TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE

by Miguel de Cervantes

　　I: ABOUT THIS TRANSLATIONIt was with considerable reluctance that I abandoned in favour of thepresent undertaking what had long been a favourite project: that of a newedition of Shelton's "Don Quixote," which has now become a somewhatscarce book. There are some--and I confess myself to be one--for whomShelton's racy old version, with all its defects, has a charm that nomodern translation, however skilful or correct, could possess. Sheltonhad the inestimable advantage of belonging to the same generation asCervantes; "Don Quixote" had to him a vitality that only a contemporarycould feel; it cost him no dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes sawthem; there is no anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish ofCervantes into the English of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself mostlikely knew the book; he may have carried it home with him in hissaddle-bags to Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under themulberry tree at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in itspages.But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for even a moderatepopularity for Shelton was vain. His fine old crusted English would, nodoubt, be relished by a minority, but it would be only by a minority. Hiswarmest admirers must admit that he is not a satisfactory representativeof Cervantes. His translation of the First Part was very hastily made andwas never revised by him. It has all the freshness and vigour, but also afull measure of the faults, of a hasty production. It is often veryliteral--barbarously literal frequently--but just as often very loose. Hehad evidently a good colloquial knowledge of Spanish, but apparently notmuch more. It never seems to occur to him that the same translation of aword will not suit in every case.It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of "DonQuixote." To those who are familiar with the original, it savours oftruism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughlysatisfactory translation of "Don Quixote" into English or any otherlanguage. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly unmanageable,or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no doubt, are sosuperabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness to which thehumour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to Spanish, and can atbest be only distantly imitated in any other tongue.The history of our English translations of "Don Quixote" is instructive.Shelton's, the first in any language, was made, apparently, about 1608,but not published till 1612. This of course was only the First Part. Ithas been asserted that the Second, published in 1620, is not the work ofShelton, but there is nothing to support the assertion save the fact thatit has less spirit, less of what we generally understand by "go," aboutit than the first, which would be only natural if the first were the workof a young man writing currente calamo, and the second that of amiddle-aged man writing for a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closerand more literal, the style is the same, the very same translations, ormistranslations, occur in it, and it is extremely unlikely that a newtranslator would, by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to carryoff the credit.In 1687 John Phillips, Milton's nephew, produced a "Don Quixote" "madeEnglish," he says, "according to the humour of our modern language." His"Quixote" is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a travesty thatfor coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even inthe literature of that day.Ned Ward's "Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrilytranslated into Hudibrastic Verse" (1700), can scarcely be reckoned atranslation, but it serves to show the light in which "Don Quixote" wasregarded at the time.A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 byPeter Motteux, who had then recently combined tea-dealing withliterature. It is described as "translated from the original by severalhands," but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under themanipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the otherhand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. Anyone who compares it carefully withthe original will have little doubt that it is a concoction from Sheltonand the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked out by borrowings fromPhillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It is, to be sure, moredecent and decorous, but it treats "Don Quixote" in the same fashion as acomic book that cannot be made too comic.To attempt to improve the humour of "Don Quixote" by an infusion ofcockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux's operators did, is notmerely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but anabsolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof ofthe uncritical way in which "Don Quixote" is generally read that thisworse than worthless translation--worthless as failing to represent,worse than worthless as misrepresenting--should have been favoured as ithas been.It had the effect, however, of bringing out a translation undertaken andexecuted in a very different spirit, that of Charles Jervas, the portraitpainter, and friend of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. Jervas has beenallowed little credit for his work, indeed it may be said none, for it isknown to the world in general as Jarvis's. It was not published untilafter his death, and the printers gave the name according to the currentpronunciation of the day. It has been the most freely used and the mostfreely abused of all the translations. It has seen far more editions thanany other, it is admitted on all hands to be by far the most faithful,and yet nobody seems to have a good word to say for it or for its author.Jervas no doubt prejudiced readers against himself in his preface, whereamong many true words about Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly andunjustly charges Shelton with having translated not from the Spanish, butfrom the Italian version of Franciosini, which did not appear until tenyears after Shelton's first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too,seems to have attached to him because he was by profession a painter anda mediocre one (though he has given us the best portrait we have ofSwift), and this may have been strengthened by Pope's remark that he"translated 'Don Quixote' without understanding Spanish." He has beenalso charged with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is truethat in a few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, andgone astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fiftywhere he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope's dictum, anyone whoexamines Jervas's version carefully, side by side with the original, willsee that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one thanShelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in fact, anhonest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left a versionwhich, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free from errorsand mistranslations.The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry--"wooden" in a word,-andno one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be pleadedfor Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his abhorrence ofthe light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He was one of thefew, very few, translators that have shown any apprehension of theunsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic humour; it seemed tohim a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking and grinning at his owngood things, and to this may be attributed in a great measure the asceticabstinence from everything savouring of liveliness which is thecharacteristic of his translation. In most modern editions, it should beobserved, his style has been smoothed and smartened, but without anyreference to the original Spanish, so that if he has been made to readmore agreeably he has also been robbed of his chief merit of fidelity.Smollett's version, published in 1755, may be almost counted as one ofthese. At any rate it is plain that in its construction Jervas'stranslation was very freely drawn upon, and very little or probably noheed given to the original Spanish.The later translations may be dismissed in a few words. George Kelly's,which appeared in 1769, "printed for the Translator," was an impudentimposture, being nothing more than Motteux's version with a few of thewords, here and there, artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot's (1774) wasonly an abridgment like Florian's, but not so skilfully executed; and theversion published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her brother'splates, was merely a patchwork production made out of formertranslations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield's, it would be in everysense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had noteven seen it when the present undertaking was proposed to me, and sincethen I may say vidi tantum, having for obvious reasons resisted thetemptation which Mr. Duffield's reputation and comely volumes hold out toevery lover of Cervantes.From the foregoing history of our translations of "Don Quixote," it willbe seen that there are a good many people who, provided they get the merenarrative with its full complement of facts, incidents, and adventuresserved up to them in a form that amuses them, care very little whetherthat form is the one in which Cervantes originally shaped his ideas. Onthe other hand, it is clear that there are many who desire to have notmerely the story he tells, but the story as he tells it, so far at leastas differences of idiom and circumstances permit, and who will give apreference to the conscientious translator, even though he may haveacquitted himself somewhat awkwardly.But after all there is no real antagonism between the two classes; thereis no reason why what pleases the one should not please the other, or whya translator who makes it his aim to treat "Don Quixote" with the respectdue to a great classic, should not be as acceptable even to the carelessreader as the one who treats it as a famous old jest-book. It is not aquestion of caviare to the general, or, if it is, the fault rests withhim who makes so. The method by which Cervantes won the ear of theSpanish people ought, mutatis mutandis, to be equally effective with thegreat majority of English readers. At any rate, even if there are readersto whom it is a matter of indifference, fidelity to the method is as mucha part of the translator's duty as fidelity to the matter. If he canplease all parties, so much the better; but his first duty is to thosewho look to him for as faithful a representation of his author as it isin his power to give them, faithful to the letter so long as fidelity ispracticable, faithful to the spirit so far as he can make it.My purpose here is not to dogmatise on the rules of translation, but toindicate those I have followed, or at least tried to the best of myability to follow, in the present instance. One which, it seems to me,cannot be too rigidly followed in translating "Don Quixote," is to avoideverything that savours of affectation. The book itself is, indeed, inone sense a protest against it, and no man abhorred it more thanCervantes. For this reason, I think, any temptation to use antiquated orobsolete language should be resisted. It is after all an affectation, andone for which there is no warrant or excuse. Spanish has probablyundergone less change since the seventeenth century than any language inEurope, and by far the greater and certainly the best part of "DonQuixote" differs but little in language from the colloquial Spanish ofthe present day. Except in the tales and Don Quixote's speeches, thetranslator who uses the simplest and plainest everyday language willalmost always be the one who approaches nearest to the original.Seeing that the story of "Don Quixote" and all its characters andincidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiaras