Cervantes, Miguel
ser-van'tes, Miguel (1547-1616), a Spanish poet and story writer. His parents were people of moderate means. He became a page in the family of a cardinal at Rome. He served in the war of 1570 against the Turks, and is said to have been held as a slave in Algiers for seven years. To raise money for his ransom his father sold all his possessions, and his two sisters gave up their marriage portions. In 1580 he was thus ransomed and returned to Spain. He gave the rest of his life to literature. He is known chiefly as the author of Don Quixote a two volume novel that has been translated into almost as many languages as Robinson Crusoe. In Cervantes' day Spain was overrun by improbable stories of knightly adventure which formed the theme of almost all romances. Young and old devoured strange tales. The effect on young people was a good deal like that produced at the present time by our yellow-backed literature dealing with robbers and Indians. Cervantes had in mind to "render abhorred of men the false and absurd stories contained in books of chivalry." He threw so much ridicule on this class of writing that such romances became unpopular and disappeared from view. Don Quixote is a piece of brilliant caricature. Its immediate influence is considered the most remarkable in all literature. Don Quixote is a country gentleman who sets out with his squire, Sancho Panza, to see the world and lend a hand in its reform. One of his first adventures was running atilt into a windmill. His shiftless servant, Sancho Panza, and his horse, Rocinante, have a permanent place in literature.
Cervantes lived for the greater part of his life in misery, little relieved by the success of his famous Don Quixote, which brought more fame than money. The secretary of the archbishop of Toledo, in his approbation appended to the second part of this novel, says that foreigners of distinction visiting Madrid inquired first of all for the author of Don Quixote; that he was obliged to reply that "he who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm, though a soldier and a gentleman." A few days before his death, he entered the order of Franciscan friars. He died in poverty, but serene and cheerful, on the same day as Shakespeare, April 23, 1616. His body was buried in the convent of the Trinitarian nuns, of which community his daughter was a member. In 1633 the nuns moved to a new site and their dead were exhumed and deposited in a common ossuary or bone heap. The last resting place of the greatest name in Spanish literature is, therefore, unknown.
See Don Quixote
SAYINGS OF CERVANTES.
All in good time.
This peck of troubles.
As secret as the grave.
A finger in every pie.
Honesty is the best policy.
The pot calls the kettle black.
Within a stone's throw of it.
The proof of the pudding is the eating.
My thoughts ran a wool-gathering.
Why do you lead me a wild goose chase?
Spare your breath to cool your porridge.
Cervantes smil'd Spain's chivalry away.--Byron.
His record was as glorious and as calamitous as any in literary history. He was one of the world's greatest benefactors whom the world knew not--the best of all Spaniards, the very type and embodiment of the highest Castilian nature, whom his country starved and who made her immortal.--Henry Edward Watts.
Cervantes is the father of the modern novel, in so far as it has become a study and delineation of character instead of being a narrative seeking to interest by situation and incident.--Lowell.