But He Was Laid In His
Grave Like A Pauper, And The Spot Where He Lay Was Quickly Forgotten.
At
that very hour a vast multitude was assisting at what the polished
academician calls a "more solemn ceremony,
" The bearing of the Virgin of
the Atocha to the Convent of San Domingo el Real, to see if peradventure
pleased by the airing, she would send rain to the parching fields.
The world speedily did justice to his name. Even before his death it had
begun. The gentlemen of the French embassy who came to Madrid in 1615 to
arrange the royal marriages asked the chaplain of the Archbishop of
Toledo in his first visit many questions of Miguel Cervantes. The
chaplain happened to be a friend of the poet, and so replied, "I know
him. He is old, a soldier, a gentleman, and poor." At which they
wondered greatly. But after a while, when the whole civilized world had
trans-lated and knew the Quixote by heart, the Spaniards began to be
proud of the genius they had neglected and despised. They quote with a
certain fatuity the eulogy of Montesquieu, who says it is the only book
they have; "a proposition" which Navarrete considers "inexact," and we
agree with Navarrete. He has written a good book himself. The Spaniards
have very frankly accepted the judgment of the world, and although they
do not read Cervantes much, they admire him greatly, and talk about him
more than is amusing. The Spanish Academy has set up a pretty mural
tablet on the facade of the convent which shelters the tired bones of
the unlucky immortal, enjoying now their first and only repose.
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