In Cervantes freedom gained a champion whose efforts entitle him to grateful mention on this threshold of our inquiry. Taught in the school of slavery, he knew how to commiserate the slave. The unhappy condition of his fellow-Christians in chains was ever uppermost in his mind. He lost no opportunity of inciting attempts for their emancipation, and for the overthrow of the "peculiar institution"--pardon the recurring phrase!--under which they groaned. He became in Spain what, in our day and country, is sometimes called an "anti-slavery agitator,"--not by public meetings and addresses, but, according to the genius of the age, mainly through the theatre. Not from the platform, but from the stage, did this liberated slave speak to the world. In a play entitled _El Trato de Argel_, or Life in Algiers--which, though not composed according to rules of art, found much favor, probably from its subject--he pictured, shortly after his return to Spain, the manifold humiliations, pains, and torments of slavery. This was followed by two other plays in the same spirit,--_La Gran Sultana Doña Cathalina de Oviedo_, and _Los Baños de Argel_, or, The Galleys of Algiers. The last act of the latter closes with the statement, calculated to enlist the sympathies of an audience, that "this play is not drawn from the imagination, but was born far from the regions of fiction, in the very heart of truth." More could not be said of a tale of Slavery in our day. Not content with this appeal through the theatre, Cervantes, with constant zeal, takes up the same theme in the tale of "The Captive" which he introduces into Don Quixote, and also in that of _El Amante Liberal_, and in some parts of _La Española Inglesa_. All these may be regarded not merely as literary labors, but as charitable efforts in behalf of human freedom.