they must be kind to other knights
and to all people. He said that if he heard that they were not, he could
come and punish them.

After this, Sir Damas gave back to the twenty knights all their money,
and they went on their way rejoicing. King Arthur mounted his horse and
rode over to the abbey, where he sat by the bed of Sir Accalon till the
poor knight died. Then the king went back alone to his Court at Camelot.

405-411

Miguel de Cervantes, the greatest literary
genius of Spain, was born in 1547 in a small
town near Madrid, and he died in 1616, the year
of the death of Shakespeare. He received a fair
education, and by reading he gained a thorough
knowledge of the romantic poetry of Spain and
Italy and of the romances of chivalry. At the
age of twenty-one he went to Italy. For several
years he was a soldier in the Spanish army.
When he was twenty-eight years old, he was
captured by pirates of Algiers and was held a
prisoner for five years. When he returned to
Spain, he attempted to make a living by writing
dramas and romances, and later he secured an
unimportant governmental position as commissary
and tax-collector in Seville. In 1606 he
published the first part of _Don Quixote_. This
book immediately became very popular, but it
did not bring him much money nor did it win for
him the recognition of literary men. All his
life he was poor, and sometimes apparently he
was actually in want of food. In 1615, one year
before his death, he published the second part
of _Don Quixote_, the greatest national book of
Spain.

_Don Quixote_ is a humorous satire upon the
romances of chivalry, which at the time were so
popular in Spain as to corrupt the national
life by their loose morals and false ideals. So
complete was the success of Cervantes that the
whole nation began to laugh at the absurdities
of the romances of chivalry, and it is said
that not one new edition of any book of
chivalry appeared in Spain after the
publication of _Don Quixote_.

Although the world no longer takes serious
consideration of the ideals of the romances of
chivalry, _Don Quixote_ will always be
remembered as a great book, for