was born there; but I think the reader will agree with me
that the highest honor of the city is that it was long the home of the
gallant gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers and the
loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty
and neglect, the first part of a romance which remains and must always
remain one of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the
world. I mean that
Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,
Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory
and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof
that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and
even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a
tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible
house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very
little house, as small as Ariosto's in Ferrara, which he said was so apt
for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad
neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the
days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of
these a gentleman was stabbed near the author's house.
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