For a few months Cervantes continued to live at Esquívias, and in 1585 we find him removed to Madrid, where his household consisted, in addition to his wife and his little daughter, Isabel, his widowed sister, Andrea, and her eight-year-old daughter, Constanza. Letters had not then become a recognised profession, and in the domain of poetry, amateurism was a disease. Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors--all rhymed unceasingly. Lope de Vega, who was of the number, wrote: “In every street 4,000 poets;” and Cervantes, in his _Voyage around Parnassus_, refers to “the vulgar squadron of seven-month poets, 20,000 strong, whose being is a mystery.” Lope de Vega, then, as always, more fortunate than Cervantes, a youth of twenty-three, already famous as a poet and a libertine, was acting as the confidential secretary of the young Duke of Alva. His dissolute life, which occasionally brought him into conflict with the authorities was, on the whole, far more to his advancement than was the virtuous rectitude of Cervantes, and it is possible that the jealousy and rancour with which the [Illustration] younger dramatist followed his less affluent but more gifted rival was inspired by the knowledge of his purity in his life and his works. Their careers for awhile progressed along the same lines, but with Cervantes always in the van. They were writing innumerable verses at the same period; but while Lope de Vega, following the custom of the day, lampooned his colleagues, and levelled foul and venemous sonnets at his contemporaries, Cervantes steadily set his face against the practice. He had laid down a rule for his own guidance, from which he never diverged. He can jest a brother poet and banter the foibles of the writers of his day with gentle irony and good humour, but he reserves his censure and his sarcasm for the castigation of evil, vice and folly. If, as seems more than probable, the relations between Cervantes and Vega were strained, their differences could have had no origin in the attitude of the former. It is true that in _Don Quixote_ the literary artifices and affectations of Lope de Vega are treated with benignant banter, and the bad taste and vulgarity which he indulged in many of his plays came in for some severe and judicious criticism, but in the same place other of his dramas are selected for special praise, and the dramatist is eulogised as “that most happy genius of these kingdoms, who has composed such an infinite number of plays with so much glory, with so much grace, such elegant verse, such choice language, such weighty sentiments--so rich in eloquence and loftiness of style, as that the world is filled with his renown.”