Cervantes strikes the characteristic notes of devotion, patriotism, and loyalty to his sovereign. Though he vastly enlarged the circle of his themes later on, he was sufficiently representative of his own time and country to introduce these three motives into his subsequent writings whenever a plausible occasion offered. This is particularly notable in his fugitive verses. Sainte-Beuve says that nearly all men are born poets, but that, as a rule, the poet in us dies young. It was not so with Cervantes—so far as impulse was concerned. From youth to old age he was a persistent versifier. As we have seen, he first appeared in print with elegiacs on the death of Isabel de Valois; as a slave in Algiers he dedicated sonnets to Bartolomeo Ruffino, and from Algiers also he appealed for help to Mateo Vázquez in perhaps the most spirited and sincere of his poetical compositions; he was not long free from slavery when he supplied Juan Rufo Gutiérrez with a resounding patriotic sonnet, and Pedro de Padilla with devotional poems. As he began, so he continued. He has made merry at the practice of issuing books with eulogistic prefatory poems; but he observed the custom in his own _Galatea_, and he was indefatigable in furnishing such verses to his friends. All subjects came alike to him. He would as soon praise the quips and quillets of López Maldonado as lament the death of the famous admiral Santa Cruz, and he celebrated with equal promptitude a tragic epic on the lovers of Teruel and a technical treatise on kidney diseases. It must, I think, be allowed that Cervantes was readily stirred into song. At the end of his career, in his mock-heroic _Viage del Parnaso_, he cast a backward glance at his varied achievement in literature, and, with his usual good judgment, admitted wistfully that nature had denied him the gift of poetry. As the phrase stands, and baldly interpreted, it would seem that excessive modesty had led Cervantes to underestimate his powers. He was certainly endowed with imagination, and with a beautifying vision; but, though he had the poet’s dream, he had not the faculty of verbal magic. It was not given to him to wed immortal thoughts to immortal music, and this no doubt is what he means us to understand by his ingenuous confession. His verdict is eminently just. Cervantes has occasional happy passages, even a few admirable moments, but no lofty or sustained inspiration. He recognised the fact with that transparent candour which has endeared him to mankind, not dreaming that uncritical admirers in future generations would seek to crown him with the laurel to which he formally resigned all claim. Yet we read appreciations of him as a ‘great’ poet, and we can only marvel at such misuse of words. If Cervantes be a ‘great’ poet, what adjective is left to describe Garcilaso, Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora and Calderón?