before which great exploit Sancho determines, in his fear, not to leave his master till the conclusion of the enterprise. From this honourable determination, says the text, the author of the history concludes him to have been well born and at least a cristiano viejo. This appears to Clemencin, who never himself rows one way and looks another, a very improper phrase in the mouth of the Mahommedan Cide Hamete Benengeli. But the passage is to be understood ironically, or it may be interpreted nothing less than a cristiano viejo." The commentator here reminds one of Panza, when he hears the Devil swear en Dios y en mi conciencia. "Doubtless," says Sancho, "this demon must be a good man and a good Christian, otherwise he wouldn't swear thus. Therefore it is plain there are good folks even in hell." In that passage where Cardenio alludes to a certain impropriety that passed, as he affirms, between the Queen Madásima and the curer of souls and bodies, Maestro Elisabad, Clemencin gives a long note, showing that both Cardenio and Don Quixote mistook Madásima, who never had any relation with Elisabad, for the Infanta Grasinda, niece of King Tafinor of Bohemia, and lady of a city on the sea-coast called Sadiana, information for which he is indebted to the second part of the Chronicles of Amadis de Grecia. "But," adds Clemencin, "this mistake is the less to be wondered at, seeing that both the interlocutors were mad." The great commentator may be taken as a type of those who are perpetually seeing references to works of chivalry. On hearing the valorous resolve of his master about the fulling mills, Sancho weeps-a very natural thing for him to do. But Clemencin cannot let this sorrow pass without citing how Ardian, the dwarf of Amadis, wept and tore his hair and beat his head against the walls, when his master was for fighting with the Endriago; the squire Gandalin is also quoted, who went and did likewise. Nor are the prayers and tears of Lelicio forgotten, when Florambel de Lucea went in the boat which the lady of Fondovalle had sent him to the island of Sumida, which was girt about with a thick cloud and smoke, as of a furnace, from which lightning burst continually. But this greatest of Cervantes' critics concludes that, notwithstanding the defectos notados of grammar and of style, of inconsequence, contradiction, distraction, and obscurity, and innumerable others, the book "astounds, enchains, and enchants readers who do not perceive them or scarcely perceive them." The abundance of merit in the invention and treatment of this admirable fable likens it to those famous pictures which, in spite of their faults, we cannot fail to praise. In some of those passages which have been obelized by Clemencin-we speak only of Spanish critics; to speak of others eso seria nunca acabar-Cervantes might be easily justified if the space of this article permitted it. Those difficulties which remain, admitting apparently of no defence, are but the spots on the sun, and may be excused by that αἱ ὑπερμεγέθεις φύσεις ἥκιστα καθαραὶ of the minister of the Queen of Palmyra. That which is everywhere accurate runs a chance of being the reverse of sublime, which seems to require some degree of carelessness. Sublimity with a few faults is more effective than mediocrity with none. The average talent, never soaring very high, is less likely to become giddy and to fall. Nor are the faults of a great writer easily forgotten, left, as the Spaniards say in the inkstand. The memory of vices remains, while that of virtues fades; and one will more readily learn to remember the ridiculous than that which is worthy of reverence. It is the nature of mankind to observe the seasons of storm and tempest, and pass unnoticed all the smiling seasons of the year. The beauties of Cervantes, who shall tell them? Though, as Longinus said, the style of the poet Apollonius be without error, &ттоs, yet who would not rather be Homer than Apollonius? "The Erigone of Eratosthenes," says the master of Porphyry, "is without blemish, and Archilochus is disordered, preposterous, from the working of that divine spirit, not easily submitting itself to human laws; but was the former for this reason the greater man?" Among the Lyricists was Bacchylides, he who wrote the travels of a god, preferable to Pindar; and Ion of Chios, called by Aristophanes the Eastern Star, among the writers of tragedy, to the supreme Sophocles? Yet Ion and Bacchylides were remarkable for the elegance and correctness of their compositions, while Sophocles and Pindar are here full of fire and there cold as snow. "Yet no sensible man," says Zenobia's unfortunate minister, "would presume to compare all Ion ever wrote with one single legend of Sophocles-the Edipus.” Its very faults make Don Quixote natural. It is like the sun in heaven on a cloudy day, clear at intervals. Laboured accuracy is not a desirable attainment. Compositions should rather resemble wealthy houses, where certain trifling expenses are considered unworthy of notice : Exilis domus est ubi non et multa supersunt "A few instances of inaccuracy or mediocrity," says Goldsmith, "can never derogate from the superlative merit of Homer and