Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in
accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian
nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an
inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another
convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of
Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clue
to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes
perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect
brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a good
deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one would
suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but against
his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and left
him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life and
unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done to
distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a
precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been
wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause,
but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written a
mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays which
manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: were
the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because the
author was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?
The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on
the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to
its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writes
a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldly
received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe of
wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the
sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all against
him, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the general
public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of his
days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than the
English-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It did
the best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, and
encouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.
It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no
monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of
him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las
Cortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been set
up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is not
worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "such
weak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case except
testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si
monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show
what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."