but few men of letters have been poorer. Most men of his class were no richer than himself,--for Spain was a very poor country, and mere poverty was deprived of its worst sting when men ranked by birth and not by their possessions. No want of means could cause a noble to be other than the social superior of the merely rich man, while the Church had been only too successful in investing poverty with a certain sanctity. Yet though there were alleviations, the lot of Cervantes was a hard one, embittered by disappointments and imprisonments, which seem to have been chiefly due to the clumsy brutality of the Spanish judicial system. All this he bore with that dignity in misfortune which is one of the finest features in the character of the Spaniard, and with a cheerful courage all his own. Everything known of his life shows that he possessed two of the finest qualities which can support a man in a life of hardship--pride and a sweet temper. [SN: _His work._] The written work of Cervantes is divided in a way not unexampled in literature, but nowhere seen to the same extent except in the case of Prevost, a far smaller, but a real, genius. If he had left nothing but _Don Quixote_, his place in literature would be what it is. If he had not written his one masterpiece, he would have passed unnoticed; and there would have been no reason why he should have been remembered, unless it were with Bermudez and Virues, as one of the forerunners of Lope who made vague, ill-directed experiments in the childhood of Spanish dramatic literature. Even the _Novelas Ejemplares_, though they possess a greater measure of his qualities than any part of his literary inheritance, other than _Don Quixote_ and his _entremeses_, are mainly interesting because they are his. Other Spaniards did such things as well as he, or better, but none have approached _Don Quixote_. The difference is not in degree, it is in kind. [SN: _The minor things._]