we know by Quevedo's burlesque ballad on Don Quixote's Testament that in 1608 it was already famous as Don Quixote's town. Also that Cervantes had a grudge of some kind against the town seems likely from his having "no desire to call its name to mind," and from the banter about the Academicians. It would be uncritical to reject the story absolutely because it depends on local tradition, at the same time it needs very little insight into mythology to see how easily the legend might have grown up under the circumstances.
The cause of the imprisonment is variously stated. It is attributed to a dispute about tithes due to the Priory of St. John which Cervantes had to collect, to a squabble about water rights, to "a stinging jest" of his, to a love affair with the daughter of a hidalgo, whose portrait, Avith that of his daughter, hangs in the village church, and who is conjectured from the inscription upon it to have been the original of Don Quixote. But whatever the cause, the Argamasillans are all agreed that the prison was the arched cellar under the Casa de Medrano, and the late J. E. Hartzenbusch was so far impressed by the tradition that he had two editions of "Don Quixote" printed there, the charming little Elzevir edited by him in 1863, and the four volumes containing the novel in the twelve-volume edition of Cervantes' works completed in 1865.
The books mentioned in Chap. vi. (e.g., the "Pastor de Iberia," printed in 1591) and the adventure of the dead body in Chap. xx., which is obviously based upon an actual occurrence that made some noise in the South of Spain about the year 1593, limit the time within which the First Part can have been written, and it was licensed for the press in September 1604. But it is plain the book had circulated in manuscript to some extent before this, for in the "Picara Justina," which was licensed in August 1604, there are some verses in which Justina speaks of herself as more famous than Don Quixote, Celestina, Lazarillo, or Guzman de Alfarache, so that more than four months before it had been printed we have "Don Quixote" ranked with the three most famous fictions of Spain. Nor is this all. In a letter which is extant, dated August 1604, Lope de Vega says that of the rising poets "there is not one so bad as Cervantes or so silly as to write in praise of 'Don Quixote;'" and in another passage that satire is "as odious to him as his comedies are to Cervantes"—evidently alluding to the dramatic criticism in Chap, xlviii.
