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Don Quixote



by Miguel de Cervantes



 Translated by John Ormsby




Ebook Editor’s Note



The book cover and spine above and the images which follow were not
part of the original Ormsby translation—they are taken from the 1880
edition of J. W. Clark, illustrated by Gustave Doré. Clark in his
edition states that, “The English text of ‘Don Quixote’ adopted in this
edition is that of Jarvis, with occasional corrections from Motteaux.”
See in the introduction below John Ormsby’s critique of both the Jarvis
and Motteaux translations. It has been elected in the present Project
Gutenberg edition to attach the famous engravings of Gustave Doré to
the Ormsby translation instead of the Jarvis/Motteaux. The detail of
many of the Doré engravings can be fully appreciated only by utilizing
the “Full Size” button to expand them to their original dimensions.
Ormsby in his Preface has criticized the fanciful nature of Doré’s
illustrations; others feel these woodcuts and steel engravings well
match Quixote’s dreams.            D.W.



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CONTENTS VOLUME I


INTRODUCTION

PREFARATORY

CERVANTES

‘DON QUIXOTE’

THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE

COMMENDATORY VERSES




CHAPTER I WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND
PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA 

CHAPTER II WHICH TREATS OF THE FIRST SALLY THE INGENIOUS
DON QUIXOTE MADE FROM HOME 

CHAPTER III
WHEREIN IS RELATED THE DROLL WAY IN WHICH DON QUIXOTE HAD HIMSELF DUBBED A
KNIGHT 

CHAPTER IV OF WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR
KNIGHT WHEN HE LEFT THE INN 

CHAPTER V IN
WHICH THE NARRATIVE OF OUR KNIGHT’S MISHAP IS CONTINUED 

CHAPTER VI OF THE DIVERTING AND IMPORTANT SCRUTINY WHICH
THE CURATE AND THE BARBER MADE IN THE LIBRARY OF OUR INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN


CHAPTER VII OF THE SECOND SALLY OF OUR WORTHY
KNIGHT DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA 

CHAPTER VIII
OF THE GOOD FORTUNE WHICH THE VALIANT DON QUIXOTE HAD IN THE TERRIBLE AND
UNDREAMT-OF ADVENTURE OF THE WINDMILLS, WITH OTHER OCCURRENCES WORTHY TO
BE FITLY RECORDED 

CHAPTER IX IN WHICH IS
CONCLUDED AND FINISHED THE TERRIFIC BATTLE BETWEEN THE GALLANT BISCAYAN
AND THE VALIANT MANCHEGAN 

CHAPTER X OF THE
PLEASANT DISCOURSE THAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS SQUIRE SANCHO
PANZA 

CHAPTER XI OF WHAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE
WITH CERTAIN GOATHERDS 

CHAPTER XII OF WHAT A
GOATHERD RELATED TO THOSE WITH DON QUIXOTE 

CHAPTER
XIII IN WHICH IS ENDED THE STORY OF THE SHEPHERDESS MARCELA, WITH
OTHER INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER XIV WHEREIN ARE
INSERTED THE DESPAIRING VERSES OF THE DEAD SHEPHERD, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
INCIDENTS NOT LOOKED FOR 

CHAPTER XV IN WHICH
IS RELATED THE UNFORTUNATE ADVENTURE THAT DON QUIXOTE FELL IN WITH WHEN HE
FELL OUT WITH CERTAIN HEARTLESS YANGUESANS 

CHAPTER
XVI OF WHAT HAPPENED TO THE INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN IN THE INN WHICH HE
TOOK TO BE A CASTLE 

CHAPTER XVII IN WHICH
ARE CONTAINED THE INNUMERABLE TROUBLES WHICH THE BRAVE DON QUIXOTE AND HIS
GOOD SQUIRE SANCHO PANZA ENDURED IN THE INN, WHICH TO HIS MISFORTUNE HE
TOOK TO BE A CASTLE 

CHAPTER XVIII IN WHICH
IS RELATED THE DISCOURSE SANCHO PANZA HELD WITH HIS MASTER, DON QUIXOTE,
AND OTHER ADVENTURES WORTH RELATING 

CHAPTER XIX
OF THE SHREWD DISCOURSE WHICH SANCHO HELD WITH HIS MASTER, AND OF THE
ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL HIM WITH A DEAD BODY, TOGETHER WITH OTHER NOTABLE
OCCURRENCES 

CHAPTER XX OF THE UNEXAMPLED AND
UNHEARD-OF ADVENTURE WHICH WAS ACHIEVED BY THE VALIANT DON QUIXOTE OF LA
MANCHA WITH LESS PERIL THAN ANY EVER ACHIEVED BY ANY FAMOUS KNIGHT IN THE
WORLD 

CHAPTER XXI WHICH TREATS OF THE
EXALTED ADVENTURE AND RICH PRIZE OF MAMBRINO’S HELMET, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO OUR INVINCIBLE KNIGHT 

CHAPTER
XXII OF THE FREEDOM DON QUIXOTE CONFERRED ON SEVERAL UNFORTUNATES WHO
AGAINST THEIR WILL WERE BEING CARRIED WHERE THEY HAD NO WISH TO GO 

CHAPTER XXIII OF WHAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE IN THE SIERRA
MORENA, WHICH WAS ONE OF THE RAREST ADVENTURES RELATED IN THIS VERACIOUS
HISTORY 

CHAPTER XXIV IN WHICH IS CONTINUED
THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIERRA MORENA 

CHAPTER XXV
WHICH TREATS OF THE STRANGE THINGS THAT HAPPENED TO THE STOUT KNIGHT OF LA
MANCHA IN THE SIERRA MORENA, AND OF HIS IMITATION OF THE PENANCE OF
BELTENEBROS 

CHAPTER XXVI IN WHICH ARE
CONTINUED THE REFINEMENTS WHEREWITH DON QUIXOTE PLAYED THE PART OF A LOVER
IN THE SIERRA MORENA 

CHAPTER XXVII OF HOW
THE CURATE AND THE BARBER PROCEEDED WITH THEIR SCHEME; TOGETHER WITH OTHER
MATTERS WORTHY OF RECORD IN THIS GREAT HISTORY 

CHAPTER
XXVIII WHICH TREATS OF THE STRANGE AND DELIGHTFUL ADVENTURE THAT
BEFELL THE CURATE AND THE BARBER IN THE SAME SIERRA 

CHAPTER XXIX WHICH TREATS OF THE DROLL DEVICE AND METHOD
ADOPTED TO EXTRICATE OUR LOVE-STRICKEN KNIGHT FROM THE SEVERE PENANCE HE
HAD IMPOSED UPON HIMSELF 

CHAPTER XXX WHICH
TREATS OF ADDRESS DISPLAYED BY THE FAIR DOROTHEA, WITH OTHER MATTERS
PLEASANT AND AMUSING 

CHAPTER XXXI OF THE
DELECTABLE DISCUSSION BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA, HIS SQUIRE,
TOGETHER WITH OTHER INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER XXXII
WHICH TREATS OF WHAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE’S PARTY AT THE INN 

CHAPTER XXXIII IN WHICH IS RELATED THE NOVEL OF “THE
ILL-ADVISED CURIOSITY” 

CHAPTER XXXIV IN
WHICH IS CONTINUED THE NOVEL OF “THE ILL-ADVISED CURIOSITY” 

CHAPTER XXXV WHICH TREATS OF THE HEROIC AND PRODIGIOUS
BATTLE DON QUIXOTE HAD WITH CERTAIN SKINS OF RED WINE, AND BRINGS THE
NOVEL OF “THE ILL-ADVISED CURIOSITY” TO A CLOSE 

CHAPTER
XXXVI WHICH TREATS OF MORE CURIOUS INCIDENTS THAT OCCURRED AT THE INN


CHAPTER XXXVII IN WHICH IS CONTINUED THE
STORY OF THE FAMOUS PRINCESS MICOMICONA, WITH OTHER DROLL ADVENTURES 

CHAPTER XXXVIII WHICH TREATS OF THE CURIOUS DISCOURSE DON
QUIXOTE DELIVERED ON ARMS AND LETTERS 

CHAPTER
XXXIX WHEREIN THE CAPTIVE RELATES HIS LIFE AND ADVENTURES 

CHAPTER XL IN WHICH THE STORY OF THE CAPTIVE IS CONTINUED


CHAPTER XLI IN WHICH THE CAPTIVE STILL
CONTINUES HIS ADVENTURES 

CHAPTER XLII WHICH
TREATS OF WHAT FURTHER TOOK PLACE IN THE INN, AND OF SEVERAL OTHER THINGS
WORTH KNOWING 

CHAPTER XLIII WHEREIN IS
RELATED THE PLEASANT STORY OF THE MULETEER, TOGETHER WITH OTHER STRANGE
THINGS THAT CAME TO PASS IN THE INN 

CHAPTER XLIV
IN WHICH ARE CONTINUED THE UNHEARD-OF ADVENTURES OF THE INN 

CHAPTER XLV IN WHICH THE DOUBTFUL QUESTION OF MAMBRINO’S
HELMET AND THE PACK-SADDLE IS FINALLY SETTLED, WITH OTHER ADVENTURES THAT
OCCURRED IN TRUTH AND EARNEST 

CHAPTER XLVI
OF THE END OF THE NOTABLE ADVENTURE OF THE OFFICERS OF THE HOLY
BROTHERHOOD; AND OF THE GREAT FEROCITY OF OUR WORTHY KNIGHT, DON QUIXOTE


CHAPTER XLVII OF THE STRANGE MANNER IN WHICH
DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA WAS CARRIED AWAY ENCHANTED, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
REMARKABLE INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER XLVIII IN WHICH
THE CANON PURSUES THE SUBJECT OF THE BOOKS OF CHIVALRY, WITH OTHER MATTERS
WORTHY OF HIS WIT 

CHAPTER XLIX WHICH TREATS
OF THE SHREWD CONVERSATION WHICH SANCHO PANZA HELD WITH HIS MASTER DON
QUIXOTE 

CHAPTER L OF THE SHREWD CONTROVERSY
WHICH DON QUIXOTE AND THE CANON HELD, TOGETHER WITH OTHER INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER LI WHICH DEALS WITH WHAT THE GOATHERD TOLD THOSE
WHO WERE CARRYING OFF DON QUIXOTE 

CHAPTER LII
OF THE QUARREL THAT DON QUIXOTE HAD WITH THE GOATHERD, TOGETHER WITH THE
RARE ADVENTURE OF THE PENITENTS, WHICH WITH AN EXPENDITURE OF SWEAT HE
BROUGHT TO A HAPPY CONCLUSION 



CONTENTS VOLUME II



CHAPTER I OF THE INTERVIEW THE CURATE AND
THE BARBER HAD WITH DON QUIXOTE ABOUT HIS MALADY 

CHAPTER
II WHICH TREATS OF THE NOTABLE ALTERCATION WHICH SANCHO PANZA HAD WITH
DON QUIXOTE’S NIECE, AND HOUSEKEEPER, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
DROLLMATTERS 

CHAPTER III OF THE LAUGHABLE
CONVERSATION THAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE, SANCHO PANZA, AND THE
BACHELOR SAMSON CARRASCO 

CHAPTER IV IN WHICH
SANCHO PANZA GIVES A SATISFACTORY REPLY TO THE DOUBTS AND QUESTIONS OF THE
BACHELOR SAMSON CARRASCO, TOGETHER WITH OTHER MATTERS WORTH KNOWING AND
TELLING 

CHAPTER V OF THE SHREWD AND DROLL
CONVERSATION THAT PASSED BETWEEN SANCHO PANZA AND HIS WIFE TERESA PANZA,
AND OTHER MATTERS WORTHY OF BEING DULY RECORDED 

CHAPTER
VI OF WHAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS NIECE AND
HOUSEKEEPER; ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT CHAPTERS IN THE WHOLE HISTORY 

CHAPTER VII OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS
SQUIRE, TOGETHER WITH OTHER VERY NOTABLE INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER VIII WHEREIN IS RELATED WHAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE
ON HIS WAY TO SEE HIS LADY DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO 

CHAPTER
IX WHEREIN IS RELATED WHAT WILL BE SEEN THERE 

CHAPTER X WHEREIN IS RELATED THE CRAFTY DEVICE SANCHO
ADOPTED TO ENCHANT THE LADY DULCINEA, AND OTHER INCIDENTS AS LUDICROUS AS
THEY ARE TRUE 

CHAPTER XI OF THE STRANGE
ADVENTURE WHICH THE VALIANT DON QUIXOTE HAD WITH THE CAR OR CART OF
“THE CORTES OF DEATH” 

CHAPTER XII
OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURE WHICH BEFELL THE VALIANT DON QUIXOTE WITH THE
BOLD KNIGHT OF THE MIRRORS 

CHAPTER XIII IN
WHICH IS CONTINUED THE ADVENTURE OF THE KNIGHT OF THE GROVE, TOGETHER WITH
THE SENSIBLE, ORIGINAL, AND TRANQUIL COLLOQUY THAT PASSED BETWEEN THE TWO
SQUIRES 

CHAPTER XIV WHEREIN IS CONTINUED
THE ADVENTURE OF THE KNIGHT OF THE GROVE 

CHAPTER
XV WHEREIN IT IS TOLD AND KNOWN WHO THE KNIGHT OF THE MIRRORS AND HIS
SQUIRE WERE 

CHAPTER XVI OF WHAT BEFELL DON
QUIXOTE WITH A DISCREET GENTLEMAN OF LA MANCHA 

CHAPTER
XVII WHEREIN IS SHOWN THE FURTHEST AND HIGHEST POINT WHICH THE
UNEXAMPLEDCOURAGE OF DON QUIXOTE REACHED OR COULD REACH; TOGETHER WITH THE
HAPPILY ACHIEVED ADVENTURE OF THE LIONS 

CHAPTER
XVIII OF WHAT HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE IN THE CASTLE OR HOUSE OF THE
KNIGHT OF THE GREEN GABAN, TOGETHER WITH OTHER MATTERS OUT OF THE COMMON


CHAPTER XIX IN WHICH IS RELATED THE
ADVENTURE OF THE ENAMOURED SHEPHERD, TOGETHER WITH OTHER TRULY DROLL
INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER XX WHEREIN AN ACCOUNT IS
GIVEN OF THE WEDDING OF CAMACHO THE RICH, TOGETHER WITH THE INCIDENT OF
BASILIO THE POOR 

CHAPTER XXI IN WHICH
CAMACHO’S WEDDING IS CONTINUED, WITH OTHER DELIGHTFUL INCIDENTS


CHAPTER XXII WHEREIN IS RELATED THE GRAND
ADVENTURE OF THE CAVE OF MONTESINOS IN THE HEART OF LA MANCHA, WHICH THE
VALIANT DON QUIXOTE BROUGHT TO A HAPPY TERMINATION 

CHAPTER XXIII OF THE WONDERFUL THINGS THE INCOMPARABLE
DON QUIXOTE SAID HE SAW IN THE PROFOUND CAVE OF MONTESINOS, THE
IMPOSSIBILITY AND MAGNITUDE OF WHICH CAUSE THIS ADVENTURE TO BE DEEMED
APOCRYPHAL 

CHAPTER XXIV WHEREIN ARE RELATED
A THOUSAND TRIFLING MATTERS, AS TRIVIAL AS THEY ARE NECESSARY TO THE RIGHT
UNDERSTANDING OF THIS GREAT HISTORY 

