That the name of Miguel de Cervantes towers above all others in Spanish literature is a commonplace. Montesquieu’s jest, that Spain has produced but one good book, which was written to prove the absurdity of all the others, is only the flippant statement of the truth that the one Spanish book which the world has taken to itself is _Don Quixote_. What else the Spaniards have done in literature may have its own beauty and interest. It may even have affected the literature of other nations. The Spanish drama did something to form the purely theatrical skill of the playwright, and the _Novela de Pícaros_ gave a framework for the prose story of common life. Yet the plays of Lope or of Calderon, the tales of Aleman, Espinel, and others, are essentially Spanish, and Spanish of one time. It is only in touches here and there that we find in them, behind their native vesture, any touch of what is human and universal. Even when they dealt with what was common to them with other peoples, the emotions of piety and devotion, they gave them their own colour, their own purely Spanish flavour. There is no _Imitation of Christ_, no _Pilgrim’s Progress_, in their religious writing. But _Don Quixote_ is so little purely Spanish that its influence has been mainly felt abroad, that it has been, and is, loved by many who have neither heard nor wish to hear of the literature lying round it. [SN: _His life._] The life of Cervantes has been made so familiar that the details need only be briefly mentioned here.[45] It is within the knowledge of all who take any interest in him at all that he was by descent a gentleman of an ancient house. His own branch of it had become poor. He was born, probably on some day in October 1547, at Alcalá de Henares, a town lying to the east of Madrid, and the seat of the university founded by Cardinal Jimenez. It does not appear that Cervantes ever attended the university, or received more than the trifling schooling which fell to the lot of Shakespeare also. _Mar, Iglesia, y casa de rey_--the sea (_i.e._, adventure in America), the Church, and the king’s service--were the three careers open to a gentleman at a time when trade, medicine, and even the law, were plebeian. Cervantes began life in the household of a great Italian ecclesiastic, Cardinal Acquaviva, in one of those positions of domestic service about men of high position which were then, in all countries, filled by gentlemen of small or no fortune. From 1571 to 1575 he served as a soldier under Don John of Austria, and received that wound in the left hand at the battle of Lepanto in which he took a noble pride. From 1575 to 1580 he was a prisoner in Algiers. After his release in 1580 till his death in 1616--for thirty-six long years full of misfortune--he led the struggling life of a Spanish gentleman who had no fortune, no interest, no command of the arts which ingratiate a dependent with a superior. At the very end he may have enjoyed some measure of comparative ease,