is perhaps its most enduring charm. Our readers are well aware that Cervantes' protagonist was as partial to time-honoured terms as Rabelais to bouquins de haute graisse, but how seldom are we reminded of this keynote by the voices of his exegetists! His wit and words are modernized alike. Their Don Quixote is the Don Quixote of the comic opera, in three acts, of Barbier and Carré, which was represented a few years ago at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris. Like the girl who disenchanted her lover with frogs and toads leaping from her lips, so Don Quixote somehow loses all his seriousness as soon as he begins to sing. He takes, so doing, the one step between the sublime and the ridiculous. The inflections of his voice are intricate, but his conduct is inexplicable. MM. Barbier and Carré have bound him to his clavileño as firmly as ever Mezentius fastened the living to the dead.

The episodes have been, as we have already observed, considered by some critics as useless hors-d'œuvre. With the single exception, however, of the "Curioso Impertinente," although not strictly necessary (how very little of any work is strictly necessary!) they are yet intimately connected with the general action. With this sole exception, the charming history of the shepherdess Marcela, of Dorothea, and of the nuptials of Gamacho, rise out of the story and make us well content to linger with their beauty, especially in a work whose interest is kept up by no unforeseen dénoûment, of which a lady's impatience would in vain consult the end to obtain in a few sentences the essence of the whole, but which one opens here and there as one opens the Bible, with a rare epicurean delight. Even supposing these episodes to be digressive, would any who has read them willingly let them go?

There are, of course, many imitations of Don Quixote, more or less bad. We shall only notice two-that under the name of " Avellaneda," and the Spiritual Quixote. This Alfonso or Fernandez de Avellaneda is without doubt a pseudonym. Most of the biographers, following one another with the touching enthusiasm of the sheep of Panurge, serving up for ever the same cold meat, give quite a pleasant little history of Avellaneda, as of one who really existed, and inspired by a devil make him a native of Tordesillas, the Turris Syllana of the Romans. But name and country are alike supposititious. The authorship of the work which was published between the parts of that of Cervantes has been attributed to four persons; to André Perez, the Dominican author of La Picara Justina, under the title Fr. Lopez de Ubeda; secondly, to Fr. Juan Blanco de la Paz, also a Dominican, a companion of Cervantes' captivity; thirdly, to Bartolomé de Argensola, surnamed the historian of Aragon ; and, lastly, to Luis Aliaga, father-confessor of Philip III., and a favourite of the Duc de Lerma.

This work of the soi-disant Avellaneda was considered worth translation and improvement by Le Sage, who is of opinion that the character of Sancho is better sustained there than in the original. "Sancho," he says, "is always Sancho." He goes so far as to add, Cervantes'

Sancho" veut souvent faire le plaisant, et ne l'est pas; celui de Avellaneda l'est presque toujours sans vouloir l'être."

This family of Avellaneda, of whom the unknown author of the continuation of Don Quixote assumed the name, was not without celebrity in Old Castile. Ochoa de Avellaneda was a principal member. "Ochoa"

is said in Biscayan to signify "wolf;" and a pair of these animals are the armorial bearings of the family.

The prologue contains the bitterest envy of Cervantes, clearly shown in a charge of envy against him, interlarded with quotations from the Saints Thomas, Gregory, and Paul, with unbounded admiration of Lope de Vega. It bears coarse cruel reference to the maimed hand of the soldier of Lepanto, who has, he says, more tongue than hands. Cervantes' work is full of anger and impatience, the result of composition in gaol. "I," says the author of a preface menos cacareado, "am of a very different humour "—he might have added, without fear of contradiction— "and of very different brains." The body of the work is but a poor travestie of the material and realistic portion of that of Cervantes. His Don Quixote is degraded from the character of a dreamer lost in the land far fairer than any of this world is allowed to know, into that of an undignified and helpless idiot, whom the author very properly conducts to the hospital of Toledo. Sancho becomes an utter blockhead, who confounds grossness with simplicity, and that which is vile with that which is natural; whose attempts at pleasantry sometimes excite compassion, but more frequently disgust. The whole work is but a faint, feeble shadow of the great original in a sickly sun, the original without which it had long ago been lost, and without which it would, of course, never have been composed.

It may be added, however, that Cervantes was not behind the soi-disant Avellaneda in abuse, and that the latter was to a certain extent justified of his child. Cervantes had concluded his work with the verse borrowed from the Orlando :

Forse altri canterà con miglior plettro.