CHAPTER XXV
WHEREIN IS SET DOWN THE BRAYING ADVENTURE, AND THE DROLL ONE OF THE
PUPPET-SHOWMAN, TOGETHER WITH THE MEMORABLE DIVINATIONS OF THE DIVINING
APE 

CHAPTER XXVI WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE
DROLL ADVENTURE OF THE PUPPET-SHOWMAN, TOGETHER WITH OTHER THINGS IN TRUTH
RIGHT GOOD 

CHAPTER XXVII WHEREIN IT IS
SHOWN WHO MASTER PEDRO AND HIS APE WERE, TOGETHER WITH THE MISHAP DON
QUIXOTE HAD IN THE BRAYING ADVENTURE, WHICH HE DID NOT CONCLUDE AS HE
WOULD HAVE LIKED OR AS HE HAD EXPECTED 

CHAPTER
XXVIII OF MATTERS THAT BENENGELI SAYS HE WHO READS THEM WILL KNOW, IF
HE READS THEM WITH ATTENTION 

CHAPTER XXIX
OF THE FAMOUS ADVENTURE OF THE ENCHANTED BARK 

CHAPTER
XXX OF DON QUIXOTE’S ADVENTURE WITH A FAIR HUNTRESS 

CHAPTER XXXI WHICH TREATS OF MANY AND GREAT MATTERS


CHAPTER XXXII OF THE REPLY DON QUIXOTE GAVE
HIS CENSURER, WITH OTHER INCIDENTS, GRAVE AND DROLL 

CHAPTER XXXIII OF THE DELECTABLE DISCOURSE WHICH THE
DUCHESS AND HER DAMSELS HELD WITH SANCHO PANZA, WELL WORTH READING AND
NOTING 

CHAPTER XXXIV WHICH RELATES HOW THEY
LEARNED THE WAY IN WHICH THEY WERE TO DISENCHANT THE PEERLESS DULCINEA DEL
TOBOSO, WHICH IS ONE OF THE RAREST ADVENTURES IN THIS BOOK 

CHAPTER XXXV WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE INSTRUCTION GIVEN
TO DON QUIXOTE TOUCHING THE DISENCHANTMENT OF DULCINEA, TOGETHER WITH
OTHER MARVELLOUS INCIDENTS 

CHAPTER XXXVI
WHEREIN IS RELATED THE STRANGE AND UNDREAMT-OF ADVENTURE OF THE DISTRESSED
DUENNA, ALIAS THE COUNTESS TRIFALDI, TOGETHER WITH A LETTER WHICH SANCHO
PANZA WROTE TO HIS WIFE, TERESA PANZA 

CHAPTER
XXXVII WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE NOTABLE ADVENTURE OF THE DISTRESSED
DUENNA 

CHAPTER XXXVIII WHEREIN IS TOLD THE
DISTRESSED DUENNA’S TALE OF HER MISFORTUNES 

CHAPTER XXXIX IN WHICH THE TRIFALDI CONTINUES HER
MARVELLOUS AND MEMORABLE STORY 

CHAPTER XL
OF MATTERS RELATING AND BELONGING TO THIS ADVENTURE AND TO THIS MEMORABLE
HISTORY 

CHAPTER XLI OF THE ARRIVAL OF
CLAVILEÑO AND THE END OF THIS PROTRACTED ADVENTURE 

CHAPTER XLII OF THE COUNSELS WHICH DON QUIXOTE GAVE
SANCHO PANZA BEFORE HE SET OUT TO GOVERN THE ISLAND, TOGETHER WITH OTHER
WELL-CONSIDERED MATTERS 

CHAPTER XLIII OF
THE SECOND SET OF COUNSELS DON QUIXOTE GAVE SANCHO PANZA 

CHAPTER XLIV HOW SANCHO PANZA WAS CONDUCTED TO HIS
GOVERNMENT, AND OF THE STRANGE ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE IN THE
CASTLE 

CHAPTER XLV OF HOW THE GREAT SANCHO
PANZA TOOK POSSESSION OF HIS ISLAND, AND OF HOW HE MADE A BEGINNING IN
GOVERNING 

CHAPTER XLVI OF THE TERRIBLE BELL
AND CAT FRIGHT THAT DON QUIXOTE GOT IN THE COURSE OF THE ENAMOURED
ALTISIDORA’S WOOING 

CHAPTER XLVII
WHEREIN IS CONTINUED THE ACCOUNT OF HOW SANCHO PANZA CONDUCTED HIMSELF IN
HIS GOVERNMENT 

CHAPTER XLVIII OF WHAT
BEFELL DON QUIXOTE WITH DOÑA RODRIGUEZ, THE DUCHESS’S DUENNA,
TOGETHER WITH OTHER OCCURRENCES WORTHY OF RECORD AND ETERNAL REMEMBRANCE


CHAPTER XLIX OF WHAT HAPPENED SANCHO IN
MAKING THE ROUND OF HIS ISLAND 

CHAPTER L
WHEREIN IS SET FORTH WHO THE ENCHANTERS AND EXECUTIONERS WERE WHO FLOGGED
THE DUENNA AND PINCHED DON QUIXOTE, AND ALSO WHAT BEFELL THE PAGE WHO
CARRIED THE LETTER TO TERESA PANZA, SANCHO PANZA’S WIFE 

CHAPTER LI OF THE PROGRESS OF SANCHO’S GOVERNMENT,
AND OTHER SUCH ENTERTAINING MATTERS 

CHAPTER LII
WHEREIN IS RELATED THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND DISTRESSED OR AFFLICTED
DUENNA, OTHERWISE CALLED DOÑA RODRIGUEZ 

CHAPTER
LIII OF THE TROUBLOUS END AND TERMINATION SANCHO PANZA’S
GOVERNMENT CAME TO 

CHAPTER LIV WHICH DEALS
WITH MATTERS RELATING TO THIS HISTORY AND NO OTHER 

CHAPTER LV OF WHAT BEFELL SANCHO ON THE ROAD, AND OTHER
THINGS THAT CANNOT BE SURPASSED 

CHAPTER LVI
OF THE PRODIGIOUS AND UNPARALLELED BATTLE THAT TOOK PLACE BETWEEN DON
QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA AND THE LACQUEY TOSILOS IN DEFENCE OF THE DAUGHTER OF
DOÑA RODRIGUEZ 

CHAPTER LVII WHICH TREATS OF
HOW DON QUIXOTE TOOK LEAVE OF THE DUKE, AND OF WHAT FOLLOWED WITH THE
WITTY AND IMPUDENT ALTISIDORA, ONE OF THE DUCHESS’S DAMSELS 

CHAPTER LVIII WHICH TELLS HOW ADVENTURES CAME CROWDING
ON DON QUIXOTE IN SUCH NUMBERS THAT THEY GAVE ONE ANOTHER NO
BREATHING-TIME 

CHAPTER LIX WHEREIN IS
RELATED THE STRANGE THING, WHICH MAY BE REGARDED AS AN ADVENTURE, THAT
HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE 

CHAPTER LX OF WHAT
HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE ON HIS WAY TO BARCELONA 

CHAPTER
LXI OF WHAT HAPPENED DON QUIXOTE ON ENTERING BARCELONA, TOGETHER WITH
OTHER MATTERS THAT PARTAKE OF THE TRUE RATHER THAN OF THE INGENIOUS 

CHAPTER LXII WHICH DEALS WITH THE ADVENTURE OF THE
ENCHANTED HEAD, TOGETHER WITH OTHER TRIVIAL MATTERS WHICH CANNOT BE LEFT
UNTOLD

CHAPTER LXIII OF THE MISHAP THAT
BEFELL SANCHO PANZA THROUGH THE VISIT TO THE GALLEYS, AND THE STRANGE
ADVENTURE OF THE FAIR MORISCO 

CHAPTER LXIV
TREATING OF THE ADVENTURE WHICH GAVE DON QUIXOTE MORE UNHAPPINESS THAN ALL
THAT HAD HITHERTO BEFALLEN HIM 

CHAPTER LXV
WHEREIN IS MADE KNOWN WHO THE KNIGHT OF THE WHITE MOON WAS; LIKEWISE DON
GREGORIO’S RELEASE, AND OTHER EVENTS 

CHAPTER
LXVI WHICH TREATS OF WHAT HE WHO READS WILL SEE, OR WHAT HE WHO HAS IT
READ TO HIM WILL HEAR

CHAPTER LXVII OF THE
RESOLUTION DON QUIXOTE FORMED TO TURN SHEPHERD AND TAKE TO A LIFE IN THE
FIELDS WHILE THE YEAR FOR WHICH HE HAD GIVEN HIS WORD WAS RUNNING ITS
COURSE; WITH OTHER EVENTS TRULY DELECTABLE AND HAPPY 

CHAPTER LXVIII OF THE BRISTLY ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL DON
QUIXOTE 

CHAPTER LXIX OF THE STRANGEST AND
MOST EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURE THAT BEFELL DON QUIXOTE IN THE WHOLE COURSE
OF THIS GREAT HISTORY 

CHAPTER LXX WHICH
FOLLOWS SIXTY-NINE AND DEALS WITH MATTERS INDISPENSABLE FOR THE CLEAR
COMPREHENSION OF THIS HISTORY 

CHAPTER LXXI
OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS SQUIRE SANCHO ON THE WAY TO
THEIR VILLAGE 

CHAPTER LXXII OF HOW DON
QUIXOTE AND SANCHO REACHED THEIR VILLAGE 

CHAPTER
LXXIII OF THE OMENS DON QUIXOTE HAD AS HE ENTERED HIS OWN VILLAGE, AND
OTHER INCIDENTS THAT EMBELLISH AND GIVE A COLOUR TO THIS GREAT HISTORY


CHAPTER LXXIV OF HOW DON QUIXOTE FELL SICK,
AND OF THE WILL HE MADE, AND HOW HE DIED 




INTRODUCTION

PREFARATORY

It was with considerable reluctance that I abandoned in favour of the
present undertaking what had long been a favourite project: that of a
new edition of Shelton’s “Don Quixote,” which has now become a somewhat
scarce book. There are some—and I confess myself to be one—for whom
Shelton’s racy old version, with all its defects, has a charm that no
modern translation, however skilful or correct, could possess. Shelton
had the inestimable advantage of belonging to the same generation as
Cervantes; “Don Quixote” had to him a vitality that only a contemporary
could feel; it cost him no dramatic effort to see things as Cervantes
saw them; there is no anachronism in his language; he put the Spanish
of Cervantes into the English of Shakespeare. Shakespeare himself most
likely knew the book; he may have carried it home with him in his
saddle-bags to Stratford on one of his last journeys, and under the
mulberry tree at New Place joined hands with a kindred genius in its
pages.

But it was soon made plain to me that to hope for even a moderate
popularity for Shelton was vain. His fine old crusted English would, no
doubt, be relished by a minority, but it would be only by a minority.
His warmest admirers must admit that he is not a satisfactory
representative of Cervantes. His translation of the First Part was very
hastily made and was never revised by him. It has all the freshness and
vigour, but also a full measure of the faults, of a hasty production.
It is often very literal—barbarously literal frequently—but just as
often very loose. He had evidently a good colloquial knowledge of
Spanish, but apparently not much more. It never seems to occur to him
that the same translation of a word will not suit in every case.

It is often said that we have no satisfactory translation of “Don
Quixote.” To those who are familiar with the original, it savours of
truism or platitude to say so, for in truth there can be no thoroughly
satisfactory translation of “Don Quixote” into English or any other
language. It is not that the Spanish idioms are so utterly
unmanageable, or that the untranslatable words, numerous enough no
doubt, are so superabundant, but rather that the sententious terseness
to which the humour of the book owes its flavour is peculiar to
Spanish, and can at best 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. It has been asserted that the Second, published in
1620, is not the work of Shelton, but there is nothing to support the
assertion save the fact that it has less spirit, less of what we
generally understand by “go,” about it than the first, which would be
only natural if the first were the work of a young man writing
_currente calamo_, and the second that of a middle-aged man writing for
a bookseller. On the other hand, it is closer and more literal, the
style is the same, the very same translations, or mistranslations,
occur in it, and it is extremely unlikely that a new translator would,
by suppressing his name, have allowed Shelton to carry off the credit.

In 1687 John Phillips, Milton’s nephew, produced a “Don Quixote” “made
English,” he says, “according to the humour of our modern language.”
His “Quixote” is not so much a translation as a travesty, and a
travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost
unexampled even in the literature of that day.

Ned Ward’s “Life and Notable Adventures of Don Quixote, merrily
translated into Hudibrastic Verse” (1700), can scarcely be reckoned a
translation, but it serves to show the light in which “Don Quixote” was
regarded at the time.

A further illustration may be found in the version published in 1712 by
Peter Motteux, who had then recently combined tea-dealing with
literature. It is described as “translated from the original by several
hands,” but if so all Spanish flavour has entirely evaporated under the
manipulation of the several hands. The flavour that it has, on the
other hand, is distinctly Franco-cockney. Anyone who compares it
carefully with the original will have little doubt that it is a
concoction from Shelton and the French of Filleau de Saint Martin, eked
out by borrowings from Phillips, whose mode of treatment it adopts. It
is, to be sure, more decent and decorous, but it treats “Don Quixote”
in the same fashion as a comic book that cannot be made too comic.

To attempt to improve the humour of “Don Quixote” by an infusion of
cockney flippancy and facetiousness, as Motteux’s operators did, is not
merely an impertinence like larding a sirloin of prize beef, but an
absolute falsification of the spirit of the book, and it is a proof of
the uncritical way in which “Don Quixote” is generally read that this
worse than worthless translation—worthless as failing to represent,
worse than worthless as misrepresenting—should have been favoured as it
has been.

It had the effect, however, of bringing out a translation undertaken
and executed in a very different spirit, that of Charles Jervas, the
portrait painter, and friend of Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay. Jervas
has been allowed little credit for his work, indeed it may be said
none, for it is known to the world in general as Jarvis’s. It was not
published until after his death, and the printers gave the name
according to the current pronunciation of the day. It has been the most
freely used and the most freely abused of all the translations. It has
seen far more editions than any 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, where among many true words about
Shelton, Stevens, and Motteux, he rashly and unjustly charges Shelton
with having translated not from the Spanish, but from the Italian
version of Franciosini, which did not appear until ten years after
Shelton’s first volume. A suspicion of incompetence, too, seems to have
attached to him because he was by profession a painter and a mediocre
one (though he has given us the best portrait we have of Swift), and
this may have been strengthened by Pope’s remark that he “translated
‘Don Quixote’ without understanding Spanish.” He has been also charged
with borrowing from Shelton, whom he disparaged. It is true that in a
few difficult or obscure passages he has followed Shelton, and gone
astray with him; but for one case of this sort, there are fifty where
he is right and Shelton wrong. As for Pope’s dictum, anyone who
examines Jervas’s version carefully, side by side with the original,
will see that he was a sound Spanish scholar, incomparably a better one
than Shelton, except perhaps in mere colloquial Spanish. He was, in
fact, an honest, faithful, and painstaking translator, and he has left
a version which, whatever its shortcomings may be, is singularly free
from errors and mistranslations.

The charge against it is that it is stiff, dry—“wooden” in a word,—and
no one can deny that there is a foundation for it. But it may be
pleaded for Jervas that a good deal of this rigidity is due to his
abhorrence of the light, flippant, jocose style of his predecessors. He
was one of the few, very few, translators that have shown any
apprehension of the unsmiling gravity which is the essence of Quixotic
humour; it seemed to him a crime to bring Cervantes forward smirking
and grinning at his own good things, and to this may be attributed in a
great measure the ascetic abstinence from everything savouring of
liveliness which is the characteristic of his translation. In most
modern editions, it should be observed, his style has been smoothed and
smartened, but without any reference to the original Spanish, so that
if he has been made to read more agreeably he has also been robbed of
his chief merit of fidelity.

