Sinópse: Excerpt from Don Quixote De La Mancha, Vol. 1 It is good to find in the author of a great book a fine char acter, and in what we know of Miguel de Cervantes, there is much to love and little to regret save misfortunes. His life was full of adventure and labor. He fought bravely as a soldier; he endured captivity and slavery with fortitude; he accepted with patience tasks of commonplace drudgery in order to earn a scanty living; and in his old age and poverty he died believing, hoping and loving, as in youth, with a playful phrase upon his lips. He was born at Alcala de Henares – or, as the English idiom would put it, Alcala on the Henares a town about twenty miles east of Madrid; and, as the record of the par ish church of St. Mary the Greater shows that he was bap tized October 9, 1547, it is supposed from the name given him that he was born September 29, the feast of St. Michael the Archangel. His father was Rodrigo de Cervantes and his mother Leonor de Cortinas, and both, though poor, were of good Castilian strain, so that their son was born a gentleman by courtesy of convention as well as by grace of nature. The family of Cervantes was of distinguished origin; and many of its members had been men of wealth and high position; so that, in the endeavor to find a reputable ancestry for an offshoot of one of the various obscure branches that spread throughout Spain, there was no difficulty in dis covering a cardinal, a governor and a commissary-general. The author of Don Quixote added to Cervantes the name Saavedra, after his return from Algiers in 1580, taking the maiden name of a great-grandmother. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.