a gain to us. In 1614 an apocryphal _Don Quixote_ was published at Tarragona by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda of whom nothing has been discovered, and this spurious sequel contained a preface filled with insolent personalities. If Cervantes had received any one of the appointments in Spanish America for which he petitioned, we should not have had the first _Don Quixote_; if he had gone to Naples with Lemos we should never have had the second; if it had not been for Avellaneda’s insults, we might have had only an unfinished sequel. Cervantes’s life was now drawing to a close, but his industry was prodigious. Apart from fugitive verses he was engaged on _Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda_, on a play entitled _El Engaño á los ojos_, the long-promised continuation of the _Galatea_, and two works which he proposed to call _Las Semanas del Jardín_ and _El famoso Bernardo_. All are lost to us except _Persiles y Sigismunda_ which appeared posthumously in 1617. We catch interesting glimpses of Cervantes in the last phase. He has left a verbal portrait of himself as he looked when he was sixty-six, and it is the only authentic portrait of him in existence. He was ‘of aquiline features, with chestnut hair, smooth and unclouded brow, bright eyes, and a nose arched, though well proportioned, silver beard, once golden twenty years ago, long moustache, small mouth, teeth of no consequence, since he had only six and these in ill condition and worse placed, inasmuch as they do not correspond to one another; stature about the average, neither tall nor short, ruddy complexion, fair rather than dark, slightly stooped in the shoulders, and not very active on his feet.’ Two years later Noel Brûlart de Sillery came to Madrid on a special mission from the French Court, and his suite were intensely curious to hear what they could of Cervantes; they learned that he was ‘old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor.’ At this time, his health must have begun to fail: it was undoubtedly failing fast while he wrote _Persiles y Sigismunda_. He was apparently dependent on the bounty of Lemos and of Bernardo de Sandoval, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo. The hand of death was on him when he wrote to the Cardinal on March 26, 1616, a letter expressing his gratitude for a recent benefaction. On April 2 he was professed as a Tertiary of St. Francis, and the profession took place at the house in the Calle de León to which he had removed in 1611 or earlier. He was never to leave it again alive: on April 18 he received Extreme Unction; on April 19 he wrote the celebrated dedication of _Persiles y Sigismunda_ to Lemos; on April 23 he died, and on April 24 he was buried in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns in the Calle del Humilladero—the street which now bears the name of his great rival Lope. His wife outlived him by ten years, and his daughter by thirty-six; we hear no more of his granddaughter after 1608. Presumably she died in infancy: if so, the