Smollett’s version, published in 1755, may be almost counted as one of
these. At any rate it is plain that in its construction Jervas’s
translation was very freely drawn upon, and very little or probably no
heed 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 impudent
imposture, being nothing more than Motteux’s version with a few of the
words, here and there, artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot’s (1774) was
only an abridgment like Florian’s, but not so skilfully executed; and
the version published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her
brother’s plates, was merely a patchwork production made out of former
translations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield’s, it would be in every
sense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had not
even seen it when the present undertaking was proposed to me, and since
then I may say vidi tantum, having for obvious reasons resisted the
temptation which Mr. Duffield’s reputation and comely volumes hold out
to every lover of Cervantes.

From the foregoing history of our translations of “Don Quixote,” it
will be seen that there are a good many people who, provided they get
the mere narrative with its full complement of facts, incidents, and
adventures served up to them in a form that amuses them, care very
little whether that form is the one in which Cervantes originally
shaped his ideas. On the other hand, it is clear that there are many
who desire to have not merely the story he tells, but the story as he
tells it, so far at least as differences of idiom and circumstances
permit, and who will give a preference to the conscientious translator,
even though he may have acquitted himself somewhat awkwardly.

But after all there is no real antagonism between the two classes;
there is no reason why what pleases the one should not please the
other, or why a translator who makes it his aim to treat “Don Quixote”
with the respect due to a great classic, should not be as acceptable
even to the careless reader as the one who treats it as a famous old
jest-book. It is not a question of caviare to the general, or, if it
is, the fault rests with him who makes so. The method by which
Cervantes won the ear of the Spanish people ought, mutatis mutandis, to
be equally effective with the great majority of English readers. At any
rate, even if there are readers to whom it is a matter of indifference,
fidelity to the method is as much a part of the translator’s duty as
fidelity to the matter. If he can please all parties, so much the
better; but his first duty is to those who look to him for as faithful
a representation of his author as it is in his power to give them,
faithful to the letter so long as fidelity is practicable, faithful to
the spirit so far as he can make it.

My purpose here is not to dogmatise on the rules of translation, but to
indicate those I have followed, or at least tried to the best of my
ability to follow, in the present instance. One which, it seems to me,
cannot be too rigidly followed in translating “Don Quixote,” is to
avoid everything that savours of affectation. The book itself is,
indeed, in one sense a protest against it, and no man abhorred it more
than Cervantes. For this reason, I think, any temptation to use
antiquated or obsolete language should be resisted. It is after all an
affectation, and one for which there is no warrant or excuse. Spanish
has probably undergone less change since the seventeenth century than
any language in Europe, and by far the greater and certainly the best
part of “Don Quixote” differs but little in language from the
colloquial Spanish of the present day. Except in the tales and Don
Quixote’s speeches, the translator who uses the simplest and plainest
everyday language will almost always be the one who approaches nearest
to the original.

Seeing that the story of “Don Quixote” and all its characters and
incidents have now been for more than two centuries and a half familiar
as household words in English mouths, it seems to me that the old
familiar names and phrases should not be changed without good reason.
Of course a translator who holds that “Don Quixote” should receive the
treatment a great classic deserves, will feel himself bound by the
injunction laid upon the Morisco in Chap. IX not to omit or add
anything.




CERVANTES


Four generations had laughed over “Don Quixote” before it occurred to
anyone to ask, who and what manner of man was this Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra whose name is on the title-page; and it was too late for a
satisfactory answer to the question when it was proposed to add a life
of the author to the London edition published at Lord Carteret’s
instance in 1738. All traces of the personality of Cervantes had by
that time disappeared. Any floating traditions that may once have
existed, transmitted from men who had known him, had long since died
out, and of other record there was none; for the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were incurious as to “the men of the time,” a
reproach against which the nineteenth has, at any rate, secured itself,
if it has produced no Shakespeare or Cervantes. All that Mayans y
Siscar, to whom the task was entrusted, or any of those who followed
him, Rios, Pellicer, or Navarrete, could do was to eke out the few
allusions Cervantes makes to himself in his various prefaces with such
pieces of documentary evidence bearing upon his life as they could
find.

This, however, has been done by the last-named biographer to such good
purpose that he has superseded all predecessors. Thoroughness is the
chief characteristic of Navarrete’s work. Besides sifting, testing, and
methodising with rare patience and judgment what had been previously
brought to light, he left, as the saying is, no stone unturned under
which anything to illustrate his subject might possibly be found.
Navarrete has done all that industry and acumen could do, and it is no
fault of his if he has not given us what we want. What Hallam says of
Shakespeare may be applied to the almost parallel case of Cervantes:
“It is not the register of his baptism, or the draft of his will, or
the orthography of his name that we seek; no letter of his writing, no
record of his conversation, no character of him drawn ... by a
contemporary has been produced.”

It is only natural, therefore, that the biographers of Cervantes,
forced to make brick without straw, should have recourse largely to
conjecture, and that conjecture should in some instances come by
degrees to take the place of established fact. All that I propose to do
here is to separate what is matter of fact from what is matter of
conjecture, and leave it to the reader’s judgment to decide whether the
data justify the inference or not.

The men whose names by common consent stand in the front rank of
Spanish literature, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderon,
Garcilaso de la Vega, the Mendozas, Gongora, were all men of ancient
families, and, curiously, all, except the last, of families that traced
their origin to the same mountain district in the North of Spain. The
family of Cervantes is commonly said to have been of Galician origin,
and unquestionably it was in possession of lands in Galicia at a very
early date; but I think the balance of the evidence tends to show that
the “solar,” the original site of the family, was at Cervatos in the
north-west corner of Old Castile, close to the junction of Castile,
Leon, and the Asturias. As it happens, there is a complete history of
the Cervantes family from the tenth century down to the seventeenth
extant under the title of “Illustrious Ancestry, Glorious Deeds, and
Noble Posterity of the Famous Nuno Alfonso, Alcaide of Toledo,” written
in 1648 by the industrious genealogist Rodrigo Mendez Silva, who
availed himself of a manuscript genealogy by Juan de Mena, the poet
laureate and historiographer of John II.

The origin of the name Cervantes is curious. Nuno Alfonso was almost as
distinguished in the struggle against the Moors in the reign of Alfonso
VII as the Cid had been half a century before in that of Alfonso VI,
and was rewarded by divers grants of land in the neighbourhood of
Toledo. On one of his acquisitions, about two leagues from the city, he
built himself a castle which he called Cervatos, because “he was lord
of the solar of Cervatos in the Montana,” as the mountain region
extending from the Basque Provinces to Leon was always called. At his
death in battle in 1143, the castle passed by his will to his son
Alfonso Munio, who, as territorial or local surnames were then coming
into vogue in place of the simple patronymic, took the additional name
of Cervatos. His eldest son Pedro succeeded him in the possession of
the castle, and followed his example 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 the
ruined castle that crowns the hill above the spot where the bridge of
Alcántara spans the gorge of the Tagus, and with its broken outline and
crumbling walls makes such an admirable pendant to the square solid
Alcazar towering over the city roofs on the opposite side. It was
built, or as some say restored, by Alfonso VI shortly after his
occupation of Toledo in 1085, and called by him San Servando after a
Spanish martyr, a name subsequently modified into San Servan (in which
form it appears in the “Poem of the Cid”), San Servantes, and San
Cervantes: with regard to which last the “Handbook for Spain” warns its
readers against the supposition 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 on the 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 with the author of “Don Quixote,” for it
is in fact these old walls that have given to Spain the name she is
proudest of to-day. Gonzalo, above mentioned, it may be readily
conceived, did not relish the appropriation by his brother of a name to
which he himself had an equal right, for though nominally taken from
the castle, it was in reality derived from the ancient territorial
possession of the family, and as a set-off, and to distinguish himself
(diferenciarse) from his brother, he took as a surname the name of the
castle on the bank of the Tagus, in the building of which, according to
a family tradition, his great-grandfather had a share.

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 the service of Church and State. Gonzalo himself, and apparently a
son of his, followed Ferdinand III in the great campaign of 1236-48
that gave Cordova and Seville to Christian Spain and penned up the
Moors in the kingdom of Granada, and his descendants intermarried with
some of the noblest families of the Peninsula and numbered among them
soldiers, magistrates, and Church dignitaries, including at least two
cardinal-archbishops.

Of the line that settled in Andalusia, Deigo de Cervantes, Commander of
the Order of Santiago, married Juana Avellaneda, daughter of Juan Arias
de Saavedra, and had several sons, of whom one was Gonzalo Gomez,
Corregidor of Jerez and ancestor of the Mexican and Columbian branches
of the family; and another, Juan, whose son Rodrigo married Doña Leonor
de Cortinas, and by her had four children, Rodrigo, Andrea, Luisa, and
Miguel, our author.

The pedigree of Cervantes is not without its bearing on “Don Quixote.”
A man who could look back upon an ancestry of genuine knights-errant
extending from well-nigh the time of Pelayo to the siege of Granada was
likely to have a strong feeling on the subject of the sham chivalry of
the romances. It gives a point, too, to what he says in more than one
place about families that have once been great and have tapered away
until they have come to nothing, like a pyramid. It was the case of his
own.

He was born at Alcalá de Henares and baptised in the church of Santa
Maria Mayor on the 9th of October, 1547. Of his boyhood and youth we
know nothing, 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 de Rueda and his company set up their rude plank stage in the
plaza and acted the rustic farces which he himself afterwards took as
the model of his interludes. This first glimpse, however, is a
significant one, for it shows the early development of that love of the
drama which exercised such an influence on his life and seems to have
grown stronger as he grew older, and of which this very preface,
written only a few months before his death, is such a striking proof.
He gives us to understand, too, that he 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 of miscellaneous reading, romances
of chivalry, ballads, popular poetry, chronicles, for which he had no
time or opportunity except in the first twenty years of his life; and
his misquotations and mistakes in matters of detail are always, it may
be noticed, those of a man recalling the reading of his boyhood.

Other things besides the drama were in their infancy when Cervantes was
a boy. The period of his boyhood was in every way a transition period
for Spain. The old chivalrous Spain had passed away. The new Spain was
the mightiest power the world had seen since the Roman Empire and it
had not yet been called upon to pay the price of its greatness. By the
policy of Ferdinand and Ximenez the sovereign had been made absolute,
and the Church and Inquisition adroitly adjusted to keep him so. The
nobles, who had always resisted absolutism as strenuously as they had
fought the Moors, had been divested of all political power, a like fate
had befallen the cities, the free constitutions of Castile and Aragon
had been swept away, and the only function that remained to the Cortés
was that of granting money at the King’s dictation.

The transition extended to literature. Men who, like Garcilaso de la
Vega and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, followed the Italian wars, had
brought back from Italy the products of the post-Renaissance
literature, which took root and flourished and even threatened to
extinguish the native growths. Damon and Thyrsis, Phyllis and Chloe had
been fairly naturalised in Spain, together with all the devices of
pastoral poetry for investing with an air of novelty the idea of a
dispairing shepherd and inflexible shepherdess. As a set-off against
this, the old historical and traditional ballads, and the true
pastorals, the songs and ballads of peasant life, were being collected
assiduously and printed in the cancioneros that succeeded one another
with increasing rapidity. But the most notable consequence, perhaps, of
the spread of printing was the flood of romances of chivalry that had
continued to pour from the press ever since Garci Ordoñez de Montalvo
had resuscitated “Amadis of Gaul” at the beginning of the century.

For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no
better spot in Spain than Alcalá de Henares in the middle of the
sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town,
something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether
a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcalá the
traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and
medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the
town itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light
literature, and as a producer of books Alcalá was already beginning to
compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca and
Seville.

A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings
might, no doubt, have been often seen in the streets of Alcalá at that
time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a book-shop where
the 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 one
of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous
panoply and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved
to embellish the title-pages of their folios. If the boy was the father
of the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was
lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the
true genesis of “Don Quixote.”

For his more solid education, we are told, he went to Salamanca. But
why Rodrigo de Cervantes, who was very poor, should have sent his son
to a university a hundred and fifty miles away when he had one at his
own door, would be a puzzle, if we had any reason for supposing that he
did so. The only evidence is a vague statement by Professor Tomas
Gonzalez, that he once saw an old entry of the matriculation of a
Miguel de Cervantes. This does not appear to have been ever seen again;
but even if it had, and if the date corresponded, it would prove
nothing, as there were at least two other Miguels born about the middle
of the century; one of them, moreover, a Cervantes Saavedra, a cousin,
no doubt, who was a source of great embarrassment to the biographers.

That he was a student neither at Salamanca nor at Alcalá is best proved
by 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 college
joke,” to show that he remembered days that most men remember best. All
that we know positively about his education is that Juan Lopez de
Hoyos, a professor of humanities and belles-lettres of some eminence,
calls him his “dear and beloved pupil.” This was in a little collection
of verses by different hands on the death of Isabel de Valois, second
queen of Philip II., published by the professor in 1569, to which
Cervantes contributed four pieces, including an elegy, and an epitaph
in the form of a sonnet. It is only by a rare chance that a “Lycidas”
finds its way into a volume of this sort, and Cervantes was no Milton.
His verses are no worse than such things usually are; so much, at
least, may be said for them.

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,
afterwards Cardinal, Acquaviva had been sent at the end of 1568 to
Philip II. by the Pope on a mission, partly of condolence, partly
political, and on his return to Rome, which was somewhat brusquely
expedited by the King, he took Cervantes with him as his camarero
(chamberlain), the office he himself held in the Pope’s household. The
post would no doubt have led to advancement at the Papal Court had
Cervantes retained it, but in the summer of 1570 he resigned it and
enlisted as a private soldier in Captain Diego Urbina’s company,
belonging to Don Miguel de Moncada’s regiment, but at that time forming
a part of the command of Marc Antony Colonna. What impelled him to this
step we know not, whether it was distaste for the career before him, or
purely military enthusiasm. It may well 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 combined fleets at Lepanto, belong
rather to the history of Europe than to the life of Cervantes. He was
one of those that sailed from Messina, in September 1571, under the
command of Don John of Austria; but on the morning of the 7th of
October, when the Turkish fleet was sighted, he was lying below ill
with fever. At the news that the enemy was in sight he rose, and, in
spite of the remonstrances of his comrades and superiors, insisted on
taking his post, saying he preferred death in the service of God and
the King to health. His galley, the _Marquesa_, was in the thick of the
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 after the
battle, according to Navarrete, he had an interview with the
commander-in-chief, Don John, who was making a personal inspection of
the wounded, 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, that
with youth, a vigorous frame, and as cheerful and buoyant a temperament
as ever invalid had, he was seven months in hospital at Messina before
he was discharged. He came out with his left hand permanently disabled;
he had 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
absolutely unfit him for service, and in April 1572 he joined Manuel
Ponce de Leon’s company of Lope de Figueroa’s regiment, in which, it
seems probable, his brother Rodrigo was serving, and shared in the
operations of the next three years, including the capture of the
Goletta and Tunis. Taking advantage of the lull which followed the
recapture of these places by the Turks, he obtained leave to return to
Spain, and sailed from Naples in September 1575 on board the _Sun_
galley, in company with his brother Rodrigo, Pedro Carrillo de Quesada,
late Governor of the Goletta, and some others, and furnished with
letters from Don John of Austria and the Duke of Sesa, the Viceroy of
Sicily, recommending him to the King for the command of a company, on
account of his services; a _dono infelice_ as events proved. On the
26th they fell in with a squadron of Algerine galleys, and after a
stout resistance were overpowered and carried into Algiers.

