In October, 1615, Cervantes felt the first attacks of dropsy. He bore the slow progress of this oppressive disease with his usual serenity of mind; and occupied himself in preparing for the press his last production, “Persiles y Sigismunda,” an elegant imitation of Heliodorus’s Ethiopian story. The last action of his life was to dictate the affecting dedication of this work to the Count de Lemos. He died without much struggle, April 23, 1616, in his sixty-ninth year. It is a singular coincidence, that Spain and England should have lost on the same day of the same year the peculiar glory of their national literature: for this was the day upon which Shakspeare died. By his will he appointed his wife and a friend as his executors, and requested to be buried in the monastery of the Trinitarios, the good fathers who had released him from captivity. After the custom of pious Spaniards, he had inscribed himself as a brother of the third order of St. Francis, and in the dress of that order he was carried to his grave. No monument was raised to his memory. The house in which he died was in the Calle (or street) de Leon, where the Royal Asylum now stands. Cervantes’ great work is too generally known to require criticism. It is one of those few productions which immortalize the literature and language to which they belong. The interest excited by such a work never dies, for it is interwoven with the very nature of man. The particular circumstances which led Cervantes to the conception of Don Quixote have long ceased to exist. Books of chivalry have been forgotten, and their influence has died away; but Quixotism, under some form or another, remains a characteristic of the human mind in all ages: man is still the dupe of fictions and of his own imagination, and it is for this, that, in reading the story of the aberrations of the Knight of La Mancha, and of the mishaps that befell him in his attempt to redress all the wrongs of the world, we cannot help applying the moral of the tale to incidents that pass every day before our own eyes, and to trace similarities between Cervantes’ hero and some of our living acquaintances.