household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the oldfamiliar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason. Ofcourse a translator who holds that "Don Quixote" should receive thetreatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by theinjunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap. IX not to omit or add anything.II: ABOUT CERVANTES AND DON QUIXOTEFour generations had laughed over "Don Quixote" before it occurred toanyone to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de CervantesSaavedra whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late for asatisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life ofthe author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret's instance in1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by that timedisappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have existed,transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died out, and ofother record there was none; for the sixteenth and seventeenth centurieswere incurious as to "the men of the time," a reproach against which thenineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself, if it has produced noShakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y Siscar, to whom the task wasentrusted, or any of those who followed him, Rios, Pellicer, orNavarrete, could do was to eke out the few allusions Cervantes makes tohimself in his various prefaces with such pieces of documentary evidencebearing upon his life as they could find.This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such goodpurpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is thechief characteristic of Navarrete's work. Besides sifting, testing, andmethodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previouslybrought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned underwhich anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found.Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is nofault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says ofShakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes: "Itis not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or theorthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no recordof his conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a contemporary hasbeen produced."It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes, forcedto make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to conjecture,and that conjecture should in some instances come by degrees to take theplace of established fact. All that I propose to do here is to separatewhat is matter of fact from what is matter of conjecture, and leave it tothe reader's judgment to decide whether the data justify the inference ornot.The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of Spanishliterature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon, Garcilaso de laVega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient families, and,curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced their origin tothe same mountain district in the North of Spain. The family of Cervantesis commonly said to have been of Galician origin, and unquestionably itwas in possession of lands in Galicia at a very early date; but I thinkthe balance of the evidence tends to show that the "solar," the originalsite of the family, was at Cervatos in the north-west corner of OldCastile, close to the junction of Castile, Leon, and the Asturias. As ithappens, there is a complete history of the Cervantes family from thetenth century down to the seventeenth extant under the title of"Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and Noble Posterity of the FamousNuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo," written in 1648 by the industriousgenealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who availed himself of a manuscriptgenealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet laureate and historiographer of JohnII.The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost asdistinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of AlfonsoVII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI, andwas rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of Toledo. Onone of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he builthimself a castle which he called Cervatos, because "he was lord of thesolar of Cervatos in the Montana," as the mountain region extending fromthe Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his death in battle in1143, the castle passed by his will to his son Alfonso Munio, who, asterritorial or local surnames were then coming into vogue in place of thesimple patronymic, took the additional name of Cervatos. His eldest sonPedro succeeded him in the possession of the castle, and followed hisexample in adopting the name, an assumption at which the younger son,Gonzalo, seems to have taken umbrage.Everyone who has paid even a flying visit to Toledo will remember theruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge ofAlcantara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline andcrumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solidAlcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was built,or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his occupation ofToledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a Spanish martyr, aname subsequently modified into San Servan (in which form it appears inthe "Poem of the Cid"), San Servantes, and San Cervantes: with regard towhich last the "Handbook for Spain" warns its readers against thesupposition that it has anything to do with the author of "Don Quixote."Ford, as all know who have taken him for a companion and counsellor onthe roads of Spain, is seldom wrong in matters of literature or history.In this instance, however, he is in error. It has everything to do withthe author of "Don Quixote," for it is in fact these old walls that havegiven to Spain the name she is proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, abovementioned, it may be readily conceived, did not relish the appropriationby his brother of a name to which he himself had an equal right, forthough nominally taken from the castle, it was in reality derived fromthe ancient territorial possession of the family, and as a set-off, andto distinguish himself (diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as asurname the name of the castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the buildingof which, according to a family tradition, his great-grandfather had ashare.Both brothers founded families. The Cervantes branch had more tenacity;it sent offshoots in various directions, Andalusia, Estremadura, Galicia,and Portugal, and produced a goodly line of men distinguished in theservice of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a son ofhis, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48 that gaveCordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the Moors in thekingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with some of thenoblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them soldiers,magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least twocardinal-archbishops.Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander ofthe Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Ariasde Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches ofthe family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Dona Leonor deCortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, andMiguel, our author.The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on "Don Quixote." Aman who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errantextending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada waslikely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry ofthe romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than oneplace about families that have once been great and have tapered awayuntil they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of hisown.He was born at Alcala de Henares and baptised in the church of SantaMaria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we knownothing, unless it be from the glimpse he gives us in the preface to his"Comedies" of himself as a boy looking on with delight while Lope deRueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the plaza andacted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as the model ofhis interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a significant one, for itshows the early development of that love of the drama which exercisedsuch an influence on his life and seems to have grown stronger as he grewolder, and of which this very preface, written only a few months beforehis death, is such a striking proof. He gives us to understand, too, thathe was a great reader in his youth; but of this no assurance was needed,for the First Part of "Don Quixote" alone proves a vast amount ofmiscellaneous reading, romances of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry,chronicles, for which he had no time or opportunity except in the firsttwenty years of his life; and his misquotations and mistakes in mattersof detail are always, it may be noticed, those of a man recalling thereading of his boyhood.Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was aboy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period forSpain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was themightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it had notyet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the policy ofFerdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute, and theChurch and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The nobles, whohad always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had fought theMoors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate had befallenthe cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon had been sweptaway, and the only function that remained to the Cortes was that ofgranting money at the King's dictation.The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la Vegaand Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had brought backfrom Italy the products of the post-Renaissance literature, which tookroot and flourished and even threatened to extinguish the native growths.Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had been fairly naturalised inSpain, together with all the devices of pastoral poetry for investingwith an air of novelty the idea of a dispairing shepherd and inflexibleshepherdess. As a set-off against this, the old historical andtraditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads ofpeasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in thecancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But themost notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was theflood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the pressever since Garci Ordonez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" atthe beginning of the century.For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been nobetter spot in Spain than Alcala de Henares in the middle of thesixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether avery different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcala thetraveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology andmedicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the townitself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and lightliterature, and as a producer of books Alcala was already beginning tocompete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and Seville.A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoingsmight, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcala at thattime; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop wherethe latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be,what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy,that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion,"could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at oneof those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoplyand plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved toembellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father ofthe man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was livelyat ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesisof "Don Quixote."For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But whyRodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son to auniversity a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his owndoor, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he didso. