With the star of Lope de Vega in the ascendant Cervantes found his stage occupation gone, and he appears to have cast about for some other employment that would enable him to support his household. While he was turning out plays at the rate of eight to ten a year, his income, if not large, was at least sufficient for his modest requirements; but the [Illustration] possibility of being able to make a competence by his pen in any other branch of letters impressed him so little that he removed his family to Seville, and re-entered the king’s service in a civil capacity. The next twenty years were to be the hardest and the leanest in his hard, lean life, and during all this time he wrote little and published nothing. His appointment as a commissary is signed 12th June, 1588, and by virtue of his office he was engaged in the purchase of grain and oil for the provisioning of the fleets and armaments of the Indies. Many receipts, invoices, and official papers written out by Cervantes in a clear, bold hand are in existence, though not a line of his other manuscripts has been preserved. His official duties were uncongenial and poorly paid, and in 1590 he addressed the memorial to the king, which amplifies and confirms our record of his military service. In this memorial, he “prays and beseeches humbly, so far as he can, that your Majesty should bestow on him the favour of a place in the Indies, of the three or four which are now vacant, one of them the accountantship of the new kingdom of Granada, or the governorship of the province of Soconuso in Guatemala, or treasurer of the galleys of Carthagena, or magistrate of the city of La Paz.” If the king considered this petition seriously, and examined the qualifications that Cervantes possessed for the discharge of treasury or accountancy duties, and if he came to the conclusion that such offices could be more capably filled by other and less deserving men, the world will scarcely question his judgment. For although our author emerged from all his misfortunes with an honourable name and an unblemished reputation, it must be confessed that the incapacity he betrayed in the execution of his official tasks proved him unequal to the responsibilities of a more exalted official position. His naturally liberal disposition, his unmethodical habits, and his quixotic confidence in his fellow-men, were so many disabilities in the equipment of a commissary and tax-collector under Philip II.