That other presented himself after a lapse of nine years, and Cervantes received him in high dudgeon. On many occasions he neglects the interest of his work to satisfy his spleen with diatribes against Avellaneda. For instance, in his conversation at the inn at Zaragoza, which Don Quixote did not take for a castle, between Don Gerónimo and Don Juan. "Why are you for reading these follies?" asks Don Gerónimo, apropos of the book of Avellaneda. "Whoever has read the first part of the History of Don Quixote cannot possibly have any pleasure in reading the second." "With all that," replies Don Juan, "it would be well to read it, for there is no book so bad as not to contain something good." Again, in his visit to the printing-house at Barcelona, Don Quixote sees this obnoxious volume, and wonders that it has not been burnt to cinders because of its impertinence, and ends with "mas á cada puerco llegará su

In

S. Martin." And when Altisidora recounts her experiences of the amusements of Hell, she mentions the devils playing at ball with books stuffed with wind and butter. One of these, new and well bound, received a kick that tore out its bowels. "What is that book?" said one devil of another; who answered, "The second part of the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, composed by an Aragonese, who declares himself a native of Tordesillas." 66 'Away with it," howls the first devil," down to the abysses of hell, that my eyes may see it no more." "Is it so very bad, then?" asked the other. "So bad, that if I myself wished to make it worse, I should not succeed." Bad as it was, Cervantes more than once imitated it. Clemencin has noted two or three instances; there are others. The adventure of the Cortes de la Muerte was preceded by that of the group of comedians in Chapter xxvi. of Avellaneda. Chapter xxvii. of the same book Don Quixote assists at a representation of a play of the celebrated Lope de Vega Carpio. Here a son, possessed by a devil, in order to obtain revenge for the queen, his mother's, refusal of a certain horse, accuses her of having, during the king's absence, committed adultery with one of his retinue. The woman who plays the part of the queen appears deeply affected by this false witness. Then Don Quixote, seeing that there were none on her side, rises in extreme wrath, crying "It is a villanous wickedness," &c., and rushes on the actors who bore false witness, as Cervantes makes him rush on the puppets of Maese Pedro. It may be said that the story of Avellaneda is more natural than that of Cervantes; it is, however, a question whether it is more entertaining. The sweet chord of literary revenge echoed to the last. "Item"-thus runs the last paragraph of the will of Alonso Quijano the Good, no more Don Quixote de la Mancha-"Item. I beseech the said gentlemen (the Curate and Bachelor Sanson Carrasco) my executors, that if haply they shall come to the knowledge of the author who they say composed a history which goes about with the title of The Second Part of the Achievements of Don Quixote, that they will on my part, as kindly as they are able, beg him to pardon me for having been the innocent occasion of his writing so many and monstrous absurdities as he has therein written, for I quit this life with some scruple of conscience arising from that consideration."

The so-called translation of Le Sage by no means gives an exact idea of the original, attributed to Avellaneda, and the only English translation that the writer is acquainted with, by Mr. Baker, published in 1745, with curious cuts, being advertised as "translated from the original Spanish," is, of course, a bad version of the French of Le Sage. His work is no more a translation of Avellaneda than his Diable Boiteux is a translation of El diablo Cojuelo of Guevara. To give an instance - Don Quixote, according to Le Sage, is shot through the head with a brace of bullets by an enraged trooper whom he meets about two hundred paces from Argamasilla, while in the original, after marching onward continually, like Ahasuerus, he finds his goal in the mad hospital of Toledo. It may be the author intended by this dénoûment to show that the rest of the

world was not mad. Fully armed, mounted on the much-enduring Rozinante, La Mancha's knight enters, and the door closes on the imitator of Amadis de Gaula and his grinning companions in distress.

The only other imitation of Don Quixote to which we can here allude is the Spiritual Quixote of Richard Graves, rector of Claverton. This representation of a summer's ramble of Mr. Geoffry Wildgoose, its hero, with a thick-set little crazy cobbler for his squire, Jeremiah Tugwell or Tagwell or Tackwell (for learning was at a low ebb in the family, and the orthography is somewhat dubious, and there were some who declared it should be Tugwool by synecdoche for Tug-mutton), was, at the time of its production about a century ago, extremely popular. It is a satire on Methodism and a certain Mr. Whitfield supposed to have invented it. When Wildgoose lamented the sad decay of Christian piety, Jeremiah sadly shook his head, and when his master asserted the preference of faith over works, "Yes, yes," cried Jerry, "faith's all; our good works are no better than filthy rags' in the sight of God." Jerry has a wife Dorothy, who "wears that emblem of sovereignty the breeches," and the two meet with adventures conceived in a style approaching, longo intervallo, that of Cervantes. The object of the work seems to have been to extinguish, if possible, those idle itinerant preachers who, having in view the pleasing of old women and the filling of their pockets, did then as now their ignorant best to bring what is called religion into contempt.