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas Gonzalez,that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a Miguel deCervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again; but even ifit had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove nothing, as therewere at least two other Miguels born about the middle of the century; oneof them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin, no doubt, who was asource of great embarrassment to the biographers.That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcala is best provedby 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"Tia Fingida," if it be his, is not one--nothing, not even "a collegejoke," to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. Allthat we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de Hoyos,a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence, calls himhis "dear and beloved pupil." This was in a little collection of versesby different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second queen ofPhilip II, published by the professor in 1569, to which Cervantescontributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph in the formof a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a "Lycidas" finds its wayinto a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton. His verses areno worse than such things usually are; so much, at least, may be said forthem.By the time the book appeared he had left Spain, and, as fate ordered it,for twelve years, the most eventful ones of his life. Giulio, afterwardsCardinal, Acquaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to Philip II by thePope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly political, and on hisreturn to Rome, which was somewhat brusquely expedited by the King, hetook Cervantes with him as his camarero (chamberlain), the office hehimself held in the Pope's household. The post would no doubt have led toadvancement at the Papal Court had Cervantes retained it, but in thesummer of 1570 he resigned it and enlisted as a private soldier inCaptain Diego Urbina's company, belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada'sregiment, but at that time forming a part of the command of Marc AntonyColonna. What impelled him to this step we know not, whether it wasdistaste for the career before him, or purely military enthusiasm. It maywell have been the latter, for it was a stirring time; the events,however, which led to the alliance between Spain, Venice, and the Pope,against the common enemy, the Porte, and to the victory of the combinedfleets at Lepanto, belong rather to the history of Europe than to thelife of Cervantes. He was one of those that sailed from Messina, inSeptember 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria; but on themorning of the 7th of October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he waslying below ill with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight herose, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors,insisted on taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service ofGod and the King to health. His galley, the Marquesa, was in the thick ofthe fight, and before it was over he had received three gunshot wounds,two in the breast and one in the left hand or arm. On the morning afterthe battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with thecommander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of thewounded, one result of which was an addition of three crowns to his pay,and another, apparently, the friendship of his general.How severely Cervantes was wounded may be inferred from the fact, thatwith youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperamentas ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before hewas discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled; hehad lost the use of it, as Mercury told him in the "Viaje del Parnaso"for the greater glory of the right. This, however, did not absolutelyunfit him for service, and in April 1572 he joined Manuel Ponce de Leon'scompany of Lope de Figueroa's regiment, in which, it seems probable, hisbrother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the operations of the nextthree years, including the capture of the Goletta and Tunis. Takingadvantage of the lull which followed the recapture of these places by theTurks, he obtained leave to return to Spain, and sailed from Naples inSeptember 1575 on board the Sun galley, in company with his brotherRodrigo, Pedro Carrillo de Quesada, late Governor of the Goletta, andsome others, and furnished with letters from Don John of Austria and theDuke of Sesa, the Viceroy of Sicily, recommending him to the King for thecommand of a company, on account of his services; a dono infelice asevents proved. On the 26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerinegalleys, and after a stout resistance were overpowered and carried intoAlgiers.By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to informtheir family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcala at oncestrove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all hepossessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. ButDali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by DonJohn and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be aperson of great consequence, when the money came he refused it scornfullyas being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo, however, was moreeasily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case, and it was arrangedbetween the brothers that he should return to Spain and procure a vesselin which he was to come back to Algiers and take off Miguel and as manyof their comrades as possible. This was not the first attempt to escapethat Cervantes had made. Soon after the commencement of his captivity heinduced several of his companions to join him in trying to reach Oran,then a Spanish post, on foot; but after the first day's journey, the Moorwho had agreed to act as their guide deserted them, and they had nochoice but to return. The second attempt was more disastrous. In a gardenoutside the city on the sea-shore, he constructed, with the help of thegardener, a Spaniard, a hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one,fourteen of his fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy forseveral months, and supplying them with food through a renegade known asEl Dorador, "the Gilder." How he, a captive himself, contrived to do allthis, is one of the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project mayappear, it was very nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigomade its appearance off the coast, and under cover of night wasproceeding to take off the refugees, when the crew were alarmed by apassing fishing boat, and beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attemptshortly afterwards, they, or a portion of them at least, were takenprisoners, and just as the poor fellows in the garden were exulting inthe thought that in a few moments more freedom would be within theirgrasp, they found themselves surrounded by Turkish troops, horse andfoot. The Dorador had revealed the whole scheme to the Dey Hassan.When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions tolay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declaredaloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else hadany share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He wasthreatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears andnoses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived whattheir tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from hisoriginal statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot wasthat the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the prisonerstaken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards restored most ofthem to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali Mami 500 crownsfor him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such resource, energy, anddaring, was too dangerous a piece of property to be left in privatehands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in his own prison. If hethought that by these means he could break the spirit or shake theresolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived, for Cervantescontrived before long to despatch a letter to the Governor of Oran,entreating him to send him some one that could be trusted, to enable himand three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of his, to make their escape;intending evidently to renew his first attempt with a more trustworthyguide. Unfortunately the Moor who carried the letter was stopped justoutside Oran, and the letter being found upon him, he was sent back toAlgiers, where by the order of the Dey he was promptly impaled as awarning to others, while Cervantes was condemned to receive two thousandblows of the stick, a number which most likely would have deprived theworld of "Don Quixote," had not some persons, who they were we know not,interceded on his behalf.After this he seems to have been kept in still closer confinement thanbefore, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt. Thistime his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade and twoValencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in which he andabout sixty of the leading captives were to make their escape; but justas they were about to put it into execution one Doctor Juan Blanco dePaz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey of the plot.Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by his untiringenergy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his companions in misery,had endeared himself to all, and become the leading spirit in the captivecolony, and, incredible as it may seem, jealousy of his influence and theesteem in which he was held, moved this man to compass his destruction bya cruel death. The merchants finding that the Dey knew all, and fearingthat Cervantes under torture might make disclosures that would imperiltheir own lives, tried to persuade him to slip away on board a vesselthat was on the point of sailing for Spain; but he told them they hadnothing to fear, for no tortures would make him compromise anybody, andhe went at once and gave himself up to the Dey.As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices. Everythingwas made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was put round hisneck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be got from himwas that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who had since leftAlgiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who were to accompanyhim were not to know anything of it until the last moment. Finding hecould make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to prison more heavilyironed than before.The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying oncemore to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred ducatswas got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan Gil, whowas about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more thandouble the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and he wasabout to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with him, thecase of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board heavily ironed,when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by one-half, andFather Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount, and on September19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a week, Cervantes wasat last set free. Before long he discovered that Blanco de Paz, whoclaimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now concocting on falseevidence a charge