Then, on his way home by sea, he was captured and taken to Algiers as a slave. There he fell to the share of an Albanian renegade and afterward he was sold to the Dey of Algiers. During all the five years of his Moorish captivity Cervantes was the life and soul of his fellow slaves, and he was constantly planning to free himself and his companions. The personal force of the man may be seen from the fact that the Dey declared he "should consider captives, and barks and the whole city of Algiers in perfect safety could he but be sure of that handless Spaniard." Finally Cervantes was ransomed and returned to his home at the age of thirty-five. There he married and became a naval commissary and later a tax collector. His mind soon turned to literature, and for twenty years he wrote a great variety of verses and dramas, all in the prevailing sentimental spirit of the age. At last he produced the first part of _Don Quixote_ at the age of fifty-eight, and he lacked only two years of seventy when the second and final part of the great romance was given to the world. Comment has often been made on the ripe age of Cervantes when he produced his masterpiece, but Lockhart, who wrote an excellent short introduction to _Don Quixote_, points out that of all the great English novelists Smollett was the only one who did first-rate work while young. _Humphrey Clinker_ and _Roderick Random_ are little read in these days, but we have a noteworthy instance of the great success of a new English novelist when past sixty years of age in William de Morgan, whose _Joseph Vance_ made him famous, and who has followed this with no less than three great novels: _Alice for Short_, _Somehow Good_ and _It Never Can Happen Again_. And the marvel of it is that Mr. de Morgan actually took up authorship at sixty, without any previous experience in writing. Dickens and Kipling are about the only exceptions to the rule that a novelist does his best work in mature years, but they are in a class by themselves. _Don Quixote_ reflects all the varying fortunes of Cervantes. The book was begun in prison, where Cervantes was cast, probably for attempting to collect debts. All his remarkable experiences in the wars against the Turks and in captivity among the Moors are embodied in the interpolated tales. The philosophy put into the mouth of the Knight of La Mancha is the fruit of Cervantes' hard experience and mature thought. He was a Spaniard with the sentiments and the prejudices of his century; but by the gift of genius he looked beyond his age and his country and, like Shakespeare, he wrote for all time and all peoples.