He reached home and formed the mad idea of turning shepherd with Sancho and the Bachelor, and living out his penance in the fields. But Death saw otherwise, and the old man answered his call before he could do as he wished. He was seized with a violent fever that confined him to his room for six days; finally he slept calmly for some hours, and again awakened, only to fall into one attack of syncope after another until he died; the sanguine assurance of Sancho Panza that Dulcinea had been successfully disenchanted could not save him. Like most idealists he died a sad and disappointed man, certain of one thing only--that he was out of touch with the majority of mankind. Cervantes was far too great an artist to kill his old hero by some such folly as “brain fever”--which nonsense I guess to have been typhoid. I believe that in describing the death of Don Quixote he was thinking of some old man whom he had seen crawl home to die after a severe physical shock, disappointed and disillusioned in a world of practical youth in which there is no room for romantic old age--probably some kind old man whom he himself had loved. These old men usually die of hypostatic pneumonia, which has been called the “natural end of man,” and is probably the real broken heart of popular medicine. The old man, after a severe shock, is affected by a weakened circulation; the lungs are attacked by a slow inflammation, and he dies, usually in a few days, in much the same way as died Don Quixote. Cervantes did not know that these old men die from inflammation of the lungs; no doubt he observed the way they die, and immortalized his memories in the death of Don Quixote. I have written this to point out Cervantes’ great powers of observation. He would probably have made a good doctor in our day. This theory of _Don Quixote_, that at its roots lie memories of Don John and Don Quixada, is in no way inconsistent with Cervantes’ own statement that he wrote the book to ridicule the romances of Chivalry which were so vitiating the literary taste of seventeenth-century Spain; at the back of his mind probably lay his own memories of foolish and gallant things, quite worthy of affectionate ridicule such as he has lavished on his knight-errant. Philip II and the Arterio-Sclerosis of Statesmen