The alarm brought
Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he was
promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his
niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories
before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record, and
it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one
sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The
man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than
the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day),
was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great
ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be sure,
his _Don Quixote_ had not yet appeared, though he is said to have
finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region; but
he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of
"Numancia," and he had held public employs and lived near enough to
courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and
very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most
provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of
ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally
against him.
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