BOOK OF A WISE OLD MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12931, 29 July 1905, Page 5 (Supplement)

BOOK OF A WISE OLD MAN.

THE STORY OF A FAMOUS ROMANCE. Professor George Edward Woodrerry lias contributed to McClure's Magazine a delightfully readable sketch of the author of "Don Quixote." .Cervantesis here depicted in the two worlds of arms and letters. "If by the spirit lie was a writer," says Professor Wood berry, " by the ilesli lie was a soldier." For in that adventurous age a Spaniard was burn for roving and lighting. Cervantes' boyhood at Valladolid, his youth at Madrid, are still wrapped in mystery and tradition. His biographer thinks he may— ." 'lis as easy .us deer-stealing"— identified witli that Miguel de Cervantes, page at court, who, condemned to ten years' exile and to having his right hand cut off, escaped by flight. At all events, lie left Madrid at twenty-one in the train of the papal ambassador, and Wjis fortunate in having a season at Rome in the year 1570 in. the. most cultivated society of the world. While there lie was stirred by the cry for a crusade against the Turks, who were storming Cyprus and threatening Venice. The young Spaniard (half-poet-, half-gallant, with a soul for great enthusiasms) enlisted in the Christian ranks to " crush the infidel."

j "To ■ Cervantes it remained his ' one crowded hour of glorious life.' Five years lie was in these wars, in barracks, and on campaign*. He served at Navarino, Corfu, Tunis, Sardinia, Sicily, and in Italy. Don.. John himself and the Sicilian viceroy bore testimony to his good conduct.. .. He sailed for home, was captured, taken to Algiers, and fell to the spoils of a: Greek renegade as a Christian slave. Fivo years more he was in these bonds. Once he.was sold to the dey, Hassan, for five hundred ducats."

. After several years of adventure the decamping court page of twenty came back to Spain at thirty-three, a crippled soldier and a ransomed slave. He became a king's officer, a ..commissary to collect stores, for naval adventures, like that great one .of the Armada, and. a tax-gatherer. Ho gut embarrassed with courts- and officers, a trusted agent defaulted, and. he was ; more than once in prison. , He had married a wife, Dona Catniina, not a fortune, hut she brought him—hero opens the domestic , interior—besides some vineyards, 'two linen sheets, one good blanket and one worn, table, chairs, a brazier, 'a grater, several sacred images, one cock,'and forty-live pullets.' . - *" : :'

" The gaol, the tax-colleetorship, the longsuffering poverty, are they not the familiar marks'of that other profession, the career of letters? '' Pen never blunted lance, nor lance the-pen,' he said ; one failing, lie took the other. Strong by nature, he eared for. success, and with good sense he sought it in the beaten track. He obeyed occasions, he followed the fashion and the market, and tried all kinds. It was the age of artificial sentiment, and he wrote a shepherd book, like Sidney's: ■' Arcadia," a tangle of intrigue, rhetoric, and love-plaining verse. It was the ago of the rising drama, and he tried the play, staging realistic scenes from his life in Algiers. It was the age of the European short story, luid he tried the tale, creating that - variety of it which springs from direct observation .of manners, twenty yeans of such labours, % range from the thinnest whimsies of fashionable, courtly, fancy to the hard realism of the thieves' market, and lie had not .yet -succeeded but his mind . comprised the theatre of life, and he was trained in all the modes of literary art. 'Don Quixote,' when it appeared in his, fifty-eighth • year, . wasi the- book of -a wise old man. Its popular success did not bring him friends or money. • ' I " Cervantes himself could not have foreknown the nature of his fame. He did not perceive the relative importance of",,' Don. Quixote ■among Lis Works.' Not recpgnis- 1 ing' that he had broken out the modern path lie went back to his old ways. He again, sought the honours'of a poet in his Journey to .Parnassus.'.' He' fell in with' the opinion of. his .friends,- that 'his 'Persies' and ' Sigismimda','-.woiiid.' reach : the " ' extreme of possible < goodness':, and be 1 the best composed in our language of books of entertainment.' He died.,, still projecting a sequel to las first pastoral romance, ualatea.'■' . ■ ,