Nearly three centuries have elapsed since Cervantes laid aside his pen and rested from the indignities which his generation piled upon him, but the identity of the author of the crowning indignity of his career is still to be revealed. Cervantes himself must have had a shrewd suspicion of the author of this conspiracy, but he either refrained from publishing his name, or felt too insecure in his facts, to be [Illustration: ADVENTURE WITH THE LIONS. _Paris, 1844._ _40th Edition._] able to prove the charge; or, as his first biographer asserts, his assailant was so powerful as to defy accusation. The secret was kept, at the time, with a success that to us seems incomprehensible, and has created controversy and speculation which has not decreased with years. But it would appear that until the ploughshare of accident shall turn up from the fallow earth of the literary past, or until the jealous guard which is posted over the letters in the _Biblioteca Nacional_ shall be relaxed, speculation and conjecture are vain. Luis de Aliaga, the King’s Confessor, Alarcon the Dramatist, Bartolomé de Argénsola, Cervantes’ one-time friend; the monk Perez, who wrote _La Picara Justina_; and the great Lope de Vega himself have all been laid under the suspicion of being the writer of the false _Don Quixote_. The weight of circumstantial evidence bears hardest upon Vega, whose private letters have disclosed his ill-will and envy towards Cervantes; whose life and character--despite the arguments urged by his apologists--convict him, at least, of being capable of committing so foul a deed; and whose method of waging literary warfare was quite in the manner of the false Prologue. A man of his arrogant disposition would resent bitterly the criticism which Cervantes applied to his plans in the First Part of his _magnum opus_, and we can believe of him that he would stop at nothing to be revenged upon his critic. A jealous, unscrupulous, intolerant man, confident of the protection of friends in high places; a libertine who acted as procurer for the Duke of Sessa; an officer of the Holy Inquisition; and the only real rival to Cervantes in the arena of letters--if Lope de Vega did not himself pen the false _Don Quixote_, he will go down to posterity as the suspected inspirer of the basest literary atrocity that has ever been perpetrated.