assumptions. It is an assumption that the manuscript on which the whole depends is a trustworthy document; an assumption that the picture Señor Asensio has fixed on is the one the manuscript means; and an assumption that the boatman he has fixed on in the picture is the portrait of Cervantes.
On the other hand, there is, among others, the improbability of Pacheco painting a portrait of Cervantes as a boatman, with the full use of both hands, and about five-and-twenty years of age, Cervantes being thirty-three at the time of his release at Algiers (which is supposed to be the occasion represented) and at least fifty-four at the time the picture was painted, if Pacheco was the painter. It will need a stronger case than this to establish a vera effigies of Cervantes.[1] It is hardly necessary to remind the reader that the Spanish Academy picture from which the familiar engraved portrait is taken is now admitted on all hands to be a fabrication, based in all probability on the fancy portrait by Kent in Tonson's "Quixote" of 1738.
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, worthy 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 to testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Si monumentum quæris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will show what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."
- ↑ Señor Asensio's case may be said, indeed, to break down in his last assumption. Where Cervantes was from the end of 1598 to the beginning of 1603 we know not; but all his biographers are agreed that he did not remain in Seville. But the commission to paint the six pictures, of which Señor Asensio's is one, was only given to Vazquez and Pacheco in 1600, and no doubt they took some considerable time to paint. Cervantes, therefore, could not have sat for the head of the boatman. In the face of this difficulty, Señor Asensio assumes that Pacheco painted it from a portrait previously taken between 1590 and 1597. But, granted that Pacheco might have made Cervantes nearly thirty years younger in the picture, what motive could he have had for representing him as a young man of five or six and twenty in a sketch made, we are to suppose, as a memorial of his friend?
