Cervantes' Voyage to Parnassus, in which he complains to Apollo for not being furnished even with a stool in that poets' elysium, was published in 1614, the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, and that was the last book whose proofs he had the pleasure to correct. He was employed on his Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda, [Footnote 19] and wrote its preface, and the dedication to his patron the Count of Lemos, while suffering under his final complaint, the dropsy, and having only a few day to live. From the preface to the Persiles he appears to have received extreme unction before the last word of it was written. From the forgiving, and patient, and tranquil spirit of his writing, even when annoyed by much unkindness and injustice on the part of the Madrid coteries, from the spirit of religion and morality that pervades his writings, and the care he appears to have taken to meet his summons as a sincere Christian, we may reasonably hope that his sorrows and troubles for time and eternity ended on 23d April, 1616 the day on which a kindred spirit breathed his last at Stratford-on-Avon. [Footnote 19: It was published by his widow, Dona Catalina, la 1617.] And indeed in our meditations on the characteristics of the author and man in Cervantes, we have always mentally associated him with Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. We find in all the same versatility of genius, the same grasp and breadth of intellect, the same gifts of genial humor and the same largeness of sympathy. The life of Cervantes will be always an interesting and edifying study in connexion with the literature and the great events of his time. We find him conscientiously doing his duty in every phase of his diversified existence, and effecting all the good in his power. When he feels the need of filling a very disagreeable office in order to afford necessary support to his family, he bends the stubborn pride of the hidalgo to his irksome duties--and it is not easy for us to realize the rigidity of that quality which he inherited by birth, and which became a second nature in every gentleman of his nation. In advanced years he still vigorously exerts his faculties, and endures privations and disappointments in a resigned and patient spirit; and when complaints are wrung from him they are neither bitter nor ill-natured. Even his harmless vanity has something amiable and cordial about it. When he has just reached his sixtieth year he effects a salutary revolution in the corrupt literary taste of his countrymen and countrywomen, and save a few coarse expressions separable from the literature of his day, a deathbed examination would have found few passages in his numerous writings which it would be desirous to find omitted. He closed an anxious and industrious life by a Christian death. NOTE.