of misconduct to be brought against him on his returnto Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up a series of twenty-fivequestions, covering the whole period of his captivity, upon which herequested Father Gil to take the depositions of credible witnesses beforea notary. Eleven witnesses taken from among the principal captives inAlgiers deposed to all the facts above stated and to a great deal morebesides. There is something touching in the admiration, love, andgratitude we see struggling to find expression in the formal language ofthe notary, as they testify one after another to the good deeds ofCervantes, how he comforted and helped the weak-hearted, how he kept uptheir drooping courage, how he shared his poor purse with this deponent,and how "in him this deponent found father and mother."On his return to Spain he found his old regiment about to march forPortugal to support Philip's claim to the crown, and utterly pennilessnow, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to theAzores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the warreturned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the manuscriptof his pastoral romance, the "Galatea," and probably also, to judge byinternal evidence, that of the first portion of "Persiles andSigismunda." He also brought back with him, his biographers assert, aninfant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with greatcircumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth, whosename, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they omit tomention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there certainlywas living in the family of Cervantes a Dona Isabel de Saavedra, who isdescribed in an official document as his natural daughter, and thentwenty years of age.With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now thatDon John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and services, andfor a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a dismal prospect; hehad already a certain reputation as a poet; he made up his mind,therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a first venturecommitted his "Galatea" to the press. It was published, as Salva y Mallenshows conclusively, at Alcala, his own birth-place, in 1585 and no doubthelped to make his name more widely known, but certainly did not do himmuch good in any other way.While it was going through the press, he married Dona Catalina dePalacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, andapparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which maypossibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that wasall. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages andstrolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned toit for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty orthirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing ofcucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any hisses,outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not bad enoughto be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold their own uponit. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they happen to be two ofthe seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we may assume they arefavourable specimens, and no one who reads the "Numancia" and the "Tratode Argel" will feel any surprise that they failed as acting dramas.Whatever merits they may have, whatever occasional they may show, theyare, as regards construction, incurably clumsy. How completely theyfailed is manifest from the fact that with all his sanguine temperamentand indomitable perseverance he was unable to maintain the struggle togain a livelihood as a dramatist for more than three years; nor was therising popularity of Lope the cause, as is often said, notwithstandinghis own words to the contrary. When Lope began to write for the stage isuncertain, but it was certainly after Cervantes went to Seville.Among the "Nuevos Documentos" printed by Senor Asensio y Toledo is onedated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an agreementwith one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six comedies atfifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case unless itappeared on representation that the said comedy was one of the best thathad ever been represented in Spain. The test does not seem to have beenever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to Rodrigo Osorio thatthe comedies were not among the best that had ever been represented.Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might have been found, nodoubt, more than one letter like that we see in the "Rake's Progress,""Sir, I have read your play, and it will not doo."He was more successful in a literary contest at Saragossa in 1595 inhonour of the canonisation of St. Jacinto, when his composition won thefirst prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had beenappointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada. In order toremit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury, heentrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as thebankrupt's assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent toprison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however,was a small one, about 26l., and on giving security for it he wasreleased at the end of the year.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 thatabound in the pages of "Don Quixote:" the Benedictine monks withspectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers incostume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on hishead, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in hisbundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in theventa gateway listening to "Felixmarte of Hircania" read out to them; andthose little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to bring in, theox-tail hanging up with the landlord's comb stuck in it, the wine-skinsat the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry art, Helen goingoff in high spirits on Paris's arm, and Dido on the tower dropping tearsas big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on those journeys into remoteregions he came across now and then a specimen of the pauper gentleman,with his lean hack and his greyhound and his books of chivalry, dreamingaway his life in happy ignorance that the world had changed since hisgreat-grandfather's old helmet was new. But it was in Seville that hefound out his true vocation, though he himself would not by any meanshave admitted it to be so. It was there, in Triana, that he was firsttempted to try his hand at drawing from life, and first brought hishumour into play in the exquisite little sketch of "Rinconete yCortadillo," the germ, in more ways than one, of "Don Quixote."Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonmentall trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which itmay be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in Sevillein November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the elaboratecatafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the death ofPhilip II, but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his movements. Thewords in the preface to the First Part of "Don Quixote" are generallyheld to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the book, and wrotethe beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he may have done sois extremely likely.There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to aselect audience at the Duke of Bejar's, which may have helped to make thebook known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of "DonQuixote" lay on his hands some time before he could find a publisher boldenough to undertake a venture of so novel a character; and so littlefaith in it had Francisco Robles of Madrid, to whom at last he sold it,that he did not care to incur the expense of securing the copyright forAragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for Castile. Theprinting was finished in December, and the book came out with the newyear, 1605. It is often said that "Don Quixote" was at first receivedcoldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was it in the handsof the public than preparations were made to issue pirated editions atLisbon and Valencia, and to bring out a second edition with theadditional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which he secured inFebruary.No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certainsections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination amongthe aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in generalwere not likely to relish a book that turned their favourite reading intoridicule and laughed at so many of their favourite ideas. The dramatistswho gathered round Lope as their leader regarded Cervantes as theircommon enemy, and it is plain that he was equally obnoxious to the otherclique, the culto poets who had Gongora for their chief. Navarrete, whoknew nothing of the letter above mentioned, tries hard to show that therelations between Cervantes and Lope were of a very friendly sort, asindeed they were until "Don Quixote" was written. Cervantes, indeed, tothe last generously and manfully declared his admiration of Lope'spowers, his unfailing invention, and his marvellous fertility; but in thepreface of the First Part of "Don Quixote" and in the verses of "Urgandathe Unknown," and one or two other places, there are, if we read betweenthe lines, sly hits at Lope's vanities and affectations that argue nopersonal good-will; and Lope openly sneers at "Don Quixote" andCervantes, and fourteen years after his death gives him only a few linesof cold commonplace in the "Laurel de Apolo," that seem all the colderfor the eulogies of a host of nonentities whose names are found nowhereelse.In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginningof 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with thebalance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. Heremained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies andscrivener's work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing upstatements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like. So, atleast, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of the deathof a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been carried intothe house in which he lived. In these he himself is described as a manwho wrote and transacted business, and it appears that his household thenconsisted of his wife, the natural daughter Isabel de Saavedra alreadymentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow, her daughter Constanza, amysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling herself his sister, for whomhis biographers cannot account, and a servant-maid.Meanwhile "Don Quixote" had been growing in favour, and its author's namewas now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed atBrussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet thedemand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The popularity ofthe book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was led to bring outan edition in 1610; and another was called for in Brussels in 1611. Itmight naturally have been expected that, with such proofs before him thathe had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes would have at once setabout redeeming his rather vague promise of a second volume.But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He hadstill by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he hadinserted in "Don Quixote" and instead of continuing the adventures of DonQuixote, he set to work to write more of these "Novelas Exemplares" as heafterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them.The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to theConde de Lemos, the Maecenas of the day, and with one of those chattyconfidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight years anda half after the First Part of "Don Quixote" had appeared, we get thefirst hint of a forthcoming Second Part. "You shall see shortly," hesays, "the further exploits of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza."His idea of "shortly" was a somewhat elastic one, for, as we know by thedate to Sancho's letter, he had barely one-half of the book completedthat time twelvemonth.But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramaticambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit thatkept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him toattempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made himpersevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to winthe ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes wasessentially sanguine. The portrait he draws in the preface to the novels,with the aquiline features, chestnut hair, smooth untroubled forehead,and bright cheerful eyes, is the very portrait of a sanguine man. Nothingthat the managers might say could persuade him that the merits of hisplays would not be recognised at last if they were only given a fairchance. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on being theAeschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama, based on thetrue principles of art, that was to be the envy of all nations; he was todrive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the "mirrors of nonsenseand models of folly" that were in vogue through the cupidity of themanagers and shortsightedness of the authors; he was to correct andeducate the public taste until it was ripe for tragedies on the model ofthe Greek drama--like the "Numancia" for instance--and comedies thatwould not only amuse but improve and instruct. All this he was to do,could he once get a hearing: there was the initial difficulty.He shows plainly enough, too, that "Don Quixote" and the demolition ofthe chivalry romances was not the work that lay next his heart. He was,indeed, as he says himself in his preface, more a stepfather than afather to "Don Quixote." Never was great work so neglected by its author.That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and starts, was notalways his fault, but it seems clear he never read what he sent to thepress. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he never took thetrouble to correct them when the third edition was in progress, as a manwho really cared for the child of his brain would have done. He appearsto have regarded the book as little more than a mere libro deentretenimiento, an amusing book, a thing, as he says in the "Viaje," "todivert the melancholy moody heart at any time or season." No doubt he hadan affection for his hero, and was very proud of Sancho Panza. It wouldhave been strange indeed if he had not been proud of the most humorouscreation in all fiction. He was proud, too, of the popularity and successof the book, and beyond measure delightful is the naivete with which heshows his pride in a dozen passages in the Second Part. But it was notthe success he coveted. In all probability he would have given all thesuccess of "Don Quixote," nay, would have seen every copy of "DonQuixote" burned in the Plaza Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vegawas enjoying on an average once a week.And so he went on, dawdling over "Don Quixote," adding a chapter now andagain, and putting it aside to turn to "Persiles and Sigismunda"--which,as we know, was to be the most entertaining book in the language, and therival of "Theagenes and Chariclea"--or finishing off one of his darlingcomedies; and if Robles asked when "Don Quixote" would be ready, theanswer no doubt was: En breve-shortly, there was time enough for that. Atsixty-eight he was as full of life and hope and plans for the future as aboy of eighteen.Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which athis leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October orNovember 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave latelyprinted at Tarragona, and calling itself "Second Volume of the IngeniousGentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez deAvellaneda of Tordesillas." The last half of Chapter LIX and most of thefollowing chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effectproduced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened bythe reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda,in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to "DonQuixote," Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His ownintentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of thebook; nay, in his last words, "forse altro cantera con miglior plettro,"he seems actually to invite some one else to continue the work, and hemade no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which timeAvellaneda's volume was no doubt written.In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the merecontinuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface toit, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned mancould pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost hishand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless,accuses him of envy of Lope's success, of petulance and querulousness,and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda's reason forthis personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it isclear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope's school, for he has theimpudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in hiscriticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best criticsand baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bearon it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantesknew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests aninvisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by amosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of languagepronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself,supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been anecclesiastic, a Dominican probably.Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dullto reflect much. "Dull and dirty" will always be, I imagine, the verdictof the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poorplagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him byCervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns forcastles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, andSancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; allthrough he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he hascontrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenthcentury novellieri and without their sprightliness.But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the debtwe owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, "Don Quixote" wouldhave come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even ifCervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he wouldhave left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the furtheradventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It isplain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoralromances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but forAvellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likelythat, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume wouldhave remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have nevermade the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho toBarataria.From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have beenhaunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field,and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his taskand protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him. Theconclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of workand the frequent repetition of the scolding administered to Avellanedabecomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate, a conclusionand for that we must thank Avellaneda.The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printedtill the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put togetherthe comedies and interludes he had written within the last few years,and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the managers, andpublished them with a preface, worth the book it introduces tenfold, inwhich he gives an account of the early Spanish stage, and of his ownattempts as a dramatist. It is needless to say they were put forward byCervantes in all good faith and full confidence in their merits. Thereader, however, was not to suppose they were his last word or finaleffort in the drama, for he had in hand a comedy called "Engano a losojos," about which, if he mistook not, there would be no question.Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has no opportunity of judging; hishealth had been failing for some time, and he died, apparently of dropsy,on the 23rd of April, 1616, the day on which England lost Shakespeare,nominally at least, for the English calendar had not yet been reformed.He died as he had lived, accepting his lot bravely and cheerfully.Was it an unhappy life, that of Cervantes? His biographers all tell usthat it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life ofpoverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment, butCervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils. His wasnot one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely by virtueof their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high spirit that hewas proof against it. It is impossible to conceive Cervantes giving wayto despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for poverty, it was withhim a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh he ever allows toescape him is when he says, "Happy he to whom Heaven has given a piece ofbread for which he is not bound to give thanks to any but Heaven itself."Add to all this his vital energy and mental activity, his restlessinvention and his sanguine temperament, and there will be reason enoughto doubt whether his could have been a very unhappy life. He who couldtake Cervantes' distresses together with his apparatus for enduring themwould not make so bad a bargain, perhaps, as far as happiness in life isconcerned.Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, inaccordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitariannuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was aninmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to anotherconvent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains ofCervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the clueto their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishesperhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglectbrought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a gooddeal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one wouldsuppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but againsthis memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits, and lefthim to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard life andunworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done todistinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning aprecarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had beenwounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country's cause,but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had written amediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some plays whichmanifestly did not comply with the primary condition of pleasing: werethe playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse them, because theauthor was to produce "Don Quixote" twenty years afterwards?The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately onthe appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility toits merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man writesa book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with being coldlyreceived by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole tribe ofwigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, thesentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all againsthim, it was because "Don Quixote" was what it was; and if the generalpublic did not come forward to make him comfortable for the rest of hisdays, it is no more to be charged with neglect and ingratitude than theEnglish-speaking public that did not pay off Scott's liabilities. It didthe best it could; it read his book and liked it and bought it, andencouraged the bookseller to pay him well for others.It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected nomonument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, ofhim; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de lasCortes, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been setup to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town, is notworthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of "suchweak witness of his name;" or what could a monument do in his case excepttestify to the self-glorification of those who had put it up? Simonumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller's shop will showwhat bathos there would be in a monument to the author of "Don Quixote."Nine editions of the First Part of "Don Quixote" had already appearedbefore Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to hisown estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after hisdeath. