Consider the facts a moment! So far as external evidence goes we have no information concerning Cervantes from May 1601 to February 1603, but I suggest that he was in Seville during 1602. We know that Lope de Vega was constantly in Seville from 1600 to 1604, and we know that Cervantes wrote a complimentary sonnet for the edition of the _Dragontea_ issued by Lope in 1602. The inference is that Cervantes and Lope were on friendly terms at this date, and it is therefore incredible that Cervantes had written—or even contemplated writing—the sharp attack on Lope in the forty-seventh chapter of _Don Quixote_. During the course of 1602 differences arose to separate the two men, and thenceforward Cervantes felt free to treat Lope as an ordinary mortal, an author who invited trenchant criticism. This would lead us to suppose that _Don Quixote_ was not actually finished till just before Cervantes’s departure to Valladolid at the beginning of 1603, and it would also explain how Lope de Vega became acquainted with the contents of _Don Quixote_ before it was actually published. Cervantes is pleasantly chatty and confidential in print respecting the books upon which he is at work; he is not likely to have been more reserved in private conversation with a friend. And it is intrinsically probable that at this difficult period of his life Cervantes may have made many confidences to Lope concerning his projects. At first sight it may seem odd that we hear nothing of Cervantes’s mingling in the literary circles of Seville; it may seem still more strange, if we take into consideration the fact that several of the poets whom he had praised in the _Galatea_ were then living in Seville. But there is nothing strange about it, if we look at men and things from a contemporary point of view. The plain truth is that at this time Cervantes was a nobody in the eyes of educated people at Seville. His steps had been persistently dogged by failure. He had failed as a dramatist, and as a writer of romance; he had been discharged from the public service under a cloud, and his imprisonment would not recommend him to the Philistines. Highly respectable literary persons closed their doors to him, and in these circumstances Lope’s companionship would be most welcome. From these small details we may fairly infer that _Don Quixote_ was not finished till the very end of 1602, and that the final touches were not given till Cervantes went to Valladolid in 1603, a perfectly insignificant figure in the eyes of literary men and literary patrons. He was still nothing but a seedy elderly hack when _Don Quixote_ was licensed in September 1604. The book stole into the market at the beginning of 1605, with no great expectation of success on the part of the publisher who had it printed in a commonplace, careless fashion, and left it to take its chance on his counter at the price of eight and a half _reales_. We all know the result. From the