have probably read some of his amusing adventures—how he went about with his funny little squire, Sancho Panza, and gave proof of his heroism in many diverting ways. But the book in which his adventures are written is not only an entertaining story—it is a wonderfully accurate picture of Spanish life in the sixteenth century, and is a record of many interesting events that took place outside Spain as well. When it was published in 1605, the book was very popular in Spain, but nobody thought it was going to become one of the world's greatest books, no one guessed that it would be translated into more foreign languages than any other book in the world except the Bible and Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress." No one, therefore, paid much attention to the author, and his very birthplace was not even remembered after he died. But when the Spaniards found that Cervantes had become famous throughout the world, then they took the trouble to unearth something about his history, and it was found that he had a claim to fame as a man, apart from his renown as an author.
Cervantes was a soldier. It is not usual for a soldier to write imaginative books. But he was not a soldier in a regular army, drilling every day in a barrack square, but a soldier who went out and fought, endured fearful hardships, and had the most terrible adventures. He gained in this way a very wide knowledge of the world, which, combined with his powerful
