To the other famous names of Lope de Vega and Calderon, that of Cervantes will ever stand associated with distinguished honor in the annals of Spanish literature. He was born in 1549. While yet young, he was captured by a Barbary corsair, and remained five years and a half in slavery. Maimed and friendless, he returned to Spain, and in 1584, began to publish his influential works. The leading purpose of Cervantes was to exhibit the abuse of the books of chivalry, and to overwhelm with ridicule those romances which are the creations of a diseased imagination, in which attempt he was completely successful. The romances of chivalry ended with Don Quixote; and this was appropriately accomplished at the time when, and in the place where, Columbus was fitted by Providence to reveal that New World which had been kept hid until the time for raising the curtain of a sublimer age. At least one author was now born who believed that "a titled nobility is the most undisputed progeny of barbarism," and that its very existence proves it to be inimical to all the interests of the people. The badges of the former are, idleness, vanity, and luxury; those of the latter are, labor, pride, and necessity. The son of misfortune and wrong, who had been ransomed from vassalage at the expense of a mother's life-toil and the dowry of his sisters, was the fitting instrument to strike the knell of hereditary feudalism, and confront those brazen lords to whom alone Cervantes could do justice. What Petrarch began in Italy during the fourteenth century was carried on by the fifteenth with unabated activity. The recovery of lost classics and the revival of philology occupied many leading minds. The discovery of an unknown manuscript, says Tiraboschi, was regarded almost as the conquest of a kingdom. Indeed, so zealously did the scholars of this era trim the lamp of ancient sepulchres, that they in a measure overlooked the splendor of their native language. But a keen susceptibility to beauty of form, with the power of expressing it, was manifested to an extraordinary degree at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries. It was an epoch when the fortress erected by a baron, and the annotation written by a philologist on the margin of his author, were alike characterized by a severe and chaste beauty. Under the liberal and discriminating patronage of Julius II. and Leo X., a vivid appreciation of antique literature, philosophy, and art, became an absorbing passion, and spread in all directions. Referring to the Guicciardini and Machiavelli of that time, Macaulay says: "To collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronize men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise; every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazaars of the