We have little trace of how he exercised his pen during this interval. The house of the celebrated painter Francisco Pacheco, master and father-in-law of Velasquez, was then frequented by all the men of education in Seville: the painter was also a poet, and Rodrigo Caro mentions that his house was an academy resorted to by all the literati of the town. Cervantes was numbered among them; and his portrait is found among the pictures of more than a hundred distinguished persons, painted and brought together by this artist. The poet Jauregui, who also cultivated painting, painted his portrait, and was numbered among his friends. Here Cervantes became the friend of Herrera, who spent his life in Seville, secluded from the busy world, but venerated and admired by his friends. Cervantes, in after days, wrote a sonnet to his memory, and mentions him with fond praise in his "Voyage to Parnassus." Viardôt assures us, that it was during his residence at Seville that Cervantes wrote most of his tales. This appears probable. Certainly he did not lose the habit of composition. Much of the material of these stories was furnished him by incidents that actually occurred in Seville; and when we see the mastery of invention and language he had acquired when he wrote "Don Quixote," we may believe that these tales occupied his pen when apparently, in a literary sense, idle. It seems that, at Seville, and during his distasteful employments there, he acquired that bitter view of human affairs displayed in "Don Quixote." Yet it is wrong to call it bitter. Even when his hopes were crushed and blighted, a noble enthusiasm survived disappointment and ill-treatment; and, though he looks sadly, and with somewhat of causticity on human life, still no one can mistake the generous and lofty aspirations of his injured spirit throughout. We have two sonnets of his, written at Seville, which justify the idea, however, that there was something in this city (as is usually the case with provincial towns), that peculiarly excited his spirit of sarcasm. The first of these sonnets was written in ridicule of some recruits gathered together by a captain Bercerra to join the forces sent under the duke of Medina, to repel the disembarcation of the earl of Essex, who hovered near Cadiz with his fleet.