By means of a ransomed fellow-captive the brothers contrived to inform
their family of their condition, and the poor people at Alcalá at once
strove to raise the ransom money, the father disposing of all he
possessed, and the two sisters giving up their marriage portions. But
Dali Mami had found on Cervantes the letters addressed to the King by
Don John and the Duke of Sesa, and, concluding that his prize must be a
person of great consequence, when the money came he refused it
scornfully as being altogether insufficient. The owner of Rodrigo,
however, was more easily satisfied; ransom was accepted in his case,
and it was arranged between the brothers that he should return to Spain
and procure a vessel in which he was to come back to Algiers and take
off Miguel and as many of their comrades as possible. This was not the
first attempt to escape that Cervantes had made. Soon after the
commencement of his captivity he induced 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 Moor who had agreed to act as their
guide deserted them, and they had no choice but to return. The second
attempt was more disastrous. In a garden outside the city on the
sea-shore, he constructed, with the help of the gardener, a Spaniard, a
hiding-place, to which he brought, one by one, fourteen of his
fellow-captives, keeping them there in secrecy for several months, and
supplying them with food through a renegade known as El Dorador, “the
Gilder.” How he, a captive himself, contrived to do all this, is one of
the mysteries of the story. Wild as the project may appear, it was very
nearly successful. The vessel procured by Rodrigo made its appearance
off the coast, and under cover of night was proceeding to take off the
refugees, when the crew were alarmed by a passing fishing boat, and
beat a hasty retreat. On renewing the attempt shortly afterwards, they,
or a portion of them at least, were taken prisoners, and just as the
poor fellows in the garden were exulting in the thought that in a few
moments more freedom would be within their grasp, they found themselves
surrounded by Turkish troops, horse and foot. The Dorador had revealed
the whole scheme to the Dey Hassan.

When Cervantes saw what had befallen them, he charged his companions to
lay all the blame upon him, and as they were being bound he declared
aloud that the whole plot was of his contriving, and that nobody else
had any share in it. Brought before the Dey, he said the same. He was
threatened with impalement and with torture; and as cutting off ears
and noses were playful freaks with the Algerines, it may be conceived
what their tortures were like; but nothing could make him swerve from
his original statement that he and he alone was responsible. The upshot
was that the unhappy gardener was hanged by his master, and the
prisoners taken possession of by the Dey, who, however, afterwards
restored most of them to their masters, but kept Cervantes, paying Dali
Mami 500 crowns for him. He felt, no doubt, that a man of such
resource, energy, and daring, was too dangerous a piece of property to
be left in private hands; and he had him heavily ironed and lodged in
his own prison. If he thought that by these means he could break the
spirit or shake the resolution of his prisoner, he was soon undeceived,
for Cervantes contrived before long to despatch a letter to the
Governor of Oran, entreating him to send him someone that could be
trusted, to enable him and three other gentlemen, fellow-captives of
his, to make their escape; intending evidently to renew his first
attempt with a more trustworthy guide. Unfortunately the Moor who
carried the letter was stopped just outside Oran, and the letter being
found upon him, he was sent back to Algiers, where by the order of the
Dey he was promptly impaled as a warning to others, while Cervantes was
condemned to receive two thousand blows of the stick, a number which
most likely would have deprived the world 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 than
before, for nearly two years passed before he made another attempt.
This time his plan was to purchase, by the aid of a Spanish renegade
and two Valencian merchants resident in Algiers, an armed vessel in
which he and about sixty of the leading captives were to make their
escape; but just as they were about to put it into execution one Doctor
Juan Blanco de Paz, an ecclesiastic and a compatriot, informed the Dey
of the plot. Cervantes by force of character, by his self-devotion, by
his untiring energy and his exertions to lighten the lot of his
companions in misery, had endeared himself to all, and become the
leading spirit in the captive colony, and, incredible as it may seem,
jealousy of his influence and the esteem in which he was held, moved
this man to compass his destruction by a cruel death. The merchants
finding that the Dey knew all, and fearing that Cervantes under torture
might make disclosures that would imperil their own lives, tried to
persuade him to slip away on board a vessel that was on the point of
sailing for Spain; but he told them they had nothing to fear, for no
tortures would make him compromise anybody, and he went at once and
gave himself up to the Dey.

As before, the Dey tried to force him to name his accomplices.
Everything was made ready for his immediate execution; the halter was
put round his neck and his hands tied behind him, but all that could be
got from him was that he himself, with the help of four gentlemen who
had since left Algiers, had arranged the whole, and that the sixty who
were to accompany him were not to know anything of it until the last
moment. Finding he could make nothing of him, the Dey sent him back to
prison more heavily ironed than before.

The poverty-stricken Cervantes family had been all this time trying
once more to raise the ransom money, and at last a sum of three hundred
ducats was got together and entrusted to the Redemptorist Father Juan
Gil, who was about to sail for Algiers. The Dey, however, demanded more
than double the sum offered, and as his term of office had expired and
he was about to sail for Constantinople, taking all his slaves with
him, the case of Cervantes was critical. He was already on board
heavily ironed, when the Dey at length agreed to reduce his demand by
one-half, and Father Gil by borrowing was able to make up the amount,
and on September 19, 1580, after a captivity of five years all but a
week, Cervantes was at last set free. Before long he discovered that
Blanco de Paz, who claimed to be an officer of the Inquisition, was now
concocting on false evidence a charge of misconduct to be brought
against him on his return to Spain. To checkmate him Cervantes drew up
a series of twenty-five questions, covering the whole period of his
captivity, upon which he requested Father Gil to take the depositions
of credible witnesses before a notary. Eleven witnesses taken from
among the principal captives in Algiers deposed to all the facts above
stated and to a great deal more besides. There is something touching in
the admiration, love, and gratitude we see struggling to find
expression in the formal language of the notary, as they testify one
after another to the good deeds of Cervantes, how he comforted and
helped the weak-hearted, how he kept up their 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 for
Portugal to support Philip’s claim to the crown, and utterly penniless
now, had no choice but to rejoin it. He was in the expeditions to the
Azores in 1582 and the following year, and on the conclusion of the war
returned to Spain in the autumn of 1583, bringing with him the
manuscript of his pastoral romance, the “Galatea,” and probably also,
to judge by internal evidence, that of the first portion of “Persiles
and Sigismunda.” He also brought back with him, his biographers assert,
an infant daughter, the offspring of an amour, as some of them with
great circumstantiality inform us, with a Lisbon lady of noble birth,
whose name, however, as well as that of the street she lived in, they
omit to mention. The sole foundation for all this is that in 1605 there
certainly was living in the family of Cervantes a Doña Isabel de
Saavedra, who is described in an official document as his natural
daughter, and then twenty years of age.

With his crippled left hand promotion in the army was hopeless, now
that Don John was dead and he had no one to press his claims and
services, and for a man drawing on to forty life in the ranks was a
dismal prospect; he had already a certain reputation as a poet; he made
up his mind, therefore, to cast his lot with literature, and for a
first venture committed his “Galatea” to the press. It was published,
as Salva y Mallen shows conclusively, at Alcalá, his own birth-place,
in 1585 and no doubt helped to make his name more widely known, but
certainly did not do him much good in any other way.

While it was going through the press, he married Doña Catalina de
Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano, a lady of Esquivias near Madrid, and
apparently a friend of the family, who brought him a fortune which may
possibly have served to keep the wolf from the door, but if so, that
was all. The drama had by this time outgrown market-place stages and
strolling companies, and with his old love for it he naturally turned
to it for a congenial employment. In about three years he wrote twenty
or thirty plays, which he tells us were performed without any throwing
of cucumbers or other missiles, and ran their course without any
hisses, outcries, or disturbance. In other words, his plays were not
bad enough to be hissed off the stage, but not good enough to hold
their own upon it. Only two of them have been preserved, but as they
happen to be two of the seven or eight he mentions with complacency, we
may assume they are favourable specimens, and no one who reads the
“Numancia” and the “Trato de Argel” will feel any surprise that they
failed as acting dramas. Whatever merits they may have, whatever
occasional they may show, they are, as regards construction, incurably
clumsy. How completely they failed is manifest from the fact that with
all his sanguine temperament and indomitable perseverance he was unable
to maintain the struggle to gain a livelihood as a dramatist for more
than three years; nor was the rising popularity of Lope the cause, as
is often said, notwithstanding his own words to the contrary. When Lope
began to write for the stage is uncertain, but it was certainly after
Cervantes went to Seville.

Among the “Nuevos Documentos” printed by Señor Asensio y Toledo is one
dated 1592, and curiously characteristic of Cervantes. It is an
agreement with one Rodrigo Osorio, a manager, who was to accept six
comedies at fifty ducats (about 6l.) apiece, not to be paid in any case
unless it appeared on representation that the said comedy was one of
the best that had ever been represented in Spain. The test does not
seem to have been ever applied; perhaps it was sufficiently apparent to
Rodrigo Osorio that the comedies were not among the best that had ever
been represented. Among the correspondence of Cervantes there might
have been found, no doubt, 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 in
honour of the canonisation of St. Jacinto, when his composition won the
first prize, three silver spoons. The year before this he had been
appointed a collector of revenues for the kingdom of Granada. In order
to remit the money he had collected more conveniently to the treasury,
he entrusted it to a merchant, who failed and absconded; and as the
bankrupt’s assets were insufficient to cover the whole, he was sent to
prison at Seville in September 1597. The balance against him, however,
was a small one, about 26l., and on giving security for it he was
released 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
that abound in the pages of “Don Quixote:” the Benedictine monks with
spectacles and sunshades, mounted on their tall mules; the strollers in
costume bound for the next village; the barber with his basin on his
head, on his way to bleed a patient; the recruit with his breeches in
his bundle, tramping along the road singing; the reapers gathered in
the venta gateway listening to “Felixmarte of Hircania” read out to
them; and those little Hogarthian touches that he so well knew how to
bring in, the ox-tail hanging up with the landlord’s comb stuck in it,
the wine-skins at the bed-head, and those notable examples of hostelry
art, Helen going off in high spirits on Paris’s arm, and Dido on the
tower dropping tears as big as walnuts. Nay, it may well be that on
those journeys into remote regions he came across now and then a
specimen of the pauper gentleman, with his lean hack and his greyhound
and his books of chivalry, dreaming away his life in happy ignorance
that the world had changed since his great-grandfather’s old helmet was
new. But it was in Seville that he found out his true vocation, though
he himself would not by any means have admitted it to be so. It was
there, in Triana, that he was first tempted to try his hand at drawing
from life, and first brought his humour into play in the exquisite
little sketch of “Rinconete y Cortadillo,” the germ, in more ways than
one, of “Don Quixote.”

Where and when that was written, we cannot tell. After his imprisonment
all trace of Cervantes in his official capacity disappears, from which
it may be inferred that he was not reinstated. That he was still in
Seville in November 1598 appears from a satirical sonnet of his on the
elaborate catafalque erected to testify the grief of the city at the
death of Philip II, but from this up to 1603 we have no clue to his
movements. The words in the preface to the First Part of “Don Quixote”
are generally held to be conclusive that he conceived the idea of the
book, and wrote the beginning of it at least, in a prison, and that he
may have done so is extremely likely.

There is a tradition that Cervantes read some portions of his work to a
select audience at the Duke of Bejar’s, which may have helped to make
the book known; but the obvious conclusion is that the First Part of
“Don Quixote” lay on his hands some time before he could find a
publisher bold enough to undertake a venture of so novel a character;
and so little faith 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 for Aragon or Portugal, contenting himself with that for
Castile. The printing was finished in December, and the book came out
with the new year, 1605. It is often said that “Don Quixote” was at
first received coldly. The facts show just the contrary. No sooner was
it in the hands of the public than preparations were made to issue
pirated editions at Lisbon and Valencia, and to bring out a second
edition with the additional copyrights for Aragon and Portugal, which
he secured in February.

No doubt it was received with something more than coldness by certain
sections of the community. Men of wit, taste, and discrimination among
the aristocracy gave it a hearty welcome, but the aristocracy in
general were not likely to relish a book that turned their favourite
reading into ridicule and laughed at so many of their favourite ideas.
The dramatists who gathered round Lope as their leader regarded
Cervantes as their common enemy, and it is plain that he was equally
obnoxious to the other clique, the culto poets who had Gongora for
their chief. Navarrete, who knew nothing of the letter above mentioned,
tries hard to show that the relations between Cervantes and Lope were
of a very friendly sort, as indeed they were until “Don Quixote” was
written. Cervantes, indeed, to the last generously and manfully
declared his admiration of Lope’s powers, his unfailing invention, and
his marvellous fertility; but in the preface of the First Part of “Don
Quixote” and in the verses of “Urganda the Unknown,” and one or two
other places, there are, if we read between the lines, sly hits at
Lope’s vanities and affectations that argue no personal good-will; and
Lope openly sneers at “Don Quixote” and Cervantes, and fourteen years
after his death gives him only a few lines of cold commonplace in the
“Laurel de Apolo,” that seem all the colder for the eulogies of a host
of nonentities whose names are found nowhere else.

In 1601 Valladolid was made the seat of the Court, and at the beginning
of 1603 Cervantes had been summoned thither in connection with the
balance due by him to the Treasury, which was still outstanding. He
remained at Valladolid, apparently supporting himself by agencies and
scrivener’s work of some sort; probably drafting petitions and drawing
up statements of claims to be presented to the Council, and the like.
So, at least, we gather from the depositions taken on the occasion of
the death of a gentleman, the victim of a street brawl, who had been
carried into the house in which he lived. In these he himself is
described as a man who wrote and transacted business, and it appears
that his household then consisted of his wife, the natural daughter
Isabel de Saavedra already mentioned, his sister Andrea, now a widow,
her daughter Constanza, a mysterious Magdalena de Sotomayor calling
herself his sister, for whom his biographers cannot account, and a
servant-maid.

Meanwhile “Don Quixote” had been growing in favour, and its author’s
name was now known beyond the Pyrenees. In 1607 an edition was printed
at Brussels. Robles, the Madrid publisher, found it necessary to meet
the demand by a third edition, the seventh in all, in 1608. The
popularity of the book in Italy was such that a Milan bookseller was
led to bring out an edition in 1610; and another was called for in
Brussels in 1611. It might naturally have been expected that, with such
proofs before him that he had hit the taste of the public, Cervantes
would have at once set about redeeming his rather vague promise of a
second volume.

But, to all appearance, nothing was farther from his thoughts. He had
still by him one or two short tales of the same vintage as those he had
inserted in “Don Quixote” and instead of continuing the adventures of
Don Quixote, he set to work to write more of these “Novelas Exemplares”
as he afterwards called them, with a view to making a book of them.

The novels were published in the summer of 1613, with a dedication to
the Conde de Lemos, the Maecenas of the day, and with one of those
chatty confidential prefaces Cervantes was so fond of. In this, eight
years and a half after the First Part of “Don Quixote” had appeared, we
get the first hint of a forthcoming Second Part. “You shall see
shortly,” he says, “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 the date to Sancho’s letter, he had barely one-half of
the book completed that time twelvemonth.

