“We crossed the Mancha,” writes de Amicis in another reference to Cervantes in his work on _Spain_, “the celebrated Mancha, the immortal theatre of the adventures of Don Quixote. It is just as I imagined it. There are broad, bare plains, long tracts of sandy earth, some windmills, a few miserable villages, solitary paths, and wretched, abandoned houses. On seeing those places I experienced a feeling of melancholy which the perusal of Cervantes’ book always rouses; and I repeated to myself what I always say in reading it: ‘This man cannot make one laugh; or, if he does, under the smile, the tears are springing up.’ Don Quixote is a sad and solemn character; his mania is a lament; his life is the history of the dreams, illusions, disappointments and aberrations of us all; the struggle of reason with the imagination, of the true with the false, the ideal with the real! We all have something of Don Quixote about us; we all take windmills for giants; all are spurred upward from time to time by an impulse of enthusiasm, and driven back by a laugh of disdain; are all a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous, and feel, with profound bitterness, the perpetual contrast between the greatness of our aspirations and the weakness of our powers.” One reads the opinion of the eminent Italian author, and it but confirms the opinion that Mr. Watts is doubtless right in his belief that Don Quixote and the man of Lepanto are one and the same. From the depositions made at this inquiry into the murder of Ezpeleta, which have been preserved, we learn that the family, which was at this time dependent upon Cervantes, consisted of his wife, his natural daughter Isabel, aged twenty; his widowed sister, Andrea, aged sixty-one; a cousin, Dona Magdalena de Sotomayor, a lady of forty; and their servant, Maria. The household followed the Court to Madrid in 1606, where Cervantes found two eminent, if not by any means prodigal, patrons in Bernardo Sandoval y Rojas, the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, and the Conde de Lemos, nephew and son-in-law of the Duke de Lerma. But if the Inquisitor-General, who ranked after the Pope as the most powerful Prelate in Christendom, was not lavish in his disbursements of patrimony, his patronage saved the author from molestation at the hands of the Inquisition, and it was not until the death of Archbishop Sandoval that the Holy Office cast a censorial eye upon _Don Quixote_, and expunged certain passages which did not meet with its approval. For the next seven years Cervantes appears to have published nothing, and it may be assumed that [Illustration: FIGHT BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND THE BISCAYAN. _Paris, 1713._ _5th Edition._]