Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in

accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian

nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an

inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another

convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of

Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clue

to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes

perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect

brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good

deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would

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suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against

his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left

him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and

unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to

distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a

precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been

wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause,

but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a

mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which

manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were

the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because the

author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?

The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on

the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to

its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes

a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly

received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of

wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the

sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against

him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general

public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his

days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the

English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did

the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and

encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.

It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no

monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of

him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las

Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set

up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not

worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such

weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except

testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si

monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show

what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."




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