He now betook himself seriously to literature, published the Galatea, and began to write for the theater. At first he was very successful, but on a sudden Lope de Vega came on the scene, and exhibited such dramatic aptitude and genius and mental fertility, that managers and actors and audience had no ears for any other aspirant to dramatic reputation, and poor Cervantes found his prospect of fame and independence all at once clouded. The pride of the Spanish hidalgo and "Old Christian" [Footnote 16] had been much {24} modified by his life in the army and bagnio, and his good common sense told him that it was his duty to seek to support his family by some civil occupation rather than indulge his family pride, and suffer them and himself to starve. [Footnote 16: One unsuspected of having Moorish or Jewish blood in his veins.] But oh, Apollo and his nine blue stockings! what was the occupation dropped over our soldier-poet's head, and doing all in its power to extinguish his imaginative and poetic faculties? Nothing more nor less than the anti-romantic duties of a commissary. Well, well, Spain was no more prosaic than other countries, and Cervantes had brothers in his mechanical occupations. Charles Lamb's days were spent in adding up columns of "long tots." Burns gauged whiskey casks and kept an eye on private stills; Shakespeare adjusted the contentions of actors, and saw that their exits and entrances did not occur at the wrong sides; perhaps the life of the mill-slave Plautus furnished as much happiness as any of the others. The mill-stones got an occasional rest, and he was in enjoyment for the time, when reading comic scenes from his tablets or scrolls, and listening to the outbursts of laughter that came from the open throats of his sister and brother drudges. The Invincible Armada, while preparing to make a hearty meal on England, had need meantime of provender while crossing the rough Biscayan sea, and four commissaries were appointed to collect provisions for that great monster, and for the behoof of the Indian fleets. Cervantes was one of the four, Seville appointed his headquarters, and his time most unpoetically employed collecting imposts in kind from all tax-paying folk. The regular clergy (houses of friars and monks) were at the time at deadly feud with his Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II., and refused to pay him tribute. They founded their refusal on a papal bull; and on the other aide, the alcaids produced the royal warrant. Between the contending powers the author of Galatea found himself sufficiently embarrassed.