better spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,
something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a
very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala the
traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and
medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town
itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light
literature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning to
compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.

A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings
might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at that
time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where
the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,
what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,
that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"
could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one
of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply
and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to
embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father of
the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively
at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis
of "Don Quixote."

For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But why
Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to a
university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his own
door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he did
so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez,
that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel de