ades under the pseudonym of Fernândez de Avellaneda, and whose identity remains an enigma. The days of Cervantes were drawing to their close, but he continued to labor to the end, and on his dying couch he put the finishing touches to a novel of love and adventurous travel, the "Persiles y Sigismunda." On April 23, 1616, Cervantes passed away at Madrid, nominally on the same day as Shakespeare, but not precisely so on account of the difference still existing between the Spanish and the English calendar. His remains are supposed to rest in a community house of the Redemptionists in the Spanish capital.
THE PURPOSE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF "DON QUIXOTE"
For the modern world at large, the "Don Quixote" is that one among the works of Cervantes which exercises a paramount claim upon attention, and this it does both because it is the greatest novel as yet produced in the literatures of civilization and because it is the sole work of cosmopolitan importance that Spain has given to the rest of humanity. But in giving it Spain gave a noble gift, one which has brought unfeigned delight to the hearts and the minds of millions of human beings peopling both the Eastern and the Western Hemisphere, and this delight remains ever fresh although three centuries have passed since Don Quixote made his first sally forth.
Cervantes began the "Don Quixote" with the intention of making it a satirical burlesque of the romances of chivalry, which for more than a century before had beguiled the Spanish fancy with accounts of absurdly impossible deeds of derring-do. Their influence served only to entrance the Spanish mind, fascinating it with the glamour of aspects of mediævalism that had long since ceased to exist, and diverting its attention from the real world with its serious daily tasks. As a matter of fact, the sway of the chivalric romances had begun to weaken even before the close of the sixteenth century, but it was from the "Don Quixote" that they received their death stroke, for no new work of their kind appeared after the "Don Quixote" was published. How did Cervantes achieve his purpose? Simply by adopting the methods of the romance of chivalry and showing the falseness of their application to modern life; in a word, by demonstrating that they were out of date. But Cervantes built a structure
