Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/42

 xxxii an appointment to one of three or four posts then vacant in the Spanish possessions across the Atlantic, an application which, fortunately for the world, was "referred," it would seem, to some official in the Indies Office at Seville, and being shelved, so remained until it was discovered among the documents brought to light by Cean Bermudez.

Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Señor Asensio y Toledo is one dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreement with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies at fifty ducats (about 6/.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless it appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best that had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have been ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio that the comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented. Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, no doubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress," "Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo."

He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 in honor of the canonization of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada, a better post probably than his first, but certainly a more responsible one, as he found in the end to his cost. In order to remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, he intrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the bankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however, was a small one, about 26/., and on giving security for it he was released at the end of the year. It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king's taxes, that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that abound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks with spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the venta gateway listening to "Felixmarte de Hircania" read out to them; and those little Hogarthian touches that lie so well