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time, butby 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down to thepresent day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly andregularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request thebook has been from the very outset. In seven years from the completion ofthe work it had been translated into the four leading languages ofEurope. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so widely diffused as"Don Quixote." The "Imitatio Christi" may have been translated into asmany different languages, and perhaps "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Vicar ofWakefield" into nearly as many, but in multiplicity of translations andeditions "Don Quixote" leaves them all far behind.Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. "DonQuixote" has been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas aboutknight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who hadnever seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feelthe humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author's purpose.Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in theworld, is one of the most intensely national. "Manon Lescaut" is not morethoroughly French, "Tom Jones" not more English, "Rob Roy" not moreScotch, than "Don Quixote" is Spanish, in character, in ideas, insentiment, in local colour, in everything. What, then, is the secret ofthis unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh threecenturies? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in theworld, "Don Quixote" is the most catholic. There is something in it forevery sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. AsCervantes himself says with a touch of pride, "It is thumbed and read andgot by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves, theyoung people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praiseit."But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than itshumour, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge ofhuman nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude, isthe vein of farce that runs through it. It was the attack upon the sheep,the battle with the wine-skins, Mambrino's helmet, the balsam ofFierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill, Sanchotossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master and man,that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so still tosome extent with the majority of readers. It is plain that "Don Quixote"was generally regarded at first, and indeed in Spain for a long time, aslittle more than a queer droll book, full of laughable incidents andabsurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much considerationor care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to 1771, when thefamous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade editions, badly andcarelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the style of chap-booksintended only for popular use, with, in most instances, uncouthillustrations and clap-trap additions by the publisher.To England belongs the credit of having been the first country torecognise the right of "Don Quixote" to better treatment than this. TheLondon edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret's from having beensuggested by him, was not a mere edition de luxe. It produced "DonQuixote" in becoming form as regards paper and type, and embellished withplates which, if not particularly happy as illustrations, were at leastwell intentioned and well executed, but it also aimed at correctness oftext, a matter to which nobody except the editors of the Valencia andBrussels editions had given even a passing thought; and for a firstattempt it was fairly successful, for though some of its emendations areinadmissible, a good many of them have been adopted by all subsequenteditors.The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about aremarkable change of sentiment with regard to "Don Quixote." A vastnumber of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. Itbecame almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was notentirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as analtogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than thestalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot hisphilosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for onthis point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object heaimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in thepreface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that hehad no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this, toadvanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have beensomething else.One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth theeternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit ofpoetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy neverevolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its innerconsciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be found in"Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, andCervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in whichthe never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and DonQuixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age,among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes andSancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could seethe facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else.But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any suchidea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose something not only veryunlike the age in which he lived, but altogether unlike Cervanteshimself, who would have been the first to laugh at an attempt of the sortmade by anyone else.The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day isquite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of theprodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenthcentury may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the readerbears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far thelargest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation, there isabundant evidence. From the time when the Amadises and Palmerins began togrow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steadystream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight totheir words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation oftheir readers. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ampleprovocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those wholook into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalryitself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that,thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is nogreater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." Inthe first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain'schivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done whenGranada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature,it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the freeinstitutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalrybut a degrading mockery of it.The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array," before which,according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which Cervantes'single laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his owncountrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain George Carleton, inhis "Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713." "Before the appearance in theworld of that labour of Cervantes," he said, "it was next to animpossibility for a man to walk the streets with any delight or withoutdanger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing and curvetting beforethe windows of their mistresses, that a stranger would have imagined thewhole nation to have been nothing less than a race of knight-errants. Butafter the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, theman that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a DonQuixote, and found himself the jest of high and low. And I verily believethat to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spiritwhich has run through all our councils for a century past, so littleagreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors."To call "Don Quixote" a sad book, preaching a pessimist view of life,argues a total misconception of its drift. It would be so if its moralwere that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule anddiscomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so far asit can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that is bornof vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not a means toan end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of circumstances andconsequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very considerablenuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot distinguishbetween the one kind and the other, no doubt "Don Quixote" is a sad book;no doubt to some minds it is very sad that a man who had just uttered sobeautiful a sentiment as that "it is a hard case to make slaves of thosewhom God and Nature made free," should be ungratefully pelted by thescoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let loose on society; but to othersof a more judicial cast it will be a matter of regret that recklessself-sufficient enthusiasm is not oftener requited in some such way forall the mischief it does in the world.A very slight examination of the structure of "Don Quixote" will sufficeto show that Cervantes had no deep design or elaborate plan in his mindwhen he began the book. When he wrote those lines in which "with a fewstrokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper gentleman," he hadno idea of the goal to which his imagination was leading him. There canbe little doubt that all he contemplated was a short tale to range withthose he had already written, a tale setting forth the ludicrous resultsthat might be expected to follow the attempt of a crazy gentleman to actthe part of a knight-errant in modern life.It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into theoriginal scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would nothave omitted him in his hero's outfit, which he obviously meant to becomplete. Him we owe to the landlord's chance remark in Chapter III thatknights seldom travelled without squires. To try to think of a DonQuixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed pairof scissors.The story was written at first, like the others, without any division andwithout the intervention of Cide Hamete Benengeli; and it seems notunlikely that Cervantes had some intention of bringing Dulcinea, orAldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransackingof the Don's library and the discussion on the books of chivalry thatfirst suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development. What,if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to makehis tale a burlesque of one of these books, caricaturing their style,incidents, and spirit?In pursuance of this change of plan, he hastily and somewhat clumsilydivided what he had written into chapters on the model of "Amadis,"invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up CideHamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost invariable practice of thechivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to somerecondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the valueof Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho's part, but tothe whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho utters when heannounces his intention of taking his ass with him. "About the ass," weare told, "Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could callto mind any knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back;but no instance occurred to his memory." We can see the whole scene at aglance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the perplexity of hismaster, upon whose perception the incongruity has just forced itself.This is Sancho's mission throughout the book; he is an unconsciousMephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his master'saspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by someunintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of factand commonplace by force of sheer stolidity.By the time Cervantes had got his volume of novels off his hands, andsummoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in earnest,the case was very much altered. