DON QUIXOTE

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methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously
brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under
which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found.
Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no
fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of
Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "It
is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or the
orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no record
of his conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a contemporary has
been produced."

It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forced
to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture,
and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take the
place of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separate
what is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it to
the reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference or