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source of great embarrassment to the biographers.

That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best proved
by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did,
and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life-for the
"Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one--nothing, not even "a college
joke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All
that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos,
a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him
his "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of verses
by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of
Philip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes
contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form
of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its way
into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are
no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for
them.