This honor, if we may trust the uniform testimony of two centuries, belongs, beyond question, to his Don Quixote,--the work which, above all others, not merely of his own age, but of all modern times, bears most deeply the impression of the national character it represents, and has, therefore, in return, enjoyed a degree and extent of national favor never granted to any other.[165] When Cervantes began to write it is wholly uncertain. For twenty years preceding the appearance of the First Part he printed nothing;[166] and the little we know of him, during that long and dreary period of his life, shows only how he obtained a hard subsistence for himself and his family by common business agencies, which, we have reason to suppose, were generally of trifling importance, and which, we are sure, were sometimes distressing in their consequences. The tradition, therefore, of his persecutions in La Mancha, and his own averment that the Don Quixote was begun in a prison, are all the hints we have received concerning the circumstances under which it was first imagined; and that such circumstances should have tended to such a result is a striking fact in the history, not only of Cervantes, but of the human mind, and shows how different was his temperament from that commonly found in men of genius. [165] My own experience in Spain fully corroborates the suggestion of Inglis, in his very pleasant book, (Rambles in the Footsteps of Don Quixote, London, 1837, 8vo, p. 26), that “no Spaniard is entirely ignorant of Cervantes.” At least, none I ever questioned on the subject--and their number was great in the lower conditions of society--seemed to be entirely ignorant what sort of personages were Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. [166] He felt this himself as a dreary interval in his life, for he says in his Prólogo: “Al cabo de tantos años como ha, que duermo en el silencio del olvido,” etc. In fact, from 1584 till 1605 he had printed nothing except a few short poems of little value, and seems to have been wholly occupied in painful struggles to secure a subsistence.