Virgil, whose poems are the great magazines, replete with every species of beauty and magnificence." It has also been urged against the work that it is destitute of plot. It certainly has none of the artificial intricacies of a modern novel, which too often subordinate the proper delight of the present page to a morbid curiosity concerning that which is to follow. But it seems none the less excellent for this than for the absence of those light dishes of love or dissipation which it has become the fashion to substitute for the poor and homely entertainment of a life undistinguished except by wisdom and by virtue. An essay might be written on Cervantes as a moralist alone. "Desnudo nací, desnudo me hallo," repeats Sancho, with the patience and resignation of him from whose mouth these words originally came, in that pathetic apostrophe to his ass when he gave him, with tears in his eyes, the kiss of peace upon his forehead. "Ah, dear companion of my labours, when I had no other care than that of feeding your little carcase, happy were my hours, my days, my years; but now since I have begun to scale the towers of ambition and pride, a thousand sorrows, a thousand toils, and four thousand pains have pierced my soul." No less excellent is the remark on that love in young men which is "for the most part nothing but appetite, which having for its end delight, in obtaining this ceases; while real love has no such ending." To the practical philosopher in the school of adversity are we indebted for such moral maxims as these:"Seldom or never comes good pure and simple, but it is joined or followed by some evil which disturbs or exceeds it"; "Misfortunes ever track talent"; "Happy is he to whom Heaven hath given a piece of bread, without the obligation of thanking any other than Heaven itself." The hypocrisy of monks is well hit off in that question of Sancho's, "Do hermits keep hens?" These moths of the people, and sometimes worse, as the virtue-cloaked Don Rafael and Ambrosio Lamela of Gil Blas, were indeed but little resembling those of "the deserts of Egypt, who dressed in palm leaves and lived on roots." Sancho's wife, that woman of many names, utters a philippic against pride, as displayed in hidalgas, which reminds us of the "Baron" of Moratin. "They think because they're fine ladies the wind mustn't touch them, and go to church as if they were queens, and take it to be beneath them even to look on a poor labouring woman." In death we are all equal, for "the prince goes thither by as narrow a path as the day-labourer, and the body of the Pope takes no more room in earth than that of the sexton; we shrink willy-nilly at the pit's mouth to one proper size, and, goodnight!" The whole foundation of the famous medical system of Le Roy is contained in "Dine on little and sup on less, for the health of all the body is forged in the foundry of the stomach." "Sorrow was made, not for beasts, but for men; but if men give much way to it, they become beasts." This sentence, which, though somewhat of a riddle, seems to discourage the practice of looking at ills through a ̄magnifying-glass, and recommends a man to stand the hazard of a leap out of window as a last resource when his house is on fire, may be compared with the advice of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita—" There is nothing better for a man than lawful war," i.e. against distress. Speaking of that vexed social question of the public and its plays, Cervantes says, in the mouth of his protagonist, "The fault is not in the former for asking absurdities, but in those who represent nothing else." "It is not necessary," he continues, "to speak as a fool to be understood by the vulgar;" and he thought with Yriarte that though, if you give the people straw it would eat straw, yet if you provide it with grain, it would eat grain. "An author's work who looks to money is the coat of a tailor who works late on the vespers of Easter Sunday-made in a hurry and seldom of much good." Yet, on the other hand, "sin provecho no vale un cuatrin la buena fama." VOL. XXX.-No. 179. 29. In the advice to Sancho on his taking in hand the reins of government, Don Quixote provides for the case of a Phryne being brought before the judgment-seat by another Hyperides of Barataria-"If any pretty woman seeks for justice, abstract thy eyes from her tears and thy ears from her lamentations, unless thou wouldst have thy reason drowned in her mourning, and thy morality in her sighs." What an excellent piece of cunning is this!" Some wise man was of opinion that there was but one good woman in the world, and advised every married man to think she was his own, that so he might live well content." Don Quixote is at first simply a madman. Sancho, a coarse peasant, seconding, sometimes through simplicity, far more frequently through self-interest, the extravagant sallies of his Señor. Soon, however, as we have said, Cervantes clothes his heroes with the raiment of his own reason and intelligence, bestowing on the master that judgment and charity which is the child of reflection, on the servant that limited but sure common sense which most men inherit as the appanage of nature. Poetry