“To say that when Cervantes left his home of servitude,” Mr. Kelly writes, “he was in every respect the same man as when he entered it, would be to say that he was deaf to the voice of wisdom, and blind to the disillusioning teaching of experience. He had had borne in on him ‘the sense that every struggle brings defeat,’ and had realised the width and depth of the vast abyss which yawns between the easy project and the painful, nebulous, far-off achievement. Something of the invincible confidence, the early ardour, the unquestioning trustfulness of youth had passed with the passing years, and melted into the grey, sombre ether of the past; but nothing misanthropic mingled with his splendid scorn, his magnificent disdain for the base and the ignoble; nothing of the cruel, fierce indignation of Swift gleamed from those quiet, searching eyes, which watched the absurdities of his fellow-men with a humorous, whimsical, indulgent smile. In the squalid prison life his strenuous courage, his iron constancy and self-sacrificing devotion had drawn every heart towards him with one exception--that of the scandalous, shameless friar, Blanco de Paz.” After seven years of intermittant activity, and yet another five of terrible captivity, in the service of Spain, we find Cervantes, at the age of thirty-three, the “captain of his fate,” but attached to no regiment; the “master of his soul,” but master of nothing else. He carried his honourable wounds and the traces of his duress with pride, but so far as worldly advancement went, they did not serve him. He might well have cried, in the spirit and words of W. E. Henley: “Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody but unbowed;” but the king, for whom he had shed his blood, was unmindful of him; his patron, Don Juan of Austria, was dead, and he had perforce to commence the business of life over again, without a friend and with a financial liability in the matter of his ransom, which was to take him four years to pay off. But he would appear to have been without regrets or repinings--he had regained his liberty, and we know in what measure he prized it. He must have been re-living the emotions he experienced on his return to his native land, when he made Don Quixote declare to his faithful squire: “Liberty ... is one of the most valuable blessings that heaven has bestowed upon mankind. Not all the treasures concealed in the bowels of the earth, nor those in the bosom of the sea can be compared with it. For liberty a man may--nay, ought--to hazard even his life, as well as for honour, accounting captivity the greatest misery he can endure.”