But more than poems, or pastorals, or novels, it was his dramatic
ambition that engrossed his thoughts. The same indomitable spirit that
kept him from despair in the bagnios of Algiers, and prompted him to
attempt the escape of himself and his comrades again and again, made
him persevere in spite of failure and discouragement in his efforts to
win the ear of the public as a dramatist. The temperament of Cervantes
was essentially 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. Nothing that the managers might say could persuade him that the
merits of his plays would not be recognised at last if they were only
given a fair chance. The old soldier of the Spanish Salamis was bent on
being the Aeschylus of Spain. He was to found a great national drama,
based on the true principles of art, that was to be the envy of all
nations; he was to drive from the stage the silly, childish plays, the
“mirrors of nonsense and models of folly” that were in vogue through
the cupidity of the managers and shortsightedness of the authors; he
was to correct and educate the public taste until it was ripe for
tragedies on the model of the Greek drama—like the “Numancia” for
instance—and comedies that would 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 of
the 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 a
father to “Don Quixote.” Never was great work so neglected by its
author. That it was written carelessly, hastily, and by fits and
starts, was not always his fault, but it seems clear he never read what
he sent to the press. He knew how the printers had blundered, but he
never took the trouble to correct them when the third edition was in
progress, as a man who really cared for the child of his brain would
have done. He appears to have regarded the book as little more than a
mere libro de entretenimiento, an amusing book, a thing, as he says in
the “Viaje,” “to divert the melancholy moody heart at any time or
season.” No doubt he had an affection for his hero, and was very proud
of Sancho Panza. It would have been strange indeed if he had not been
proud of the most humorous creation in all fiction. He was proud, too,
of the popularity and success of the book, and beyond measure
delightful is the naivete with which he shows his pride in a dozen
passages in the Second Part. But it was not the success he coveted. In
all probability he would have given all the success of “Don Quixote,”
nay, would have seen every copy of “Don Quixote” burned in the Plaza
Mayor, for one such success as Lope de Vega was enjoying on an average
once a week.

And so he went on, dawdling over “Don Quixote,” adding a chapter now
and again, 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 the rival of “Theagenes and Chariclea”—or finishing
off one of his darling comedies; and if Robles asked when “Don Quixote”
would be ready, the answer no doubt was: En breve—shortly, there was
time enough for that. At sixty-eight he was as full of life and hope
and plans for the future as a boy of eighteen.

Nemesis was coming, however. He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at
his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or
November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately
printed at Tarragona, and calling itself “Second Volume of the
Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso
Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas.” The last half of Chapter LIX
and most of the following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea
of the effect produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to
be lessened by the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself.
Had Avellaneda, in fact, been content with merely bringing out a
continuation to “Don Quixote,” Cervantes would have had no reasonable
grievance. His own intentions were expressed in the very vaguest
language at the end of the book; nay, in his last words, “forse altro
cantera con miglior plettro,” he seems actually to invite someone else
to continue the work, and he made no sign until eight years and a half
had gone by; by which time Avellaneda’s volume was no doubt written.

In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere
continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to
it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man
could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost
his hand, 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 for this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever
he may have been, it is clear that he was one of the dramatists of
Lope’s school, for he has the impudence to charge Cervantes with
attacking him as well as Lope in his criticism on the drama. His
identification has exercised the best critics and baffled all the
ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear on it. Navarrete
and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes knew who he was;
but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible
assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a mosquito in
the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language pronounces him
to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself, supports this
view and believes him, moreover, to have been an ecclesiastic, a
Dominican probably.

Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too
dull to reflect much. “Dull and dirty” will always be, I imagine, the
verdict of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a
poor plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given
him by Cervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns
for castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage,
and Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony;
all through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has
contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the
sixteenth century novellieri and without their sprightliness.

But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the
debt we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, “Don Quixote”
would have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if
Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he
would have left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the further
adventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It
is plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the
pastoral romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but
for Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more
likely that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume
would have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have
never made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with
Sancho to Barataria.

From the moment the book came into his hands he seems to have been
haunted by the fear that there might be more Avellanedas in the field,
and putting everything else aside, he set himself to finish off his
task and protect Don Quixote in the only way he could, by killing him.
The conclusion is no doubt a hasty and in some places clumsy piece of
work and the frequent repetition of the scolding administered to
Avellaneda becomes in the end rather wearisome; but it is, at any rate,
a conclusion and for that we must thank Avellaneda.

The new volume was ready for the press in February, but was not printed
till the very end of 1615, and during the interval Cervantes put
together the comedies and interludes he had written within the last few
years, and, as he adds plaintively, found no demand for among the
managers, and published them with a preface, worth the book it
introduces tenfold, in which he gives an account of the early Spanish
stage, and of his own attempts as a dramatist. It is needless to say
they were put forward by Cervantes in all good faith and full
confidence in their merits. The reader, however, was not to suppose
they were his last word or final effort in the drama, for he had in
hand a comedy called “Engano a los ojos,” about which, if he mistook
not, there would be no question.

Of this dramatic masterpiece the world has no opportunity of judging;
his health 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 us
that it was; but I must say I doubt it. It was a hard life, a life of
poverty, of incessant struggle, of toil ill paid, of disappointment,
but Cervantes carried within himself the antidote to all these evils.
His was not one of those light natures that rise above adversity merely
by virtue of their own buoyancy; it was in the fortitude of a high
spirit that he was proof against it. It is impossible to conceive
Cervantes giving way to despondency or prostrated by dejection. As for
poverty, it was with him a thing to be laughed over, and the only sigh
he ever allows to escape him is when he says, “Happy he to whom Heaven
has given a piece of bread 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 restless invention and his sanguine temperament, and
there will be reason enough to doubt whether his could have been a very
unhappy life. He who could take Cervantes’ distresses together with his
apparatus for enduring them would not make so bad a bargain, perhaps,
as far as happiness in life is concerned.

Of his burial-place nothing is known except that he was buried, in
accordance with his will, in the neighbouring convent of Trinitarian
nuns, of which it is supposed his daughter, Isabel de Saavedra, was an
inmate, and that a few years afterwards the nuns removed to another
convent, carrying their dead with them. But whether the remains of
Cervantes were included in the removal or not no one knows, and the
clue to their resting-place is now lost beyond all hope. This furnishes
perhaps the least defensible of the items in the charge of neglect
brought against his contemporaries. In some of the others there is a
good deal of exaggeration. To listen to most of his biographers one
would suppose that all Spain was in league not only against the man but
against his memory, or at least that it was insensible to his merits,
and left him to live in misery and die of want. To talk of his hard
life and unworthy employments in Andalusia is absurd. What had he done
to distinguish him from thousands of other struggling men earning a
precarious livelihood? True, he was a gallant soldier, who had been
wounded and had undergone captivity and suffering in his country’s
cause, but there were hundreds of others in the same case. He had
written a mediocre specimen of an insipid class of romance, and some
plays which manifestly did not comply with the primary condition of
pleasing: were the playgoers to patronise plays that did not amuse
them, because the author was to produce “Don Quixote” twenty years
afterwards?

The scramble for copies which, as we have seen, followed immediately on
the appearance of the book, does not look like general insensibility to
its merits. No doubt it was received coldly by some, but if a man
writes a book in ridicule of periwigs he must make his account with
being coldly received by the periwig wearers and hated by the whole
tribe of wigmakers. If Cervantes had the chivalry-romance readers, the
sentimentalists, the dramatists, and the poets of the period all
against him, it was because “Don Quixote” was what it was; and if the
general public did not come forward to make him comfortable for the
rest of his days, it is no more to be charged with neglect and
ingratitude than the English-speaking public that did not pay off
Scott’s liabilities. It did the best it could; it read his book and
liked it and bought it, and encouraged the bookseller to pay him well
for others.

It has been also made a reproach to Spain that she has erected no
monument to the man she is proudest of; no monument, that is to say, of
him; for the bronze statue in the little garden of the Plaza de las
Cortés, a fair work of art no doubt, and unexceptionable had it been
set up to the local poet in the market-place of some provincial town,
is not worthy of Cervantes or of Madrid. But what need has Cervantes of
“such weak witness of his name;” or what could a monument do in his
case except testify to the self-glorification of those who had put it
up? Si monumentum quoeris, circumspice. The nearest bookseller’s shop
will show what bathos there would be in a monument to the author of
“Don Quixote.”




‘DON QUIXOTE’


Nine editions of the First Part of “Don Quixote” had already appeared
before Cervantes died, thirty thousand copies in all, according to his
own estimate, and a tenth was printed at Barcelona the year after his
death. So large a number naturally supplied the demand for some time,
but by 1634 it appears to have been exhausted; and from that time down
to the present day the stream of editions has continued to flow rapidly
and regularly. The translations show still more clearly in what request
the book has been from the very outset. In seven years from the
completion of the work it had been translated into the four leading
languages of Europe. Except the Bible, in fact, no book has been so
widely diffused as “Don Quixote.” The “Imitatio Christi” may have been
translated into as many different languages, and perhaps “Robinson
Crusoe” and the “Vicar of Wakefield” into nearly as many, but in
multiplicity of translations and editions “Don Quixote” leaves them all
far behind.

Still more remarkable is the character of this wide diffusion. “Don
Quixote” has been thoroughly naturalised among people whose ideas about
knight-errantry, if they had any at all, were of the vaguest, who had
never seen or heard of a book of chivalry, who could not possibly feel
the humour of the burlesque or sympathise with the author’s purpose.
Another curious fact is that this, the most cosmopolitan book in the
world, is one of the most intensely national. “Manon Lescaut” is not
more thoroughly French, “Tom Jones” not more English, “Rob Roy” not
more Scotch, than “Don Quixote” is Spanish, in character, in ideas, in
sentiment, in local colour, in everything. What, then, is the secret of
this unparalleled popularity, increasing year by year for well-nigh
three centuries? One explanation, no doubt, is that of all the books in
the world, “Don Quixote” is the most catholic. There is something in it
for every sort of reader, young or old, sage or simple, high or low. As
Cervantes himself says with a touch of pride, “It is thumbed and read
and got by heart by people of all sorts; the children turn its leaves,
the young people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk
praise it.”

But it would be idle to deny that the ingredient which, more than its
humour, or its wisdom, or the fertility of invention or knowledge of
human nature it displays, has insured its success with the multitude,
is the 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 of
Fierabras, Don Quixote knocked over by the sails of the windmill,
Sancho tossed in the blanket, the mishaps and misadventures of master
and man, that were originally the great attraction, and perhaps are so
still to some 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, as little more than a queer droll book, full of laughable
incidents and absurd situations, very amusing, but not entitled to much
consideration or care. All the editions printed in Spain from 1637 to
1771, when the famous printer Ibarra took it up, were mere trade
editions, badly and carelessly printed on vile paper and got up in the
style of chap-books intended only for popular use, with, in most
instances, uncouth illustrations and clap-trap additions by the
publisher.

To England belongs the credit of having been the first country to
recognise the right of “Don Quixote” to better treatment than this. The
London edition of 1738, commonly called Lord Carteret’s from having
been suggested by him, was not a mere _édition de luxe_. It produced
“Don Quixote” in becoming form as regards paper and type, and
embellished with plates which, if not particularly happy as
illustrations, were at least well intentioned and well executed, but it
also aimed at correctness of text, a matter to which nobody except the
editors of the Valencia and Brussels editions had given even a passing
thought; and for a first attempt it was fairly successful, for though
some of its emendations are inadmissible, a good many of them have been
adopted by all subsequent editors.

The zeal of publishers, editors, and annotators brought about a
remarkable change of sentiment with regard to “Don Quixote.” A vast
number of its admirers began to grow ashamed of laughing over it. It
became almost a crime to treat it as a humorous book. The humour was
not entirely denied, but, according to the new view, it was rated as an
altogether secondary quality, a mere accessory, nothing more than the
stalking-horse under the presentation of which Cervantes shot his
philosophy or his satire, or whatever it was he meant to shoot; for on
this point opinions varied. All were agreed, however, that the object
he aimed at was not the books of chivalry. He said emphatically in the
preface to the First Part and in the last sentence of the Second, that
he had no other object in view than to discredit these books, and this,
to advanced criticism, made it clear that his object must have been
something else.

One theory was that the book was a kind of allegory, setting forth the
eternal struggle between the ideal and the real, between the spirit of
poetry and the spirit of prose; and perhaps German philosophy never
evolved a more ungainly or unlikely camel out of the depths of its
inner consciousness. Something of the antagonism, no doubt, is to be
found in “Don Quixote,” because it is to be found everywhere in life,
and Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in
which the never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and
Don Quixote would not be recognised as true to nature. In the stone
age, among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don
Quixotes and Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who
never could see the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could
see nothing else. But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself
to expound any such idea in two stout quarto volumes is to suppose
something not only very unlike the age in which he lived, but
altogether unlike Cervantes himself, who would have been the first to
laugh at an attempt of the sort made by anyone else.

The extraordinary influence of the romances of chivalry in his day is
quite enough to account for the genesis of the book. Some idea of the
prodigious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth
century may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the reader
bears in mind that only a portion of the romances belonging to by far
the largest group are enumerated. As to its effect upon the nation,
there is abundant evidence. From the time when the Amadises and
Palmerins began to grow popular down to the very end of the century,
there is a steady stream of invective, from men whose character and
position lend weight to their words, against the romances of chivalry
and the infatuation of their readers. Ridicule was the only besom to
sweep away that dust.

That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample
provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who
look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry
itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that,
thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no
greater one than saying that “Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away.”
In the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain’s
chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when
Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature,
it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the
free institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not
chivalry but 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 own countrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain
George Carleton, in his “Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713.” “Before
the appearance in the world of that labour of Cervantes,” he said, “it
was next to an impossibility for a man to walk the streets with any
delight or without danger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing
and curvetting before the windows of their mistresses, that a stranger
would have imagined the whole nation to have been nothing less than a
race of knight-errants. But after the world became a little acquainted
with that notable history, the man that was seen in that once
celebrated drapery was pointed at as a Don Quixote, and found himself
the jest of high and low. And I verily believe that to this, and this
only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spirit which has run through
all our councils for a century past, so little agreeable 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 moral
were that, in this world, true enthusiasm naturally leads to ridicule
and discomfiture. But it preaches nothing of the sort; its moral, so
far as it can be said to have one, is that the spurious enthusiasm that
is born of vanity and self-conceit, that is made an end in itself, not
a means to an end, that acts on mere impulse, regardless of
circumstances and consequences, is mischievous to its owner, and a very
considerable nuisance to the community at large. To those who cannot
distinguish between 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 so beautiful a sentiment as that “it is a hard case to
make slaves of those whom God and Nature made free,” should be
ungratefully pelted by the scoundrels his crazy philanthropy had let
loose on society; but to others of a more judicial cast it will be a
matter of regret that reckless self-sufficient enthusiasm is not
oftener requited in some such way for all the mischief it does in the
world.

A very slight examination of the structure of “Don Quixote” will
suffice to show that Cervantes had no deep design or elaborate plan in
his mind when he began the book. When he wrote those lines in which
“with a few strokes of a great master he sets before us the pauper
gentleman,” he had no idea of the goal to which his imagination was
leading him. There can be little doubt that all he contemplated was a
short tale to range with those he had already written, a tale setting
forth the ludicrous results that might be expected to follow the
attempt of a crazy gentleman to act the part of a knight-errant in
modern life.

It is plain, for one thing, that Sancho Panza did not enter into the
original scheme, for had Cervantes thought of him he certainly would
not have omitted him in his hero’s outfit, which he obviously meant to
be complete. Him we owe to the landlord’s chance remark in Chapter III
that knights seldom travelled without squires. To try to think of a Don
Quixote without Sancho Panza is like trying to think of a one-bladed
pair of scissors.

