Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/58

 xlviii 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 patronize 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 wig-makers. 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.

Another charge is that his fellow-countrymen have been so careless of his memory that they have allowed his portraits to be lost. It is always assumed that there was once a portrait of him painted by his friend Juan de Jauregui, but the words on which the assumption rests prove nothing of the kind. They imply nothing more than that Jauregui could or would paint a portrait of himself if asked to do so. There is even less ground for the supposition that Pacheco ever painted or drew his portrait, unless indeed we accept as satisfactory the arguments used by Don Jose-Maria Asensio y Toledo in support of that inserted by him in his "Nuevos Documentos," and reproduced in Sir W. Stirling Maxwell's "Don John of Austria" and Mr. Gibson's "Journey to Parnassus." But in truth they amount to nothing more than a chain of mere