It was as he journeyed from town to town collecting the king’s taxes, that he noted down those bits of inn and wayside life and character that abound in the pages of Don Quixote : the Benedictine monks with spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in his bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in the venta gateway listening to Felixmarte of Hircania read out to them; and those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, the oxtail hanging up with the landlord’s comb stuck in it, the wineskins at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen going off in high spirits on Paris’s arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tears as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remote regions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman, with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreaming away his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since his great-grandfather’s old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that he found out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any means have admitted it to be so. It was there, in Triana, that he was first tempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought his humour into play in the exquisite little sketch of “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” the germ, in more ways than one, of Don Quixote .
Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which it may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Seville in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaborate catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death of Philip II , but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his movements. The words in the preface to the First Part of Don Quixote are generally held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrote the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done so is extremely likely.