The story was written at first, like the others, without any division
and without the intervention of Cid Hamete Benengeli; and it seems not
unlikely that Cervantes had some intention of bringing Dulcinea, or
Aldonza Lorenzo, on the scene in person. It was probably the ransacking
of the Don’s library and the discussion on the books of chivalry that
first suggested it to him that his idea was capable of development.
What, if instead of a mere string of farcical misadventures, he were to
make his 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 clumsily
divided what he had written into chapters on the model of “Amadis,”
invented the fable of a mysterious Arabic manuscript, and set up Cid
Hamete Benengeli in imitation of the almost invariable practice of the
chivalry-romance authors, who were fond of tracing their books to some
recondite source. In working out the new ideas, he soon found the value
of Sancho Panza. Indeed, the keynote, not only to Sancho’s part, but to
the whole book, is struck in the first words Sancho utters when he
announces his intention of taking his ass with him. “About the ass,” we
are told, “Don Quixote hesitated a little, trying whether he could call
to 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 a glance, the stolid unconsciousness of Sancho and the
perplexity of his master, upon whose perception the incongruity has
just forced itself. This is Sancho’s mission throughout the book; he is
an unconscious Mephistopheles, always unwittingly making mockery of his
master’s aspirations, always exposing the fallacy of his ideas by some
unintentional ad absurdum, always bringing him back to the world of
fact and commonplace by force of sheer stolidity.

By the time Cervantes had got his volume of novels off his hands, and
summoned up resolution enough to set about the Second Part in earnest,
the case was very much altered. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had not
merely found favour, but had already become, what they have never since
ceased to be, veritable entities to the popular imagination. There was
no occasion for him now to interpolate extraneous matter; nay, his
readers told him plainly that what they wanted of him was more Don
Quixote and more 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 very different conditions, and the difference makes
itself manifest at once. Even in translation the style will be seen to
be far easier, more flowing, more natural, and more like that of a man
sure of himself and of his audience. Don Quixote and Sancho undergo a
change also. In the First Part, Don Quixote has no character or
individuality whatever. He is nothing more than a crazy representative
of the sentiments of the chivalry romances. In all that he says and
does he is simply repeating the lesson he has learned from his books;
and therefore, it is absurd to speak of him in the gushing strain of
the sentimental critics when they dilate upon his nobleness,
disinterestedness, dauntless courage, and so forth. It was the business
of a knight-errant to right wrongs, redress injuries, and succour the
distressed, and this, as a matter of course, he makes his business when
he takes up the part; a knight-errant was bound to be intrepid, and so
he feels bound to cast fear aside. Of all Byron’s melodious nonsense
about Don Quixote, the most nonsensical statement is that “’tis 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
was a point upon which he was anxious there should be no mistake, that
his hero’s madness is strictly confined to delusions on the subject of
chivalry, and that on every other subject he is discreto, one, in fact,
whose faculty of discernment is in perfect order. The advantage of this
is that he is enabled to make use of Don Quixote as a mouthpiece for
his own reflections, and so, without seeming to digress, allow himself
the relief of digression when he requires it, as freely as in a
commonplace book.

It is true the amount of individuality bestowed upon Don Quixote is not
very great. There are some natural touches of character about him, such
as his mixture of irascibility and placability, and his curious
affection for Sancho together with his impatience of the squire’s
loquacity and impertinence; but in the main, apart from his craze, he
is little more than a thoughtful, cultured gentleman, with instinctive
good taste and a great deal of shrewdness and originality of mind.

As to Sancho, it is plain, from the concluding words of the preface to
the First Part, that he was a favourite with his creator even before he
had been taken into favour by the public. An inferior genius, taking
him in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him
by making him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes
was too true an artist to spoil his work in this way. Sancho, when he
reappears, is the old Sancho with the old familiar features; but with a
difference; they have been brought out more distinctly, but at the same
time with a careful avoidance of anything like caricature; the outline
has been filled in where filling in was necessary, and, vivified by a
few touches of a master’s hand, Sancho stands before us as he might in
a character portrait by Velazquez. He is a much more important and
prominent figure in the Second Part than in the First; indeed, it is
his matchless mendacity about Dulcinea that to a great extent supplies
the action of the story.

His development in this respect is as remarkable as in any other. In
the First Part he displays a great natural gift of lying. His lies are
not of the highly imaginative sort that liars in fiction commonly
indulge in; like Falstaff’s, they resemble the father that begets them;
they are simple, homely, plump lies; plain working lies, in short. But
in the service of such a master as Don Quixote he develops rapidly, as
we see when he comes to palm off the three country wenches as Dulcinea
and her ladies in waiting. It is worth noticing how, flushed by his
success in this instance, he is tempted afterwards to try a flight
beyond his powers in his account of the journey on Clavileño.

In the Second Part it is the spirit rather than the incidents of the
chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments of
the sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the cave
of Montesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior romances,
and another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don Quixote’s
blind adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry love is either
a mere animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a coarse-minded man
would care to make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes’
humour the latter was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule.
Like everything else in these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of
the real sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is
probably due to the influence of those masters of hyperbole, the
Provencal poets. When a troubadour professed his readiness to obey his
lady in all things, he made it incumbent upon the next comer, if he
wished to avoid the imputation of tameness and commonplace, to declare
himself the slave of her will, which the next was compelled to cap by
some still stronger declaration; and so expressions of devotion went on
rising one above the other like biddings at an auction, and a
conventional language of gallantry and theory of love came into being
that in time permeated the literature of Southern Europe, and bore
fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of Beatrice and
Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found exponents
in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes deals with
in Don Quixote’s passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has he
carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the
background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very
existence we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote’s worship of her
virtues and charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still
more point to the caricature of the sentiment and language of the
romances.

One of the great merits of “Don Quixote,” and one of the qualities that
have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the
most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course,
points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which
do not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often
takes it for granted that an allusion will be generally understood
which is only intelligible to a few. For example, on many of his
readers in Spain, and most of his readers out of it, the significance
of his choice of a country for his hero is completely lost. It would be
going too far to say that no one can thoroughly comprehend “Don
Quixote” without having seen La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a glimpse
of La Mancha will give an insight into the meaning of Cervantes such as
no commentator can give. Of all the regions of Spain it is the last
that would suggest the idea of romance. Of all the dull central plateau
of the Peninsula it is the dullest tract. There is something impressive
about the grim solitudes of Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and
Old Castile are bald and dreary, they are studded with old cities
renowned in history and rich in relics of the past. But there is no
redeeming feature in the Manchegan landscape; it has all the sameness
of the desert without its dignity; the few towns and villages that
break its monotony are mean and commonplace, there is nothing venerable
about them, they have not even the picturesqueness of poverty; indeed,
Don Quixote’s own village, Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive
respectability in the prim regularity of its streets and houses;
everything is ignoble; the very windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest
of the windmill kind.

To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of “Don
Quixote of La Mancha” gave the key to the author’s meaning at once. La
Mancha as the knight’s country and scene of his chivalries is of a
piece with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a
squire, knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for
victims of oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don
Quixote’s world and the world he lived in, between things as he saw
them and things as they were.

It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole
humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by
the majority of those who have undertaken to interpret “Don Quixote.”
It has been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To
be sure, the great majority of the artists who illustrated “Don
Quixote” knew nothing whatever of Spain. To them a venta conveyed no
idea but the abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not
therefore do full justice to the humour of Don Quixote’s misconception
in taking it for a castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its
realities from his ideal. But even when better informed they seem to
have no apprehension of the full force of the discrepancy. Take, for
instance, Gustave Doré’s drawing of Don Quixote watching his armour in
the inn-yard. Whether or not the Venta de Quesada on the Seville road
is, as tradition maintains, the inn described in “Don Quixote,” beyond
all question it was just such an inn-yard as the one behind it that
Cervantes had in his mind’s eye, and it was on just such a rude stone
trough as that beside the primitive draw-well in the corner that he
meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour. Gustave Doré makes it an
elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever watered his mules at in the
corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby entirely misses the point
aimed at by Cervantes. It is the mean, prosaic, commonplace character
of all the surroundings and circumstances that gives a significance to
Don Quixote’s vigil and the ceremony that follows.

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 is the incongruity of Sancho in all his ways, words, and works, with
the ideas and aims of his master, quite as much as the wonderful
vitality and truth to nature of the character, that makes him the most
humorous creation in the whole range of fiction. That unsmiling gravity
of which Cervantes was the first great master, “Cervantes’ serious
air,” which sits naturally on Swift alone, perhaps, of later
humourists, is essential to this kind of humour, and here again
Cervantes has suffered at the hands of his interpreters. Nothing,
unless indeed the coarse buffoonery of Phillips, could be more out of
place in an attempt to represent Cervantes, than a flippant, would-be
facetious style, like that of Motteux’s version for example, or the
sprightly, jaunty air, French translators sometimes adopt. It is the
grave matter-of-factness of the narrative, and the apparent
unconsciousness of the author that he is saying anything ludicrous,
anything but the merest commonplace, that give its peculiar flavour to
the humour of Cervantes. His, in fact, is the exact 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 man Sterne” behind
him, watching you over his shoulder to see what effect he is producing.
Cervantes always leaves you alone with Don Quixote and Sancho. He and
Swift and the great humourists always keep themselves out of sight, or,
more properly speaking, never think about themselves at all, unlike our
latter-day school of humourists, who seem to have revived the old
horse-collar method, and try to raise a laugh by some grotesque
assumption of ignorance, imbecility, or bad taste.

It is true that to do full justice to Spanish humour in any other
language is well-nigh an impossibility. There is a natural gravity and
a sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that
make an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most
preposterous statement. This is what makes Sancho Panza’s drollery the
despair of the conscientious translator. Sancho’s curt comments can
never fall flat, but they lose half their flavour when transferred from
their native Castilian into any other medium. But if foreigners have
failed to do justice to the humour of Cervantes, they are no worse than
his own countrymen. Indeed, were it not for the Spanish peasant’s
relish of “Don Quixote,” one might be tempted to think that the great
humourist was not looked upon as a humourist at all in his own country.

The craze of Don Quixote seems, in some instances, to have communicated
itself to his critics, making them see things that are not in the book
and run full tilt at phantoms that have no existence save in their own
imaginations. Like a good many critics now-a-days, they forget that
screams are not criticism, and that it is only vulgar tastes that are
influenced by strings of superlatives, three-piled hyperboles, and
pompous epithets. But what strikes one as particularly strange is that
while they deal in extravagant eulogies, and ascribe all manner of
imaginary ideas and qualities to Cervantes, they show no perception of
the quality that ninety-nine out of a hundred of his readers would rate
highest 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
a manifest misdescription. Cervantes at times makes it a kind of
commonplace book for occasional essays and criticisms, or for the
observations and reflections and gathered wisdom of a long and stirring
life. It is a mine of shrewd observation on mankind and human nature.
Among modern novels there may be, here and there, more elaborate
studies of character, but there is no book richer in individualised
character. What Coleridge said of Shakespeare in minimis is true of
Cervantes; he never, even for the most temporary purpose, puts forward
a lay figure. There is life and individuality in all his characters,
however little they may have to do, or however short a time they may be
before the reader. Samson Carrasco, the curate, Teresa Panza,
Altisidora, even the two students met on the road to the cave of
Montesinos, all live and move and have their being; and it is
characteristic of the broad humanity of Cervantes that there is not a
hateful one among them all. Even poor Maritornes, with her deplorable
morals, has a kind heart of her own and “some faint and distant
resemblance to a Christian about her;” and as for Sancho, 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 there that in his heart
does not love him?

But it is, after all, the humour of “Don Quixote” that distinguishes it
from all other books of the romance kind. It is this that makes it, as
one of the most judicial-minded of modern critics calls it, “the best
novel in the world beyond all comparison.” It is its varied humour,
ranging from broad farce to comedy as subtle as Shakespeare’s or
Molière’s that has naturalised it in every country where there are
readers, and made it a classic in every language that has a literature.



THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE

Idle reader: thou mayest believe me without any oath that I would this
book, as it is the child of my brain, were the fairest, gayest, and
cleverest that could be imagined. But I could not counteract Nature’s
law that everything shall beget its like; and what, then, could this
sterile, illtilled wit of mine beget but the story of a dry,
shrivelled, whimsical offspring, full of thoughts of all sorts and such
as never came into any other imagination—just what might be begotten in
a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes
its dwelling? Tranquillity, a cheerful retreat, pleasant fields, bright
skies, murmuring brooks, peace of mind, these are the things that go
far to make even the most barren muses fertile, and bring into the
world births that fill it with wonder and delight. Sometimes when a
father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds
his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for
gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as
wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but
the stepfather to “Don Quixote”—have no desire to go with the current
of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my
eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive
in this child of mine. Thou art neither its kinsman nor its friend, thy
soul is thine own and thy will as free as any man’s, whate’er he be,
thou art in thine own house and master of it as much as the king of his
taxes and thou knowest the common saying, “Under my cloak I kill the
king;” all which exempts and frees thee from every consideration and
obligation, and thou canst say what thou wilt of the story without fear
of being abused for any ill or rewarded for any good thou mayest say of
it.

My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned,
without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary
sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the
beginning of books. For I can tell thee, though composing it cost me
some labour, I found none greater than the making of this Preface thou
art now reading. Many times did I take up my pen to write it, and many
did I lay it down again, not knowing what to write. One of these times,
as I was pondering with the paper before me, a pen in my ear, my elbow
on the desk, and my cheek in my hand, thinking of what I should say,
there came in unexpectedly a certain lively, clever friend of mine,
who, seeing me so deep in thought, asked the reason; to which I, making
no mystery of it, answered that I was thinking of the Preface I had to
make for the story of “Don Quixote,” which so troubled me that I had a
mind not to make any at all, nor even publish the achievements of so
noble a knight.

“For, how could you expect me not to feel uneasy about what that
ancient lawgiver they call the Public will say when it sees me, after
slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now
with all my years upon my back, and with a book as dry as a rush,
devoid of invention, meagre in style, poor in thoughts, wholly wanting
in learning and wisdom, without quotations in the margin or annotations
at the end, after the fashion of other books I see, which, though all
fables and profanity, are so full of maxims from Aristotle, and Plato,
and the whole herd of philosophers, that they fill the readers with
amazement and convince them that the authors are men of learning,
erudition, and eloquence. And then, when they quote the Holy
Scriptures!—anyone would say they are St. Thomases or other doctors of
the Church, observing as they do a decorum so ingenious that in one
sentence they describe a distracted lover and in the next deliver a
devout little sermon that it is a pleasure and a treat to hear and
read. Of all this there will be nothing in my book, for I have nothing
to quote in the margin or to note at the end, and still less do I know
what authors I follow in it, to place them at the beginning, as all do,
under the letters A, B, C, beginning with Aristotle and ending with
Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the
other a painter. Also my book must do without sonnets at the beginning,
at least sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops,
ladies, or famous poets. Though if I were to ask two or three obliging
friends, I know they would give me them, and such as the productions of
those that have the highest reputation in our Spain could not equal.

“In short, my friend,” I continued, “I am determined that Señor Don
Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until
Heaven provide someone to garnish him with all those things he stands
in need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of
learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and
careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without
them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason
enough, what you have heard from me.”

Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and
breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, “Before God, Brother, now am I
disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long time I
have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd and
sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that as the
heaven is from the earth. Is it possible that things of so little
moment and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe wit like
yours, fit to break through and crush far greater obstacles? By my
faith, this comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much
indolence and too little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am
telling the truth? Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in
the opening and shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties,
and supply all those deficiencies which you say check and discourage
you from bringing before the world the story of your famous Don
Quixote, the light and mirror of all knight-errantry.”

