All that we can ascertain, concerning his student life, is that he learnt grammar and the humanities under Lopez de Hoyos, a man of culture and a teacher of some distinction in his age and generation. In 1568, upon the death of Isabel de Valois, the third wife of Philip II., Cervantes, among Hoyos’ pupils, won much commendation for some verses written in commemoration of the national bereavement, and we find his master alluding to the youthful poet as his “dear and beloved pupil,” and eulogising the “elegant style,” “rhetorical colours,” and “delicate conceits” of his literary exercises. These compositions, together with many other early poetical effusions of the author, are to be found in some Spanish editions of Cervantes’ works, but the general reader will be content to take them as read. Their author, in his reference to these immature effusions in his _Journey around Parnassus_, admits that “from his tenderest years he had loved the sweet art of poesy,” he volunteers the information that he had produced an endless variety of ballads and sonnets of varying degrees of merit, and modestly confesses that “Heaven had not granted him the poet’s grace.” Cervantes was still a stripling when he first evinced that interest in the acted drama, which he never entirely lost. Lope de Rueda, who did so much to produce order out of chaos in the drama of Spain, was at that time an actor-manager at the head of his own company of strolling players. It was this gold-beater of Seville, “admirable in Pastoral Poetry,” distinguished alike “for his acting and for his intelligence,” who brought comedies “out of their swaddling clothes and gave them habitation, and attired them decently and handsomely.” Cervantes must have attended the performances of the Rueda Company when they were in the neighbourhood of Segovia, in 1558; and in the preface to his volume of Comedies and Farces, published a year before his death, he gives us some interesting particulars of the theatrical impedimenta in use at that time. The performances were given in the morning and afternoon in the public square, and the only decoration of the theatre was “an old blanket drawn aside by two ropes, which made what they call the green-room; behind which were the musicians, singing some old ballad without a guitar.” The properties consisted of “four benches arranged in a square, with five or six planks on top of them, raised but four handsbreadth from the ground;” while the whole apparatus of a manager of plays, was contained in a sack, and consisted of “four white sheep-skin dresses, trimmed with gilt leather, and four beards, wigs, and crooks, more or less.”