case, facts are as strange as fiction—and far more interesting. It is a foible with the biographers of great men to furnish their heroes with a handsome equipment of ancestors, and Cervantes’s descent has been traced back to the end of the tenth century by these amateur genealogists. We may admire their industry, and reject their conclusions. It is quite possible that Cervantes was of good family, but we cannot go further back than two generations. His grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, appears to have been a country lawyer who died, without attaining distinction or fortune, about the middle of the sixteenth century. Juan’s son was Rodrigo de Cervantes who married Leonor de Cortinas: and the great novelist was the fourth of their seven children. Rodrigo de Cervantes was a lowly precursor of Sangrado—a simple apothecary-surgeon, of inferior professional status, seldom settled long in one place, earning a precarious living by cupping and blistering. His son Miguel was born at Alcalá de Henares—possibly, as his name suggests, on St. Michael’s Day (September 29)—and he was baptized there on Sunday, October 9, 1547, in the church of Santa María la Mayor. There was a tradition that Cervantes matriculated at Alcalá, and his name was discovered in the university registers by an investigator who looked for it with the eye of faith. This is one of many pleasing, pious legends. Rodrigo de Cervantes was not in a position to send his sons to universities. A poor, helpless, sanguine man, he wandered in quest of patients and fortune from Alcalá to Valladolid, from Valladolid to Madrid, from Madrid to Seville, and it has been conjectured that Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra spent some time in the Jesuit school at Seville. The dog Berganza, in the _Coloquio de los Perros_, recalls his edification at ‘seeing the loving-kindness, the discretion, the solicitude and the skill with which those saintly fathers and masters taught these lads, so that the tender shoots of their youth should not be twisted, nor take a wrong bend in the path of virtue which, together with the humane letters, they continually pointed out to them.’ But it is evident that Cervantes