“Say on,” said I, listening to his talk; “how do you propose to make up
for my diffidence, and reduce to order this chaos of perplexity I am
in?”

To which he made answer, “Your first difficulty about the sonnets,
epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and
which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if
you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards
baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on
Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my
knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were
not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the
fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie
against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.

“As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you
take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only
contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may
happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much
trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to
insert

_Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;_


and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you
allude to the power of death, to come in with—

_Pallida mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turres._


“If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at
once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount
of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: _Ego
autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros._ If you speak of evil
thoughts, turn to the Gospel: _De corde exeunt cogitationes malæ._ If
of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his
distich:

_Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos,
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris._


“With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a
grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and
profit.

“With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may
safely do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book
contrive that it shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone, which
will cost you almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can
put—_The giant Golias or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd
David slew by a mighty stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is
related in the Book of Kings_—in the chapter where you find it written.

“Next, to prove yourself a man of erudition in polite literature and
cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story,
and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting
forth—_The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its
source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the
walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that it
has golden sands_, etc. If you should have anything to do with robbers,
I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with
loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the
loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you
great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with
Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil
Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Cæsar himself will lend you
himself in his own ‘Commentaries,’ and Plutarch will give you a
thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces you
may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you
to your heart’s content; or if you should not care to go to foreign
countries you have at home Fonseca’s ‘Of the Love of God,’ in which is
condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can want on the
subject. In short, all you have to do is to manage to quote these
names, or refer to these stories I have mentioned, and leave it to me
to insert the annotations and quotations, and I swear by all that’s
good to fill your margins and use up four sheets at the end of the
book.

“Now let us come to those references to authors which other books have,
and you want for yours. The remedy for this is very simple: You have
only to look out for some book that quotes them all, from A to Z as you
say yourself, and then insert the very same alphabet in your book, and
though the imposition may be plain to see, because you have so little
need to borrow from them, that is no matter; there will probably be
some simple enough to believe that you have made use of them all in
this plain, artless story of yours. At any rate, if it answers no other
purpose, this long catalogue of authors will serve to give a surprising
look of authority to your book. Besides, no one will trouble himself to
verify whether you have followed them or whether you have not, being no
way concerned in it; especially as, if I mistake not, this book of
yours has no need of any one of those things you say it wants, for it
is, from beginning to end, an attack upon the books of chivalry, of
which Aristotle never dreamt, nor St. Basil said a word, nor Cicero had
any knowledge; nor do the niceties of truth nor the observations of
astrology come within the range of its fanciful vagaries; nor have
geometrical measurements or refutations of the arguments used in
rhetoric anything to do with it; nor does it mean to preach to anybody,
mixing up things human and divine, a sort of motley in which no
Christian understanding should dress itself. It has only to avail
itself of truth to nature in its composition, and the more perfect the
imitation the better the work will be. And as this piece of yours aims
at nothing more than to destroy the authority and influence which books
of chivalry have in the world and with the public, there is no need for
you to go a-begging for aphorisms from philosophers, precepts from Holy
Scripture, fables from poets, speeches from orators, or miracles from
saints; but merely to take care that your style and diction run
musically, pleasantly, and plainly, with clear, proper, and well-placed
words, setting forth your purpose to the best of your power, and
putting your ideas intelligibly, without confusion or obscurity.
Strive, too, that in reading your story the melancholy may be moved to
laughter, and the merry made merrier still; that the simple shall not
be wearied, that the judicious shall admire the invention, that the
grave shall not despise it, nor the wise fail to praise it. Finally,
keep your aim fixed on the destruction of that ill-founded edifice of
the books of chivalry, hated by some and praised by many more; for if
you succeed in this you will have achieved no small success.”

In profound silence I listened to what my friend said, and his
observations made such an impression on me that, without attempting to
question them, I admitted their soundness, and out of them I determined
to make this Preface; wherein, gentle reader, thou wilt perceive my
friend’s good sense, my good fortune in finding such an adviser in such
a time of need, and what thou hast gained in receiving, without
addition or alteration, the story of the famous Don Quixote of La
Mancha, who is held by all the inhabitants of the district of the Campo
de Montiel to have been the chastest lover and the bravest knight that
has for many years been seen in that neighbourhood. I have no desire to
magnify the service I render thee in making thee acquainted with so
renowned and honoured a knight, but I do desire thy thanks for the
acquaintance thou wilt make with the famous Sancho Panza, his squire,
in whom, to my thinking, I have given thee condensed all the squirely
drolleries that are scattered through the swarm of the vain books of
chivalry. And so—may God give thee health, and not forget me. Vale.



SOME COMMENDATORY VERSES



URGANDA THE UNKNOWN

To 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! Álvaro 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 GAUL
To Don Quixote of la Mancha

SONNET

Thou that didst imitate that life of mine
    When I in lonely sadness on the great
    Rock Peña 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 GREECE
To Don Quixote of la Mancha

SONNET

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 ORIANA
To Dulcinea del Toboso

SONNET

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 Quixote

SONNET

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 Rocinante

ON 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 FURIOSO
To Don Quixote of La Mancha

SONNET

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 PHŒBUS

To Don Quixote of La Mancha

My sword was not to be compared with thine
    Phœbus 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 SOLISDAN
To Don Quixote of La Mancha

SONNET

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.




DIALOGUE
Between Babieca and Rocinante

SONNET

_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;
    ’Tis 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 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.”



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DEDICATION OF PART I

TO THE DUKE OF BEJAR, MARQUIS OF GIBRALEON, COUNT OF BENALCAZAR AND
BANARES, VICECOUNT OF THE PUEBLA DE ALCOCER, MASTER OF THE TOWNS OF
CAPILLA, CURIEL AND BURGUILLOS




In belief of the good reception and honours that Your Excellency
bestows on all sort of books, as prince so inclined to favor good arts,
chiefly those who by their nobleness do not submit to the service and
bribery of the vulgar, I have determined bringing to light The
Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha, in shelter of Your
Excellency’s glamorous name, to whom, with the obeisance I owe to such
grandeur, I pray to receive it agreeably under his protection, so that
in this shadow, though deprived of that precious ornament of elegance
and erudition that clothe the works composed in the houses of those who
know, it dares appear with assurance in the judgment of some who,
trespassing the bounds of their own ignorance, use to condemn with more
rigour and less justice the writings of others. It is my earnest hope
that Your Excellency’s good counsel in regard to my honourable purpose,
will not disdain the littleness of so humble a service.

Miguel de Cervantes



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CHAPTER I.
WHICH TREATS OF THE CHARACTER AND PURSUITS OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON
QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA




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In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call
to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a
lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound
for coursing. An olla of rather more beef than mutton, a salad on most
nights, scraps on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, and a pigeon or so
extra on Sundays, made away with three-quarters of his income. The rest
of it went in a doublet of fine cloth and velvet breeches and shoes to
match for holidays, while on week-days he made a brave figure in his
best homespun. He had in his house a housekeeper past forty, a niece
under twenty, and a lad for the field and market-place, who used to
saddle the hack as well as handle the bill-hook. The age of this
gentleman of ours was bordering on fifty; he was of a hardy habit,
spare, gaunt-featured, a very early riser and a great sportsman. They
will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some
difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject),
although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called
Quexana. This, however, is of but little importance to our tale; it
will be enough not to stray a hair’s breadth from the truth in the
telling of it.

You must know, then, that the above-named gentleman whenever he was at
leisure (which was mostly all the year round) gave himself up to
reading books of chivalry with such ardour and avidity that he almost
entirely neglected the pursuit of his field-sports, and even the
management of his property; and to such a pitch did his eagerness and
infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of
chivalry to read, and brought home as many of them as he could get. But
of all there were none he liked so well as those of the famous
Feliciano de Silva’s composition, for their lucidity of style and
complicated conceits were as pearls in his sight, particularly when in
his reading he came upon courtships and cartels, where he often found
passages like “_the reason of the unreason with which my reason is
afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your
beauty;” or again, “the high heavens, that of your divinity divinely
fortify you with the stars, render you deserving of the desert your
greatness deserves_.” Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman
lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and
worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have
made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special
purpose. He was not at all easy about the wounds which Don Belianis
gave and took, because it seemed to him that, great as were the
surgeons who had cured him, he must have had his face and body covered
all over with seams and scars. He commended, however, the author’s way
of ending his book with the promise of that interminable adventure, and
many a time was he tempted to take up his pen and finish it properly as
is there proposed, which no doubt he would have done, and made a
successful piece of work of it too, had not greater and more absorbing
thoughts prevented him.

Many an argument did he have with the curate of his village (a learned
man, and a graduate of Siguenza) as to which had been the better
knight, Palmerin of England or Amadis of Gaul. Master Nicholas, the
village barber, however, used to say that neither of them came up to
the Knight of Phœbus, and that if there was any that could compare with
_him_ it was Don Galaor, the brother of Amadis of Gaul, because he had
a spirit that was equal to every occasion, and was no finikin knight,
nor lachrymose like his brother, while in the matter of valour he was
not a whit behind him. In short, he became so absorbed in his books
that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn
to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading
his brains got so dry that he lost his wits. His fancy grew full of
what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels,
battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of
impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric
of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in
the world had more reality in it. He used to say the Cid Ruy Diaz was a
very good knight, but that he was not to be compared with the Knight of
the Burning Sword who with one back-stroke cut in half two fierce and
monstrous giants. He thought more of Bernardo del Carpio because at
Roncesvalles he slew Roland in spite of enchantments, availing himself
of the artifice of Hercules when he strangled Antæus the son of Terra
in his arms. He approved highly of the giant Morgante, because,
although of the giant breed which is always arrogant and
ill-conditioned, he alone was affable and well-bred. But above all he
admired Reinaldos of Montalban, especially when he saw him sallying
forth from his castle and robbing everyone he met, and when beyond the
seas he stole that image of Mahomet which, as his history says, was
entirely of gold. To have a bout of kicking at that traitor of a
Ganelon he would have given his housekeeper, and his niece into the
bargain.

In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion
that ever madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied
it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour
as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant
of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in
quest of adventures, and putting in practice himself all that he had
read of as being the usual practices of knights-errant; righting every
kind of wrong, and exposing himself to peril and danger from which, in
the issue, he was to reap eternal renown and fame. Already the poor man
saw himself crowned by the might of his arm Emperor of Trebizond at
least; and so, led away by the intense enjoyment he found in these
pleasant fancies, he set himself forthwith to put his scheme into
execution.

The first thing he did was to clean up some armour that had belonged to
his great-grandfather, and had been for ages lying forgotten in a
corner eaten with rust and covered with mildew. He scoured and polished
it as best he could, but he perceived one great defect in it, that it
had no closed helmet, nothing but a simple morion. This deficiency,
however, his ingenuity supplied, for he contrived a kind of half-helmet
of pasteboard which, fitted on to the morion, looked like a whole one.
It is true that, in order to see if it was strong and fit to stand a
cut, he drew his sword and gave it a couple of slashes, the first of
which undid in an instant what had taken him a week to do. The ease
with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and
to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron
on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not
caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it
as a helmet of the most perfect construction.

He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a
real and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that “_tantum pellis
et ossa fuit_,” surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or
the Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to
give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse
belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own,
should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so
as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant,
and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master
taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should
be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and
calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck
out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of
his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to
his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a
hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all
the hacks in the world.

Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to
get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this
point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself “Don Quixote,”
whence, as has been already said, the authors of this veracious history
have inferred that his name must have been beyond a doubt Quixada, and
not Quesada as others would have it. Recollecting, however, that the
valiant Amadis was not content to call himself curtly Amadis and
nothing more, but added the name of his kingdom and country to make it
famous, and called himself Amadis of Gaul, he, like a good knight,
resolved to add on the name of his, and to style himself Don Quixote of
La Mancha, whereby, he considered, he described accurately his origin
and country, and did honour to it in taking his surname from it.

So then, his armour being furbished, his morion turned into a helmet,
his hack christened, and he himself confirmed, he came to the
conclusion that nothing more was needed now but to look out for a lady
to be in love with; for a knight-errant without love was like a tree
without leaves or fruit, or a body without a soul. As he said to
himself, “If, for my sins, or by my good fortune, I come across some
giant hereabouts, a common occurrence with knights-errant, and
overthrow him in one onslaught, or cleave him asunder to the waist, or,
in short, vanquish and subdue him, will it not be well to have someone
I may send him to as a present, that he may come in and fall on his
knees before my sweet lady, and in a humble, submissive voice say, ‘I
am the giant Caraculiambro, lord of the island of Malindrania,
vanquished in single combat by the never sufficiently extolled knight
Don Quixote of La Mancha, who has commanded me to present myself before
your Grace, that your Highness dispose of me at your pleasure’?” Oh,
how our good gentleman enjoyed the delivery of this speech, especially
when he had thought of someone to call his Lady! There was, so the
story goes, in a village near his own a very good-looking farm-girl
with whom he had been at one time in love, though, so far as is known,
she never knew it nor gave a thought to the matter. Her name was
Aldonza Lorenzo, and upon her he thought fit to confer the title of
Lady of his Thoughts; and after some search for a name which should not
be out of harmony with her own, and should suggest and indicate that of
a princess and great lady, he decided upon calling her Dulcinea del
Toboso—she being of El Toboso—a name, to his mind, musical, uncommon,
and significant, like all those he had already bestowed upon himself
and the things belonging to him.



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CHAPTER II.
WHICH TREATS OF THE FIRST SALLY THE INGENIOUS DON QUIXOTE MADE FROM
HOME




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These preliminaries settled, he did not care to put off any longer the
execution of his design, urged on to it by the thought of all the world
was losing by his delay, seeing what wrongs he intended to right,
grievances to redress, injustices to repair, abuses to remove, and
duties to discharge. So, without giving notice of his intention to
anyone, and without anybody seeing him, one morning before the dawning
of the day (which was one of the hottest of the month of July) he
donned his suit of armour, mounted Rocinante with his patched-up helmet
on, braced his buckler, took his lance, and by the back door of the
yard sallied forth upon the plain in the highest contentment and
satisfaction at seeing with what ease he had made a beginning with his
grand purpose. But scarcely did he find himself upon the open plain,
when a terrible thought struck him, one all but enough to make him
abandon the enterprise at the very outset. It occurred to him that he
had not been dubbed a knight, and that according to the law of chivalry
he neither could nor ought to bear arms against any knight; and that
even if he had been, still he ought, as a novice knight, to wear white
armour, without a device upon the shield until by his prowess he had
earned one. These reflections made him waver in his purpose, but his
craze being stronger than any reasoning, he made up his mind to have
himself dubbed a knight by the first one he came across, following the
example of others in the same case, as he had read in the books that
brought him to this pass. As for white armour, he resolved, on the
first opportunity, to scour his until it was whiter than an ermine; and
so comforting himself he pursued his way, taking that which his horse
chose, for in this he believed lay the essence of adventures.