and prose are contrasted in the Cavalier of the Sad Countenance and the Father of Proverbs. Like other reformers wise and virtuous, Don Quixote passes in corrupt and vicious society for a fool; he dreams of the possibility of obliterating lust, extinguishing anger, wiping out ambition, of doing good without the hope of reward-that pure morality of the Karma-Yoga system of Indian philosophy of refraining from cruelty and wrong, uninfluenced by the fear of retribution. In short, he is a madman, and this his monomania. In other respects he is like other men. Sancho gradually develops from the idle rustic, whose day-dream it was to enrich himself with a few maravedis, into the clever knave. A brave sight it is to see these two, inseparable as the body and the soul, joined to whom, the Caballero del Verde Gaban, the representative of the man, forms a perfect Trinity. Sancho Panza, seldom unmindful of his saddle-bags; Don Quixote, always soaring into the sublime ideal, a noble madman doing wisely deeds of consummate folly; the one a follower of the Stoic Zeno, the other of the Cyrenaic Aristippus. Especially appear these traits in the second part, superior it may be in the judgment of the author to the first; but not so well received, from its want of ridiculous adventure, by the rabble, whose cry is continually "Panem et Circenses!" Retaining only as much of the satire of knight-errantry as is sufficient to bind it to the first, it is a treatise of practical philosophy, a collection of maxims, offered, it is true, generally in the guise of parable, which a wide experience has shown to be the most generally attractive, a judicious and sweet satire on humanity. The name of Don Quixote has been in later times, by a species of metonymy, applied to that rare monster who is ready to undertake a virtuous but unfashionable course of action, uninfluenced by self-interest. So Diderot was the Don Quixote of philosophical insurrection. Edouard Fournier calls himself the Don Quixote of historic truth. But the world has this consolation. Don Quixotism is becoming rare; for self-devotion, faith, and delicacy wane day by day. No ten thousand swords leap now from their scabbards to avenge even a look which threatens a woman with insult. She pursues her remedy at Nisi Prius. The age of chivalry is gone. The historian Thucydides only mentions women once in the course of his work, and then to observe that it is their proper glory to be least spoken of among men, either for good or for evil. We have followed this illustrious example in not commenting on any of the female figures with which our author has enriched his canvas, yet it is difficult to avoid making an exception in favour of the foul Maritornes, who, with a woman's charity, when she sees Sancho bathed in sweat after the trouble of the blanketing of those needle-makers and others, gives him a cup of wine, paid for out of her own poor purse, and offers her humble prayer that his mad master may be restored to his right mind. Such a touch of humanity is presented to us in Sancho himself, whom it seems not well to suppose entirely self-interested. Not for the island only does Sancho follow his lord. Doubts about this island abound in Sancho; yet when his master proposes a separation, he says he has eaten of his bread and comes of no ungrateful race, that he is loyal and faithful, and that nothing but the shovel and spade shall ever part them. The general tone of the work is not less characteristic than its conception. Sismonde de Sismondi thinks its style inimitable. "It is written,” says Montesquieu, "to prove all others useless." It is full of profound meaning, set in the most sparkling and seductive words. It would be idle to refer any reader of this article to such well-known examples of rhetoric as the oration of Don Quixote to the goatherds about the golden age that oration which he commenced with his stomach well satisfied and a handful of acorns in his hand, speaking of that happy time as Chrysostom speaks of heaven, "Ubi non est meum ac tuum frigidum illud verbum." It were all one to remind him of how Sancho profited by the occasion in his frequent visits to the skin which was hung from a cork-tree in the hot summer noon to cool. On all the language of the Cavalier of the Lions is graven the Hall-stamp of old chivalric gravity, in all his words we hear the rattling of the sword and the glittering spear and shield, and smell the battle afar off, but in those of Sancho we smell only the wallet's savour and the odour of the skin of wine. Many translators, save the mark! have endeavoured to make the Don witty after their own conception of wit. They have succeeded in turning him into a buffoon. They look upon Cervantes' work as a comedy, ignoring, not perceiving probably, the intense sorrow of the tragedy beneath the surface. They are like a child which, pleased with gathering summer flowers in some country churchyard, cares little, or has not yet learned to think, of that which sleeps so deep and dark and silent below. By eliminating this element they ingeniously manage also to rid the story of that contrast of sadness of language and ludicrousness of situation which |