Lest the hostile--the Semitic elements, which in the noon of medieval Europe held Spain from her part in that great Synthesis, hold Spain back now, Isabel drives the Jew and Moslem from her realms. It is too late. The dissident spirit is at work in Spain. And the heroic effort of this land to revive chivalry, to recreate Christ, to re-establish all the world as Christ’s Rock and Church becomes a divine farce, a sort of comic Mystery--_Don Quixote_. * * * * * Perhaps Cervantes’ family was of gentle blood: but it had come to pitiful fortune when Miguel was born to the poor surgeon in Alcalá de Henares. The year was 1547: and the town upon the _llanura_ of Castile was the rival of Salamanca. Naught is more eloquent of the poverty of his people than the fact that Miguel was unable to attend the university round the corner. At twenty-two, however, he was a poet. He went to Italy as the body servant of the Papal Nuncio: later he rose to be a soldier. In 1571, the ships of Philip II defeated the Turk in the waters of Lepanto. A shot crippled the left hand of Cervantes. His officers ordered him below. He refused to leave the deck, and in his blood and pain fought to the close of the engagement. This is a better sign of his unusual nature than his verse. A man of high sensitivity, he exposed himself to physical suffering beyond the duty of a soldier. He was devoted passionately to the Catholic cause. And when in 1575 he took ship from Italy, he had letters to the king from Don Juan of Austria and the Duke of Sessa whom he had served in Naples. He was full of merit: and full of hope he went home for his reward. But the Berber pirates took the vessel and he and his brother, Rodrigo, became slaves in Algiers. Four times in five years Cervantes plotted to escape the stiflement of servitude in the Kasbah of that town which rises within a snow-crowned conch above the hard-blue sea, hiding its reek within the gleam of roofs. Cervantes’ sisters and mother bestirred themselves: scraped coin together, borrowed, and at last, ransomed Rodrigo. In 1580, a mendicant monk came to the aid of the sisters, and Cervantes was freed on the eve of his departure eastward. He went to Madrid. He sought protection, and he failed to find it. He had been a hero and a martyr: but such were cheap in Spain. The land swarmed with veterans of the wars which had spread Spain’s glory to the Pacific Ocean. Cervantes performed odd diplomatic jobs and tried to be a writer. From thirty-four to forty he wrote thirty plays; he had no financial success. But he wed a landed lady, Doña Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano of Esquivias, a town on the fringe of the Manchegan desert which after twenty years was to be transfigured by a hero. At about the time of his marriage, another lady Doña Ana de Rojas bore him a natural daughter, Isabel, whose life was to be fateful in his own. Cervantes’ burdens were great as his means were small.