On July 2, 1600, Rodrigo de Cervantes, then an ensign serving under the Archduke Albert in Flanders, was killed in action; but Miguel de Cervantes probably did not hear of this till long afterwards. He now vanishes from sight, for there is another blank in his record from May 1601 to February 1603. We may assume that he lived in extreme poverty at Seville, and when next heard of—at Valladolid in 1603—his circumstances had not greatly improved. His sister Andrea was employed as needlewoman by the Marqués de Villafranca, and her little bill is made out in Cervantes’s handwriting: clearly every member of the family contributed to the household expenses, and every _maravedí_ was welcome. Presumably Cervantes had come to Valladolid in obedience to a peremptory _mandamus_ from the Exchequer Court. A brief enquiry must have convinced the registrars that, with the best will in the world, he was not in a position to make good the sum which (as they alleged) was due to the treasury, and they left him in peace for three years with a cloud over him. He had touched bottom. He had valiantly endured the buffets of fortune, and was now about to enter into his reward. His mind to him a kingdom was, and during the years of his disgrace in Seville he had lived, unhindered by squalid circumstance, in a pleasaunce of reminiscence and imagination. All other doors being closed to him, he returned to the house of literature, took pen and paper, gave literary form to his experiences and imaginings, and, when drawing on to sixty, produced the masterpiece which has made his name immortal. It may well be, as he himself hints, that _Don Quixote_ was begun in Seville jail: perhaps it was finished there. At any rate there was little to be added to it when the author reached Valladolid in 1603—little beyond the preface and burlesque preliminary verses. By the summer of 1604 Cervantes had found a publisher, and it had leaked out that the book contained some caustic references to distinguished contemporaries. This may account for Lope de Vega’s opinion, expressed in August 1604 (six months before the work was published), that ‘no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so silly as to praise _Don Quixote_.’ This was not precisely a happy forecast. _Don Quixote_ appeared early in 1605, was hailed with delight, and received the dubious compliment of being pirated in Lisbon. Cervantes was the man of the moment, in the first flush of his popularity, when chance played him an unpleasant trick. On the night of June 27, 1605, a Navarrese gallant named Gaspar de Ezpeleta was wounded while in the neighbourhood of the Calle del Rastro, called for aid at the door of No. 11 where Cervantes lodged, was helped into the house, and died there two days later. The inmates were arrested on suspicion, examined by the magistrate, and released on July 1. The minutes of the examination were unpublished till recent years, and these furtive tactics gravely injured the memory of