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had notmerely found favour, but had already become, what they have never sinceceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination. There was nooccasion for him now to interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his readerstold him plainly that what they wanted of him was more Don Quixote andmore Sancho Panza, and not novels, tales, or digressions. To himself,too, his creations had become realities, and he had become proud of them,especially of Sancho. He began the Second Part, therefore, under verydifferent conditions, and the difference makes itself manifest at once.Even in translation the style will be seen to be far easier, moreflowing, more natural, and more like that of a man sure of himself and ofhis audience. Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a change also. In the FirstPart, Don Quixote has no character or individuality whatever. He isnothing more than a crazy representative of the sentiments of thechivalry romances. In all that he says and does he is simply repeatingthe lesson he has learned from his books; and therefore, it is absurd tospeak of him in the gushing strain of the sentimental critics when theydilate upon his nobleness, disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and soforth. It was the business of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redressinjuries, and succour the distressed, and this, as a matter of course, hemakes his business when he takes up the part; a knight-errant was boundto be intrepid, and so he feels bound to cast fear aside. Of all Byron'smelodious nonsense about Don Quixote, the most nonsensical statement isthat "'t is his virtue makes him mad!" The exact opposite is the truth;it is his madness makes him virtuous.In the Second Part, Cervantes repeatedly reminds the reader, as if it wasa point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that hishero's madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject ofchivalry, and that on every other subject he is discreto, one, in fact,whose faculty of discernment is in perfect order. The advantage of thisis that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for hisown reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself therelief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a commonplacebook.It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon Don Quixote is notvery great. There are some natural touches of character about him, suchas his mixture of irascibility and placability, and his curious affectionfor Sancho together with his impatience of the squire's loquacity andimpertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he is little morethan a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive good taste and agreat deal of shrewdness and originality of mind.As to Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface tothe First Part, that he was a favourite with his creator even before hehad been taken into favour by the public. An inferior genius, taking himin hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him bymaking him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes wastoo true an artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when hereappears, is the old Sancho with the old familiar features; but with adifference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the sametime with a careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outlinehas been filled in where filling in was necessary, and, vivified by a fewtouches of a master's hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in acharacter portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important andprominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is hismatchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies theaction of the story.His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In theFirst Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are not ofthe highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly indulge in;like Falstaff's, they resemble the father that begets them; they aresimple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But in theservice of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as we seewhen he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea and herladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his success inthis instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight beyond his powersin his account of the journey on Clavileno.In the Second Part it is the spirit rather than the incidents of thechivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments ofthe sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the cave ofMontesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior romances, andanother distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote's blindadoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either a mereanimalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man would care tomake merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humour the latterwas naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else inthese romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment ofchivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influenceof those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets. When a troubadourprofessed his readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made itincumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation oftameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, whichthe next was compelled to cap by some still stronger declaration; and soexpressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddingsat an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory oflove came into being that in time permeated the literature of SouthernEurope, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship ofBeatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which foundexponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantesdeals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance hashe carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in thebackground, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existencewe are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues andcharms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to thecaricature of the sentiment and language of the romances.One of the great merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities thathave secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it themost cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course,points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which donot immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes itfor granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is onlyintelligible to a few. For example, on many of his readers in Spain, andmost of his readers out of it, the significance of his choice of acountry for his hero is completely lost. It would be going too far to saythat no one can thoroughly comprehend "Don Quixote" without having seenLa Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse of La Mancha will give aninsight into the meaning of Cervantes such as no commentator can give. Ofall the regions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea ofromance. Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is thedullest tract. There is something impressive about the grim solitudes ofEstremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald anddreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich inrelics of the past. But there is no redeeming feature in the Mancheganlandscape; it has all the sameness of the desert without its dignity; thefew towns and villages that break its monotony are mean and commonplace,there is nothing venerable about them, they have not even thepicturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village,Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the primregularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the verywindmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "DonQuixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. LaMancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piecewith the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire,knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims ofoppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's worldand the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things asthey were.It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the wholehumour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by themajority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It hasbeen completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure,the great majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knewnothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no idea but theabstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do fulljustice to the humour of Don Quixote's misconception in taking it for acastle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal.But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of thefull force of the discrepancy. Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawingof Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard. Whether or not theVenta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inndescribed in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such aninn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his mind's eye, andit was on just such a rude stone trough as that beside the primitivedraw-well in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour.Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero everwatered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and therebyentirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic,commonplace character of all the surroundings and circumstances thatgives a significance to Don Quixote's vigil and the ceremony thatfollows.Cervantes' humour is for the most part of that broader and simpler sort,the strength of which lies in the perception of the incongruous. It isthe incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with theideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful vitality andtruth to nature of the character, that makes him the most humorouscreation in the whole range of fiction. That unsmiling gravity of whichCervantes was the first great master, "Cervantes' serious air," whichsits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later humourists, is essentialto this kind of humour, and here again Cervantes has suffered at thehands of his interpreters. Nothing, unless indeed the coarse buffooneryof Phillips, could be more out of place in an attempt to representCervantes, than a flippant, would-be facetious style, like that ofMotteux's version for example, or the sprightly, jaunty air, Frenchtranslators sometimes adopt. It is the grave matter-of-factness of thenarrative, and the apparent unconsciousness of the author that he issaying anything ludicrous, anything but the merest commonplace, that giveits peculiar flavour to the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is theexact opposite of the humour of Sterne and the self-conscious humourists.Even when Uncle Toby is at his best, you are always aware of "the manSterne" behind him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect heis producing. Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote andSancho. He and Swift and the great humourists always keep themselves outof sight, or, more properly speaking, never think about themselves atall, unlike our latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revivedthe old horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesqueassumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste.It is true that to do full justice to Spanish humour in any otherlanguage is well-nigh an impossibility. There is a natural gravity and asonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that makean absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the mostpreposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza's drollery thedespair of the conscientious translator. Sancho's curt comments can neverfall flat, but they lose half their flavour when transferred from theirnative Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have failed todo justice to the humour of Cervantes, they are no worse than his owncountrymen. Indeed, were it not for the Spanish peasant's relish of "DonQuixote," one might be tempted to think that the great humourist was notlooked upon as a humourist at all in his own country.The craze of Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have communicateditself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the bookand run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their ownimaginations. Like a good many critics now-a-days, they forget thatscreams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that areinfluenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, andpompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is thatwhile they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner ofimaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception ofthe quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would ratehighest in him, and hold to be the one that raises him above all rivalry.To speak of "Don Quixote" as if it were merely a humorous book would be amanifest misdescription. Cervantes at times makes it a kind ofcommonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for theobservations and reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirringlife. It is a mine of shrewd observation on mankind and human nature.Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate studiesof character, but there is no book richer in individualised character.What Coleridge said of Shakespeare in minimis is true of Cervantes; henever, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward a lay figure.There is life and individuality in all his characters, however littlethey may have to do, or however short a time they may be before thereader. Samson Carrasco, the curate, Teresa Panza, Altisidora, even thetwo students met on the road to the cave of Montesinos, all live and moveand have their being; and it is characteristic of the broad humanity ofCervantes that there is not a hateful one among them all. Even poorMaritornes, with her deplorable morals, has a kind heart of her own and"some faint and distant resemblance to a Christian about her;" and as forSancho, though on dissection we fail to find a lovable trait in him,unless it be a sort of dog-like affection for his master, who is therethat in his heart does not love him?But it is, after all, the humour of "Don Quixote" that distinguishes itfrom all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, asone of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, "the bestnovel in the world beyond all comparison." It is its varied humour,ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare's orMoliere's that has naturalised it in every country where there arereaders, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature.SOME COMMENDATORY VERSESURGANDA THE UNKNOWNTo the book of Don Quixote of la Mancha If to be welcomed by the good, O Book! thou make thy steady aim, No empty chatterer will dare To question or dispute thy claim. But if perchance thou hast a mind To win of idiots approbation, Lost labour will be thy reward, Though they'll pretend appreciation. They say a goodly shade he finds Who shelters 'neath a goodly tree; And such a one thy kindly star In Bejar bath provided thee: A royal tree whose spreading boughs A show of princely fruit display; A tree that bears a noble Duke, The Alexander of his day. Of a Manchegan gentleman Thy purpose is to tell the story, Relating how he lost his wits O'er idle tales of love and glory, Of "ladies, arms, and cavaliers:" A new Orlando Furioso- Innamorato, rather--who Won Dulcinea del Toboso. Put no vain emblems on thy shield; All figures--that is bragging play. A modest dedication make, And give no scoffer room to say, "What! Alvaro de Luna here? Or is it Hannibal again? Or does King Francis at Madrid Once more of destiny complain?" Since Heaven it hath not pleased on thee Deep erudition to bestow, Or black Latino's gift of tongues, No Latin let thy pages show. Ape not philosophy or wit, Lest one who cannot comprehend, Make a wry face at thee and ask, "Why offer flowers to me, my friend?" Be not a meddler; no affair Of thine the life thy neighbours lead: Be prudent; oft the random jest Recoils upon the jester's head. Thy constant labour let it be To earn thyself an honest name, For fooleries preserved in print Are perpetuity of shame. A further counsel bear in mind: If that thy roof be made of glass, It shows small wit to pick up stones To pelt the people as they pass. Win the attention of the wise, And give the thinker food for thought; Whoso indites frivolities, Will but by simpletons be sought. AMADIS OF GAULTo Don Quixote of la ManchaSONNET Thou that didst imitate that life of mine When I in lonely sadness on the great Rock Pena Pobre sat disconsolate, In self-imposed penance there to pine; Thou, whose sole beverage was the bitter brine Of thine own tears, and who withouten plate Of silver, copper, tin, in lowly state Off the bare earth and on earth's fruits didst dine; Live thou, of thine eternal glory sure. So long as on the round of the fourth sphere The bright Apollo shall his coursers steer, In thy renown thou shalt remain secure, Thy country's name in story shall endure, And thy sage author stand without a peer. DON BELIANIS OF GREECETo Don Quixote of la ManchaSONNET In slashing, hewing, cleaving, word and deed, I was the foremost knight of chivalry, Stout, bold, expert, as e'er the world did see; Thousands from the oppressor's wrong I freed; Great were my feats, eternal fame their meed; In love I proved my truth and loyalty; The hugest giant was a dwarf for me; Ever to knighthood's laws gave I good heed. My mastery the Fickle Goddess owned, And even Chance, submitting to control, Grasped by the forelock, yielded to my will. Yet--though above yon horned moon enthroned My fortune seems to sit--great Quixote, still Envy of thy achievements fills my soul. THE LADY OF ORIANATo Dulcinea del TobosoSONNET Oh, fairest Dulcinea, could it be! It were a pleasant fancy to suppose so-- Could Miraflores change to El Toboso, And London's town to that which shelters thee! Oh, could mine but acquire that livery Of countless charms thy mind and body show so! Or him, now famous grown--thou mad'st him grow so-- Thy knight, in some dread combat could I see! Oh, could I be released from Amadis By exercise of such coy chastity As led thee gentle Quixote to dismiss! Then would my heavy sorrow turn to joy; None would I envy, all would envy me, And happiness be mine without alloy. GANDALIN, SQUIRE OF AMADIS OF GAUL,To Sancho Panza, squire of Don QuixoteSONNET All hail, illustrious man! Fortune, when she Bound thee apprentice to the esquire trade, Her care and tenderness of thee displayed, Shaping thy course from misadventure free. No longer now doth proud knight-errantry Regard with scorn the sickle and the spade; Of towering arrogance less count is made Than of plain esquire-like simplicity. I envy thee thy Dapple, and thy name, And those alforjas thou wast wont to stuff With comforts that thy providence proclaim. Excellent Sancho! hail to thee again! To thee alone the Ovid of our Spain Does homage with the rustic kiss and cuff. FROM EL DONOSO, THE MOTLEY POET,On Sancho Panza and RocinanteON SANCHO I am the esquire Sancho Pan-- Who served Don Quixote of La Man--; But from his service I retreat-, Resolved to pass my life discreet-; For Villadiego, called the Si--, Maintained that only in reti-- Was found the secret of well-be--, According to the "Celesti--:" A book divine, except for sin-- By speech too plain, in my opin-- ON ROCINANTE I am that Rocinante fa--, Great-grandson of great Babie--, Who, all for being lean and bon--, Had one Don Quixote for an own--; But if I matched him well in weak--, I never took short commons meek--, But kept myself in corn by steal--, A trick I learned from Lazaril--, When with a piece of straw so neat-- The blind man of his wine he cheat--. ORLANDO FURIOSOTo Don Quixote of La ManchaSONNET If thou art not a Peer, peer thou hast none; Among a thousand Peers thou art a peer; Nor is there room for one when thou art near, Unvanquished victor, great unconquered one! Orlando, by Angelica undone, Am I; o'er distant seas condemned to steer, And to Fame's altars as an offering bear Valour respected by Oblivion. I cannot be thy rival, for thy fame And prowess rise above all rivalry, Albeit both bereft of wits we go. But, though the Scythian or the Moor to tame Was not thy lot, still thou dost rival me: Love binds us in a fellowship of woe. THE KNIGHT OF PHOEBUSTo Don Quixote of La Mancha My sword was not to be compared with thine Phoebus of Spain, marvel of courtesy, Nor with thy famous arm this hand of mine That smote from east to west as lightnings fly. I scorned all empire, and that monarchy The rosy east held out did I resign For one glance of Claridiana's eye, The bright Aurora for whose love I pine. A miracle of constancy my love; And banished by her ruthless cruelty, This arm had might the rage of Hell to tame. But, Gothic Quixote, happier thou dost prove, For thou dost live in Dulcinea's name, And famous, honoured, wise, she lives in thee. FROM SOLISDANTo Don Quixote of La ManchaSONNET Your fantasies, Sir Quixote, it is true, That crazy brain of yours have quite upset, But aught of base or mean hath never yet Been charged by any in reproach to you. Your deeds are open proof in all men's view; For you went forth injustice to abate, And for your pains sore drubbings did you get From many a rascally and ruffian crew. If the fair Dulcinea, your heart's queen, Be unrelenting in her cruelty, If still your woe be powerless to move her, In such hard case your comfort let it be That Sancho was a sorry go-between: A booby he, hard-hearted she, and you no lover. DIALOGUEBetween Babieca and RocinanteSONNET B. "How comes it, Rocinante, you're so lean?" R. "I'm underfed, with overwork I'm worn." B. "But what becomes of all the hay and corn?" R. "My master gives me none; he's much too mean." B. "Come, come, you show ill-breeding, sir, I ween; 'T is like an ass your master thus to scorn." R. He is an ass, will die an ass, an ass was born; Why, he's in love; what's what's plainer to be seen?" B. "To be in love is folly?"--R. "No great sense." B. "You're metaphysical."--R. "From want of food." B. "Rail at the squire, then."--R. "Why, what's the good? I might indeed complain of him, I grant ye, But, squire or master, where's the difference? They're both as sorry hacks as Rocinante."