Note 330 — SECOND SECTION. History of Spanish Poetry and Eloquence, from the Age of Cervantes and Lope de Vega to the Middle of the Seventeenth Century.

Cervantes spent that portion of his life, during which his name is particularly conspicuous, among Spanish poets, so remote from literary society, that at his death sufficient notices did not exist to form a complete narrative of his life. The well known biography by Mayans y Siscar, which was not written till the eighteenth century, deserved to be valued only for want of a better. It is prefixed to many editions of Don Quixote. The preference, however, must be given to the more recent life of Cervantes, by Don Vicente de los Rios, which is prefixed to the splendid edition of Don Quixote, published at Madrid, 1781, in royal quarto.