The author may draw himself in the guise of a character who is utterly insane, as Cervantes did in _Don Quixote_. One feels here that the author was his own knight; in fact, he too had a sneaking fondness for books of chivalry, and the familiarity that his hero shows with them is good evidence that Cervantes was a careful student of that kind of literature. He too had been bruised by windmills; he too found that the real did not coincide with his ideals. It is most likely that Don Quixote developed his mental illness by his abstinence from love, by living in fancy with the high dames he read about, and by cherishing an affection unreciprocated for the peasant girl he called in his madness Dulcinea del Toboso. At least these factors cannot be ignored in the insanity he developed from reading books of chivalry. It is not improbable that Cervantes drew on a real woman for Dulcinea; he too had wasted affection on some woman, ignorant and coarse, whom he took for a lady of high degree. We do know that in the year he married, in 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, he had an illegitimate daughter by a certain woman. There is also a tradition that he had a few years previously a daughter by a noble lady in Portugal, and though this story is discredited, it must have had some basis in reality. However, Cervantes, though not, like his knight, suffering a mental ailment, must have had a neurosis on which he drew for the material of this novel; it was no doubt caused by his worship of a Dulcinea del Toboso.