The financial occupations of Cervantes at Seville were full of various annoyances; and it seems to have been his destiny at all times, to find his life beset with various forms of adversity. He was accused of malversation in the employment of monies entrusted to him. His poverty was his best defence, but it required other circumstances to prove his innocence, and his honest heart and lofty soul must have been tortured by all the detail of accusation and defence. Viardôt has, by examining the archives of Valladolid, Seville, and Madrid, found traces of various circumstances, which he details. In themselves some of them scarcely deserve record, except as happening to Cervantes, and showing how like the equally unfortunate but more imprudent Hums, he was occupied by transactions antipathetic to his tastes and vocation. The first circumstance recorded by Viardôt is indeed a mere mercantile casualty, full of annoyance at the time, but whose effects even to the sufferer, vanishes like footsteps in the sand, when the next tide flows. Towards the end of 1594, while he was settling at Seville the accounts of his commissariat, and calling in with much difficulty several sums in arrear, he forwarded the receipts to the _contaduria mayor_ of Madrid, in bills of exchange drawn upon Seville. One of these sums, arising from the taxation of the district of Velez-Malaga, amounting to 7400 rials, (little more than 70_l_.) was intrusted by him in specie to a merchant of Seville named Simon Freire de Lima, who undertook to pay it into the treasury at Madrid. It was not paid, and Cervantes was forced to make a journey to the capital to demand from Friere the sum in question; but this man meanwhile became bankrupt, and had tied from Spain. Cervantes hastened back to Seville, and found the property of his debtor seized on by other creditors. He addressed a request to the king, and a decree was published on the 7th of August 1595; ordering doctor Bernardo de Olmedilla; judge of _los Grados_ at Seville; to take by privilege on the goods of Friere; the sum intrusted to him by Cervantes. This was done, and the money was sent by the judge to the general treasurer, don Pedro Mesia de Tobar; in a bill of exchange drawn on the 22d of November 1596.