Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/27

 Rh It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture, and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or not.

The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de la Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and, curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin to the same mountain district in the north of Spain. The family of Cervantes is commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I think the balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the original site of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of Old Castile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As it happens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from the tenth century down to the seventeenth, extant under the title of "Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the Famous Nuño Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industrious genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscript genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of John II.

The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuño Alfonso was almost as distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso VII. as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI., and was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighborhood of Toledo. On one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he built himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because—so Salazar de Mendoza, in his "Dignidades de Castilla" (1618), gives us to understand—" he was lord of the solar of Servatos in the Montaña," as the mountain region extending from the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in 1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, as territorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of the simple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest son Pedro succeeded him