His vindication being complete, he left Algiers for Denia on October 24, and reached Madrid at some date previous to December 18. His position was lamentable. He was in his thirty-fourth year, and had to begin life again. Perhaps if Don John had lived, Cervantes might have returned to the army; but Don John was dead, and his memory was not cherished at court. Cervantes had no degree, no profession, no trade, no craft except that of sonneteering: his life had been spent in the service of the King, and he endeavoured to obtain some small official post. Accordingly he made for Portugal, recently annexed by Philip II., tried to find an opening, and was sent as King’s messenger to Orán with instructions to call at Mostaganem with despatches from the Alcalde. The mission was speedily executed, and Cervantes found himself adrift. He settled in Madrid, made acquaintance with some prominent authors of the day, and, in default of more lucrative employment, betook himself to literature. He was always ready to furnish a friend with a eulogistic sonnet on that friend’s immortal masterpiece, and thus acquired a certain reputation as a facile, fluent versifier. But sonnets are expensive luxuries, and Cervantes wanted bread. He earned it by writing for the stage: to this period no doubt we must assign the _Numancia_ and _Los Tratos de Argel_, as well as many other pieces which have not survived. Cervantes was like the players in _Hamlet_. Seneca was not too heavy, nor Plautus too light for him: he was ready to supply ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited.’ It was a hard struggle to keep the wolf from the door, but perhaps this was the happiest period of Cervantes’s life. He was on friendly terms with poets like Pedro de Padilla and Juan Rufo Gutiérrez; managers did not pay him lavishly for his plays, but at least they were set upon the stage, and the applause of the pit was to him the sweetest music in the world. Moreover, following the example of his friend Luis Gálvez de Montalvo, he was engaged upon a prose pastoral, and, with his optimistic nature, he easily persuaded himself that this romance would make his reputation—and perhaps his fortune. He was now nearing the fatal age of forty, and it was high time to put away the follies of youth. Breaking off a fugitive amour with a certain Ana Franca (more probably Francisca) de Rojas, he married a girl of nineteen, Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, daughter of a widow owning a moderate estate at Esquivias, a small town near Toledo, then famous for its wine, as Cervantes is careful to inform us. Doubtless his courtship was like Othello’s.