The long pages he writes are said to be letters to the king; the misfortunes of this or that man are caused by his information.

The world thinks him a wonder of cleverness; he is but an inferior poet.

It imagines that he lives in Assyrian luxury; he lives and dies in a naked garret.

This imaginative representation might be of any time in a provincial town of an ignorant country like Spain.

It is a slight study of what superstitious imagination and gossip will work up round any man whose nature and manners, like those of a poet, isolate him from the common herd.