a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was a source of great embarrassment to the biographers.
That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcalá is best proved by his own works. No man drew more largely upon experience than he did, and he has nowhere left a single reminiscence of student life—for the “ Tía Fingida ,” if it be his, is not one—nothing, not even “a college joke,” to show that he remembered days that most men remember best.
All that we know positively about his education is that Juan López de Hoyos, a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls him his “dear and beloved pupil.” This was in a little collection of verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen of Philip II , published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantes contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the form of a sonnet.
It is only by a rare chance that a Lycidas finds its way into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses are no worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said for them.