can have had little formal schooling. He was educated in the university of practical experience, and picked up his learning as he could. He made the most of his casual opportunities. Obviously the man who wrote _Don Quixote_ must have read the books of chivalry, the leading poets, the chronicles, dramatic romances like the _Celestina_, picaresque novels like _Lazarillo de Tormes_, pastoral tales like the _Diana_, the _cancioneros_, and countless broadsides containing popular ballads; and he must have read them at this time, for his maturer years were spent in campaigning, or in the discharge of petty, exacting duties. In his early youth, too, he made acquaintance with the theatre, witnessing the performances of the enterprising Lope de Rueda, actor, manager and playwright, the first man in Spain to set up a travelling booth, and bid for public support. The impression was ineffaceable: from Cervantes’s account of his experience, given half a century later, it may be gathered that he listened and watched with the uncritical rapture of a clever, ardent lad, and that his ambition to become a successful dramatist was born there and then. In the meantime, while following his father in his futile journeys, he received a liberal education. Jogging along the high-road, lodging in wayside inns, strolling in market-places, he met men and women of all ranks, from nobles to peasants, and thus began to hoard his literary capital. Like most young men of literary ambition, Cervantes began by versifying, and, as he never grew old in heart, he versified as long as he lived. A sonnet, written between 1560 and 1568, has come to light recently, and is interesting solely as the earliest extant work of Cervantes. By 1566 he was settled in Madrid, and two years later he wrote a series of elegiacs on the death of the Queen, Isabel de Valois: these were published in a volume edited by Juan López de Hoyos, a Madrid schoolmaster, who refers to Cervantes as his ‘dear and beloved pupil.’ As the pupil was twenty before López de Hoyos’s school was founded, the meaning of the phrase is obscure. Perhaps Cervantes had been a pupil under López de Hoyos elsewhere: perhaps he was an usher in López de Hoyos’s new school: frankly, we know nothing of his circumstances. He makes his formal entry into literature, and then vanishes out of sight, and apparently out of Spain. What happened to him at this time is obscure. We know on his own statement that he was once _camarero_ to Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva; we know that Acquaviva, not yet a Cardinal, was in Madrid during the winter of 1568, and that he started for Rome towards the end of the year; and we know from documentary evidence that Cervantes was in Rome at the end of the following year. How he got there, how and when he entered Acquaviva’s service, or when and why he left it—these, as Sir Thomas Browne would say, are all ‘matters of probable conjecture.’