At Lepanto Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (please pronounce the “a’s” separately) was about twenty-five years of age, and was lying below deck sick of a fever. When he heard the roar of the guns of Don John he sprang from his bed and rushed on deck in spite of the orders of his captain; he was put in charge of a boat’s crew of twelve men and went through the thick of the fighting. Every man in Don John’s fleet was fired with his religious enthusiasm, and Cervantes’ courage was only an index of the wild fervour that distinguished the Christians on that most bloody day. He was wounded in the left hand, “for the greater glory of the right,” as he himself quaintly says, and never again could he move the fingers of the injured hand; no doubt the tendon sheaths had become septic, and he was lucky to have kept the hand at all. It has been sapiently remarked that the world would have had a great loss if it had been the right hand; but healthy people who lose the right hand can easily learn to write with the left. Cervantes remained in the fleet for some years until, on his way home, he was captured by Algerian pirates; put to the service of a Christian renegade--a man who had turned Mussulman to save his life or from still less worthy motive--Cervantes made several attempts to escape, but these were unsuccessful, and he remained in captivity for some years until his family had scraped up enough to ransom him. In _Don Quixote_ there is a good deal about the renegadoes, and much of the well-known story of the “escaped Moor” is probably autobiographical; from these hints we gather that the renegadoes were not quite so bad as has been generally thought, or else that Cervantes was far too big-minded a man to believe unnecessary evil about anybody. Back in Spain, he went into the army for two years, until, in 1582, he gave up soldiering and took to literature. He found the pen “a good stick but a bad crutch,” and in 1585 returned to the public service as deputy-purveyor of the fleet. In 1594 he became collectors of revenues in Granada, and in 1597 he became short in his accounts and fell into jail. There he seems to have begun _Don Quixote_; he somehow obtained security for the repayment of the missing money, was released penniless into a suspicious world, and published the first part of _Don Quixote_ in 1605. It was enormously well received, and from that day to this has remained one of the most successful of all books. Ten years later he found that dishonest publishers were issuing spurious second parts, so he sat himself down to write a genuine sequel. This differs from most sequels in that it is better than the original; it is wiser, mellower, less ironical; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still more lovable than they were before, and one imagines that Cervantes must have spent the whole ten years in collecting--or inventing--the wonderful proverbs so wisely uttered by the squire.