Cervantes had now but a few more months to live; and it must, in his declining years, have been a great consolation to find that the efforts of his genius were still appreciated by his countrymen; not to mention the relief from pecuniary embarrassments which the profits of the sale must have afforded him. Cervantes was now at the height to which his ambition had all along aimed; he had no rival; for Lope de Vega was dead, and the literary kingdom of Spain was all his own. He was courted by the great; no strangers came to Madrid without making the writer of Don Quixote the first object of their inquiry; he reposed in honour, free from all calumny, in the bosom of his family. This same year he published eight comedies, and the same number of interludes; two only in verse, the rest in prose. It does not seem likely that these were written at this time; they must have been the works of his earlier years; but, like his novels, corrected and given to the public when his judgment was more mature. Several of them had, no doubt, been performed on the stage many years before, and remained with Cervantes in manuscript. The dissertation which he prefixed to them is full of interest, and is very curious and valuable, since it contains the only account we have of the early history of the Spanish drama. In 1616, he completed and prepared for the press a romance entitled _Persiles and Sigismunda_, of a grave character, written in imitation of the _Ethiopics_ of Heliodorus; it was the work of many years, and is accounted by the Spaniards one of the purest specimens of Castilian writing. He finished it just before his death, but never lived to see it published. The dedication and prologue of Persiles and Sigismunda are very affecting; they are the voice of a dying man speaking to us of his approaching dissolution.