He became a government agent, collecting naval stores. He was not a great success: one of his subordinates defaulted, and he was put in prison. He lived in straitened circumstances, in a household with five women relatives and his sense of humor. Then he tried writing; for twenty years he wrote every kind of thing which a man of his time could imagine would bring a living, but all in vain. He was not a university man and so the critics of his time considered him presumptuous in attempting to break into their sacred ranks. Until he was fifty-eight his life was a failure. Then he hit upon the idea of ridiculing the established literature of chivalry, by bringing it into contact with the every-day realities of Spain. He created a character very much like himself; except that the old Don Quixote had read so many romances that his head was turned, and he began to take them seriously, mounted his old nag and rode out to rescue damsels, and to mistake a barber’s basin shining in the sun for a helmet, and wind-mills for giants who must be overthrown. The story rambles along from one comical adventure to the next, and brings in almost every type of person in Spain. It became an instant and enormously popular success; but poor Cervantes got practically nothing out of it, because editions were pirated all over the country. He was a failure to the end--and curiously enough, did not get any satisfaction even from his fame. He was ashamed of his popular book, and quite sure that mankind would some day appreciate his long poems, “The Journey to Parnassus,” and the pastoral romance, “Galatea,” and the romantic poem, “Persiles and Sigismunda.” Many of the world’s greatest writers have thus fallen victim to culture-snobbery. Shakespeare was despised by the academic critics of his own time, and apparently did not think enough of his own plays to see that posterity got a correct edition of them. When I was a boy we all read “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn,” and “laughed our heads off” over them; but if anybody had suggested to us that Mark Twain might be one of the world’s great writers, we should have thought it a Mark Twain joke.