The Life of Miguel de Cervantes. By Jan Fitzamurice Kelly.
(Chapman and Hall.)—This Life of Cervantes is very pleasant as well as instructive reading. While there is no educated person, we suppose, who is not familiar with Cervantes' groat work, "Don Quixote," probably few know much about the author's life. Cervantes, born at Alcala de Henares in 1547, died in the same year as Shakespeare. He lived in an ago and a country where the conditions of life were stormy and adventurous. Columbus had dis- covered a now continent ; Cort4s had shattered the empire of the Aztecs ; and Pizarro had conquered Peru. Cervantes in his youth hoard around him the echoes of these stirring events, and his own early life was also full of adventures. He joined the force of Don John of Austria, and fought at the battle of Lepanto,—a glorious memory which he loved to dwell on in his after-life. But his soldiering brought him no reward, and his writing little more. His whole life was a struggle against poverty. The success of "Don Quixote" was immediate ; it has boon translated into many lan- guages and read in many lands. Spain could find no higher employ- ment, it seems, for her greatest author than that of a tax-gatherer and a process-server. England—which, in this nineteenth century, thought a school inspectorship a suitable recognition of the merits of one of the greatest of her poets—can hardly afford to carp at Spain for not doing more for Cervantes in the sixteenth ; but it is sad to think that his great powers of mind and commanding genius were cramped and circumscribed by the necessity for harassing toil in mean and sordid employments, in order to support his family. "Don Quixote" is the only book by which Cervantes is now known. He wrote much for the stage; but it must be confessed that ho had no dramatic gift, and his plays were unsuccessful, and rejected alike by managers and actors. The mediteval pastoral-romance style of writing was in its noontide when Cervantes began, and the " Galatea " is one of these romances. Mr. Fitzmaurice Kelly describes it with a fine and subtle sense of humour that makes, perhaps, some of the pleasantest reading in this most attractive book ; but the taste for such creations was dying-out in Spain. The people had been stirred by the long struggle which ended in the expulsion of the Moors and the consolidation and unity of the Kingdom, and they wished, the romances of their day to reproduce the realities of those struggles and that conquest, and not the sentimental and unreal loves and sorrows of highly artificial shepherds and shepherdesses. Cervantes wrote a series of short stories called " Novelas Ejemplaros," and a novel, " Persilos and Sigismunda," with a long and involved plot, which was his last work. These are all ably described and criticised in the book ; one only wonders in reading them that they should have
fallen so far short of the height to which he attained in "Don Quixote." We think, perhaps, considering how few English people can read and understand Spanish, the quotations in that language are almost too numerous, and also that Mr. Fitzmaurice Kelly is rather too fond of using words which are far-fetched and sound pedantic. Surely, for such words as " retrospieient," "temerariousness," " inquisitionary," &c., simpler and more com- prehensible ones might be substituted ; but this is a trifling matter, and does not really detract from the charm and interest of the book.
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