The sixteenth-century prose-pastoral was a barren product, rooted in a false convention. It was not natural, and it was not artistic: it failed to reproduce the beauty of the old ideal, and it failed to create a modern ideal. It satisfies no canon, and to attempt to make a case for it is to argue for argument’s sake. Had Cervantes continued to work this vein, he would never have found his true path, and must have remained an imitator till the end; and it is a mere chance that he did not return to the pastoral and complete the _Galatea_. It was far too often in his thoughts. As his butt Feliciano de Silva would have said, his reason saw ‘the unreason of the reason with which the reason is afflicted’ when given up to the composition of pastorals; and yet the pastoral romance had a fascination for him. Fortunately, he was saved from a fatal error by the fact that, for nearly twenty years after the publication of the _Galatea_, he was kept against his will in touch with the realities of life: realities often grim, squalid, fantastic, cruel and absurd, but preferable to the pointless philanderings of imaginary swains and nymphs in a pasteboard Arcadia. The surly taxpayers from whom Cervantes had to wring contributions, the clergy who excommunicated and imprisoned him, the alcaldes and jacks-in-office who made his life a burden, the cheating landlords and strumpets whom he met in miserable inns—these people were not the crown and flower of the human race, but they were not intangible abstractions, nor even persistent bores; they were plain men and women, creatures of flesh and blood, subject to all the passions of humanity, and using vigorous, natural speech instead of euphemisms and preciosities. It was by contact with these rugged folk that Cervantes amassed his wealth of observation, and slowly learned his trade. This was precisely what he needed. After his return from Algiers, and till his marriage, circumstances had thrown him into a literary clique, well-read and well-meaning, but with no vital knowledge of the past and no intellectual interest in the present. The destiny which drove Cervantes to collect provisions and taxes in the villages of the south saved him from the Byzantinism of the capital, and placed him once more in direct relation with nature—especially human nature. This was his salvation as an author. And eighteen years later he produced the First Part of _Don Quixote_.