In Portugal, Spain, and Italy, through which his hero and heroine--disguised as they are from first to last under the names of Periandro and Auristela--make a pilgrimage to Rome, we get rid of most of the extravagances which deform the earlier portion of the romance. The whole, however, consists of a labyrinth of tales, showing, indeed, an imagination quite astonishing in an old man like Cervantes, already past his grand climacteric,--a man, too, who might be supposed to be broken down by sore calamities and incurable disease;--but it is a labyrinth from which we are glad to be extricated, and we feel relieved when the labors and trials of his Persiles and Sigismunda are over, and when, the obstacles to their love being removed, they are happily united at Rome. No doubt, amidst the multitude of separate stories with which this wild work is crowded, several are graceful in themselves, and others are interesting because they contain traces of Cervantes’s experience of life,[164] while, through the whole, his style is more carefully finished, perhaps, than in any other of his works. But, after all, it is far from being what he and his friends fancied it was,--a model of this peculiar style of fiction, and the best of his works. [164] From the beginning of Book III., we find that the action of Persiles and Sigismunda is laid in the time of Philip II. or Philip III., when there was a Spanish viceroy in Lisbon, and the travels of the hero and heroine in the South of Spain and Italy seem to be, in fact, Cervantes’s own recollections of the journey he made through the same countries in his youth; while Chapters 10 and 11 of Book III. show bitter traces of his Algerine captivity. His familiarity with Portugal, as seen in this work, should also be noticed. Frequently, indeed, as in almost every thing else he wrote, we meet intimations and passages from his own life.