Even Sancho has found one to chronicle his farther adventures after the death of his liege-Jacinto Maria Delgado, who wrote a volume modestly entitled, Adiciones á la historia del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha; but the composition only proves that Sancho Panza's ass was not a beast for everyone to ride.

The writer of an episode in the Mahabharata, that great epic of India, says that as waters in a tank may be used for drinking, washing, cooking, bathing, and many other purposes, so the texts of Scripture can be converted by priests in many ways to their own interests. This wresting of signification has obtained as well in all famous pictures as in all famous books, and Don Quixote is not without it. No matter how diverse the stories, from the Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy to the most lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth of Dame Durden and her dog, allegories have been detected by the ingenious; therefore also Don Quixote has been supposed to be an allegory. Cervantes has been treated as Homer was treated by Democritus of Abdera, or Dante in modern days by Ozanam and King John of Saxony; but the Greek Minerva was born mature from the brain of Homer and the Italian from that of Dante, while the Spanish Minerva was already almost adult when Cervantes wrote. Compared to Lope and Calderon, Cervantes was but a lay gent.

There are who, not without many and learned arguments, have supposed Cervantes meant to represent the Emperor Charles V. by his hero; while John Bowle, who deserves so much and has received so little for his labours, thinks Ignacio Loyola might have been pitched upon. Loyola in youth was certainly much addicted to books of knight-errantry, and pass

ing over that narrow and indeterminate border line between romance and religion, transferred his affections subsequently to the Flos Sanctorum, resolving to imitate what he there read. Like Don Quixote, this cavalier of Christ is said to have watched his new arms a whole night long, partly on foot, partly on his knees before the image of Our Lady of Monserrate. There are those who see in the carrier lover of Maritornes a townsman of Arévalo, because a townsman of Arévalo had once done Cervantes an ill turn. Cide Hamete Benengeli is called "autor arábigo y manchego," as a nipping taunt of the people of La Mancha for their mixed blood. The Licentiate Alonso Perez de Alcobendas is Blanco de Paz anagrammatized. Dulcinea is a lady of Tobosa named Ana Zarco de Morales. Don Quixote himself is a certain Quijada de Salazar, who had opposed Cervantes' marriage with Doña Catalina Palacios, and Sancho is discovered to be Fray Luis de Aliaga, probably on the lucus a non lucendo principle, from there being no conceivable connection between them. Those who indulge in these fantasies are like that beetle which, carefully avoiding rose leaves, eeds on dung. They search for allusions, ridiculous or morally evil, but none, or very few, venture to find an original for such noble characters as the Caballero del Verde Gaban, "el primer santo á la gineta." None venture to say to whom Cervantes alludes in the figures of Cardenio, Luscinda, or Dorothea, and to what circumstance he owes that delicate and pure love of Don Luis and Doña Clara- a picture as fair as that of Paul and Virginia, or Romeo and Juliet, and which might detain on his mission from Paradise an angel, if angels are now sent, as the Merciful Majesty once sent Raphael to Tobit and the daughter of Raguel. The same madness which inspired Don Quixote in the braving of the warriors of those armies which turned out, after all, no other warriors than these have turned out, mere sheep, this madness seems to have inspired those subtle ones who have detected cavaliers of the court of Philip III. in Alifanfaron de la Trapobana, Brandabarbaran, Micocolembo, and Pentapolin of the tuckedup sleeve. An ingenious commentator, under this point of view, makes the hero the Duke de Lerma, principally relying on a supposed resemblance between the traits of the Cavalier of La Mancha and those of the minister of Philip III. It would be difficult to disprove this likeness at the present day, but those who have thought the conceit worthy of their confutation have reminded us that Cervantes received a pension from this Duke's friend, the Count de Lemos, and that he would scarcely dedicate the second portion of his work to him whose avowed friend had been ridiculed in the first. But there is some trifling point of resemblance, and this is enough. Those who delight in these subtleties are as easily satisfied as Dorothea, who, when Don Quixote was about to undress himself to afford her ocular evidence of his bearing the mole, the stamp of her deliverer, about the exact situation of which some doubt was entertained, said to extricate herself from this emergency, "Whether it be on the shoulder or the backbone or elsewhere is of little consequence. It is enough that you have a mole."