Thus setting out, our new-fledged adventurer paced along, talking to
himself and saying, “Who knows but that in time to come, when the
veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes
it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will
do it after this fashion? ‘Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o’er
the face of the broad spacious earth the golden threads of his bright
hair, scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their
notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the
rosy Dawn, that, deserting the soft couch of her jealous spouse, was
appearing to mortals at the gates and balconies of the Manchegan
horizon, when the renowned knight Don Quixote of La Mancha, quitting
the lazy down, mounted his celebrated steed Rocinante and began to
traverse the ancient and famous Campo de Montiel;’” which in fact he
was actually traversing. “Happy the age, happy the time,” he continued,
“in which shall be made known my deeds of fame, worthy to be moulded in
brass, carved in marble, limned in pictures, for a memorial for ever.
And thou, O sage magician, whoever thou art, to whom it shall fall to
be the chronicler of this wondrous history, forget not, I entreat thee,
my good Rocinante, the constant companion of my ways and wanderings.”
Presently he broke out again, as if he were love-stricken in earnest,
“O Princess Dulcinea, lady of this captive heart, a grievous wrong hast
thou done me to drive me forth with scorn, and with inexorable obduracy
banish me from the presence of thy beauty. O lady, deign to hold in
remembrance this heart, thy vassal, that thus in anguish pines for love
of thee.”

So he went on stringing together these and other absurdities, all in
the style of those his books had taught him, imitating their language
as well as he could; and all the while he rode so slowly and the sun
mounted so rapidly and with such fervour that it was enough to melt his
brains if he had any. Nearly all day he travelled without anything
remarkable happening to him, at which he was in despair, for he was
anxious to encounter someone at once upon whom to try the might of his
strong arm.



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Writers there are who say the first adventure he met with was that of
Puerto Lapice; others say it was that of the windmills; but what I have
ascertained on this point, and what I have found written in the annals
of La Mancha, is that he was on the road all day, and towards nightfall
his hack and he found themselves dead tired and hungry, when, looking
all around to see if he could discover any castle or shepherd’s shanty
where he might refresh himself and relieve his sore wants, he perceived
not far out of his road an inn, which was as welcome as a star guiding
him to the portals, if not the palaces, of his redemption; and
quickening his pace he reached it just as night was setting in. At the
door were standing two young women, girls of the district as they call
them, on their way to Seville with some carriers who had chanced to
halt that night at the inn; and as, happen what might to our
adventurer, everything he saw or imagined seemed to him to be and to
happen after the fashion of what he read of, the moment he saw the inn
he pictured it to himself as a castle with its four turrets and
pinnacles of shining silver, not forgetting the drawbridge and moat and
all the belongings usually ascribed to castles of the sort. To this
inn, which to him seemed a castle, he advanced, and at a short distance
from it he checked Rocinante, hoping that some dwarf would show himself
upon the battlements, and by sound of trumpet give notice that a knight
was approaching the castle. But seeing that they were slow about it,
and that Rocinante was in a hurry to reach the stable, he made for the
inn door, and perceived the two gay damsels who were standing there,
and who seemed to him to be two fair maidens or lovely ladies taking
their ease at the castle gate.

At this moment it so happened that a swineherd who was going through
the stubbles collecting a drove of pigs (for, without any apology, that
is what they are called) gave a blast of his horn to bring them
together, and forthwith it seemed to Don Quixote to be what he was
expecting, the signal of some dwarf announcing his arrival; and so with
prodigious satisfaction he rode up to the inn and to the ladies, who,
seeing a man of this sort approaching in full armour and with lance and
buckler, were turning in dismay into the inn, when Don Quixote,
guessing their fear by their flight, raising his pasteboard visor,
disclosed his dry dusty visage, and with courteous bearing and gentle
voice addressed them, “Your ladyships need not fly or fear any
rudeness, for that it belongs not to the order of knighthood which I
profess to offer to anyone, much less to highborn maidens as your
appearance proclaims you to be.” The girls were looking at him and
straining their eyes to make out the features which the clumsy visor
obscured, but when they heard themselves called maidens, a thing so
much out of their line, they could not restrain their laughter, which
made Don Quixote wax indignant, and say, “Modesty becomes the fair, and
moreover laughter that has little cause is great silliness; this,
however, I say not to pain or anger you, for my desire is none other
than to serve you.”

The incomprehensible language and the unpromising looks of our cavalier
only increased the ladies’ laughter, and that increased his irritation,
and matters might have gone farther if at that moment the landlord had
not come out, who, being a very fat man, was a very peaceful one. He,
seeing this grotesque figure clad in armour that did not match any more
than his saddle, bridle, lance, buckler, or corselet, was not at all
indisposed to join the damsels in their manifestations of amusement;
but, in truth, standing in awe of such a complicated armament, he
thought it best to speak him fairly, so he said, “Señor Caballero, if
your worship wants lodging, bating the bed (for there is not one in the
inn) there is plenty of everything else here.” Don Quixote, observing
the respectful bearing of the Alcaide of the fortress (for so innkeeper
and inn seemed in his eyes), made answer, “Sir Castellan, for me
anything will suffice, for

‘My armour is my only wear,
My only rest the fray.’”


The host fancied he called him Castellan because he took him for a
“worthy of Castile,” though he was in fact an Andalusian, and one from
the strand of San Lucar, as crafty a thief as Cacus and as full of
tricks as a student or a page. “In that case,” said he,

“‘Your bed is on the flinty rock,
Your sleep to watch alway;’


and if so, you may dismount and safely reckon upon any quantity of
sleeplessness under this roof for a twelvemonth, not to say for a
single night.” So saying, he advanced to hold the stirrup for Don
Quixote, who got down with great difficulty and exertion (for he had
not broken his fast all day), and then charged the host to take great
care of his horse, as he was the best bit of flesh that ever ate bread
in this world. The landlord eyed him over but did not find him as good
as Don Quixote said, nor even half as good; and putting him up in the
stable, he returned to see what might be wanted by his guest, whom the
damsels, who had by this time made their peace with him, were now
relieving of his armour. They had taken off his breastplate and
backpiece, but they neither knew nor saw how to open his gorget or
remove his make-shift helmet, for he had fastened it with green
ribbons, which, as there was no untying the knots, required to be cut.
This, however, he would not by any means consent to, so he remained all
the evening with his helmet on, the drollest and oddest figure that can
be imagined; and while they were removing his armour, taking the
baggages who were about it for ladies of high degree belonging to the
castle, he said to them with great sprightliness:

“Oh, never, surely, was there knight
So served by hand of dame,
As served was he, Don Quixote hight,
When from his town he came;
With maidens waiting on himself,
Princesses on his hack—


—or Rocinante, for that, ladies mine, is my horse’s name, and Don
Quixote of La Mancha is my own; for though I had no intention of
declaring myself until my achievements in your service and honour had
made me known, the necessity of adapting that old ballad of Lancelot to
the present occasion has given you the knowledge of my name altogether
prematurely. A time, however, will come for your ladyships to command
and me to obey, and then the might of my arm will show my desire to
serve you.”

The girls, who were not used to hearing rhetoric of this sort, had
nothing to say in reply; they only asked him if he wanted anything to
eat. “I would gladly eat a bit of something,” said Don Quixote, “for I
feel it would come very seasonably.” The day happened to be a Friday,
and in the whole inn there was nothing but some pieces of the fish they
call in Castile “abadejo,” in Andalusia “bacallao,” and in some places
“curadillo,” and in others “troutlet;” so they asked him if he thought
he could eat troutlet, for there was no other fish to give him. “If
there be troutlets enough,” said Don Quixote, “they will be the same
thing as a trout; for it is all one to me whether I am given eight
reals in small change or a piece of eight; moreover, it may be that
these troutlets are like veal, which is better than beef, or kid, which
is better than goat. But whatever it be let it come quickly, for the
burden and pressure of arms cannot be borne without support to the
inside.” They laid a table for him at the door of the inn for the sake
of the air, and the host brought him a portion of ill-soaked and worse
cooked stockfish, and a piece of bread as black and mouldy as his own
armour; but a laughable sight it was to see him eating, for having his
helmet on and the beaver up, he could not with his own hands put
anything into his mouth unless someone else placed it there, and this
service one of the ladies rendered him. But to give him anything to
drink was impossible, or would have been so had not the landlord bored
a reed, and putting one end in his mouth poured the wine into him
through the other; all which he bore with patience rather than sever
the ribbons of his helmet.

While this was going on there came up to the inn a sowgelder, who, as
he approached, sounded his reed pipe four or five times, and thereby
completely convinced Don Quixote that he was in some famous castle, and
that they were regaling him with music, and that the stockfish was
trout, the bread the whitest, the wenches ladies, and the landlord the
castellan of the castle; and consequently he held that his enterprise
and sally had been to some purpose. But still it distressed him to
think he had not been dubbed a knight, for it was plain to him he could
not lawfully engage in any adventure without receiving the order of
knighthood.



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CHAPTER III.
WHEREIN IS RELATED THE DROLL WAY IN WHICH DON QUIXOTE HAD HIMSELF
DUBBED A KNIGHT




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Harassed by this reflection, he made haste with his scanty pothouse
supper, and having finished it called the landlord, and shutting
himself into the stable with him, fell on his knees before him, saying,
“From this spot I rise not, valiant knight, until your courtesy grants
me the boon I seek, one that will redound to your praise and the
benefit of the human race.” The landlord, seeing his guest at his feet
and hearing a speech of this kind, stood staring at him in
bewilderment, not knowing what to do or say, and entreating him to
rise, but all to no purpose until he had agreed to grant the boon
demanded of him. “I looked for no less, my lord, from your High
Magnificence,” replied Don Quixote, “and I have to tell you that the
boon I have asked and your liberality has granted is that you shall dub
me knight to-morrow morning, and that to-night I shall watch my arms in
the chapel of this your castle; thus to-morrow, as I have said, will be
accomplished what I so much desire, enabling me lawfully to roam
through all the four quarters of the world seeking adventures on behalf
of those in distress, as is the duty of chivalry and of knights-errant
like myself, whose ambition is directed to such deeds.”

The landlord, who, as has been mentioned, was something of a wag, and
had already some suspicion of his guest’s want of wits, was quite
convinced of it on hearing talk of this kind from him, and to make
sport for the night he determined to fall in with his humour. So he
told him he was quite right in pursuing the object he had in view, and
that such a motive was natural and becoming in cavaliers as
distinguished as he seemed and his gallant bearing showed him to be;
and that he himself in his younger days had followed the same
honourable calling, roaming in quest of adventures in various parts of
the world, among others the Curing-grounds of Malaga, the Isles of
Riaran, the Precinct of Seville, the Little Market of Segovia, the
Olivera of Valencia, the Rondilla of Granada, the Strand of San Lucar,
the Colt of Cordova, the Taverns of Toledo, and divers other quarters,
where he had proved the nimbleness of his feet and the lightness of his
fingers, doing many wrongs, cheating many widows, ruining maids and
swindling minors, and, in short, bringing himself under the notice of
almost every tribunal and court of justice in Spain; until at last he
had retired to this castle of his, where he was living upon his
property and upon that of others; and where he received all
knights-errant of whatever rank or condition they might be, all for the
great love he bore them and that they might share their substance with
him in return for his benevolence. He told him, moreover, that in this
castle of his there was no chapel in which he could watch his armour,
as it had been pulled down in order to be rebuilt, but that in a case
of necessity it might, he knew, be watched anywhere, and he might watch
it that night in a courtyard of the castle, and in the morning, God
willing, the requisite ceremonies might be performed so as to have him
dubbed a knight, and so thoroughly dubbed that nobody could be more so.
He asked if he had any money with him, to which Don Quixote replied
that he had not a farthing, as in the histories of knights-errant he
had never read of any of them carrying any. On this point the landlord
told him he was mistaken; for, though not recorded in the histories,
because in the author’s opinion there was no need to mention anything
so obvious and necessary as money and clean shirts, it was not to be
supposed therefore that they did not carry them, and he might regard it
as certain and established that all knights-errant (about whom there
were so many full and unimpeachable books) carried well-furnished
purses in case of emergency, and likewise carried shirts and a little
box of ointment to cure the wounds they received. For in those plains
and deserts where they engaged in combat and came out wounded, it was
not always that there was someone to cure them, unless indeed they had
for a friend some sage magician to succour them at once by fetching
through the air upon a cloud some damsel or dwarf with a vial of water
of such virtue that by tasting one drop of it they were cured of their
hurts and wounds in an instant and left as sound as if they had not
received any damage whatever. But in case this should not occur, the
knights of old took care to see that their squires were provided with
money and other requisites, such as lint and ointments for healing
purposes; and when it happened that knights had no squires (which was
rarely and seldom the case) they themselves carried everything in
cunning saddle-bags that were hardly seen on the horse’s croup, as if
it were something else of more importance, because, unless for some
such reason, carrying saddle-bags was not very favourably regarded
among knights-errant. He therefore advised him (and, as his godson so
soon to be, he might even command him) never from that time forth to
travel without money and the usual requirements, and he would find the
advantage of them when he least expected it.

Don Quixote promised to follow his advice scrupulously, and it was
arranged forthwith that he should watch his armour in a large yard at
one side of the inn; so, collecting it all together, Don Quixote placed
it on a trough that stood by the side of a well, and bracing his
buckler on his arm he grasped his lance and began with a stately air to
march up and down in front of the trough, and as he began his march
night began to fall.

The landlord told all the people who were in the inn about the craze of
his guest, the watching of the armour, and the dubbing ceremony he
contemplated. Full of wonder at so strange a form of madness, they
flocked to see it from a distance, and observed with what composure he
sometimes paced up and down, or sometimes, leaning on his lance, gazed
on his armour without taking his eyes off it for ever so long; and as
the night closed in with a light from the moon so brilliant that it
might vie with his that lent it, everything the novice knight did was
plainly seen by all.

Meanwhile one of the carriers who were in the inn thought fit to water
his team, and it was necessary to remove Don Quixote’s armour as it lay
on the trough; but he seeing the other approach hailed him in a loud
voice, “O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight that comest to lay hands
on the armour of the most valorous errant that ever girt on sword, have
a care what thou dost; touch it not unless thou wouldst lay down thy
life as the penalty of thy rashness.” The carrier gave no heed to these
words (and he would have done better to heed them if he had been
heedful of his health), but seizing it by the straps flung the armour
some distance from him. Seeing this, Don Quixote raised his eyes to
heaven, and fixing his thoughts, apparently, upon his lady Dulcinea,
exclaimed, “Aid me, lady mine, in this the first encounter that
presents itself to this breast which thou holdest in subjection; let
not thy favour and protection fail me in this first jeopardy;” and,
with these words and others to the same purpose, dropping his buckler
he lifted his lance with both hands and with it smote such a blow on
the carrier’s head that he stretched him on the ground, so stunned that
had he followed it up with a second there would have been no need of a
surgeon to cure him. This done, he picked up his armour and returned to
his beat with the same serenity as before.



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Shortly after this, another, not knowing what had happened (for the
carrier still lay senseless), came with the same object of giving water
to his mules, and was proceeding to remove the armour in order to clear
the trough, when Don Quixote, without uttering a word or imploring aid
from anyone, once more dropped his buckler and once more lifted his
lance, and without actually breaking the second carrier’s head into
pieces, made more than three of it, for he laid it open in four. At the
noise all the people of the inn ran to the spot, and among them the
landlord. Seeing this, Don Quixote braced his buckler on his arm, and
with his hand on his sword exclaimed, “O Lady of Beauty, strength and
support of my faint heart, it is time for thee to turn the eyes of thy
greatness on this thy captive knight on the brink of so mighty an
adventure.” By this he felt himself so inspired that he would not have
flinched if all the carriers in the world had assailed him. The
comrades of the wounded perceiving the plight they were in began from a
distance to shower stones on Don Quixote, who screened himself as best
he could with his buckler, not daring to quit the trough and leave his
armour unprotected. The landlord shouted to them to leave him alone,
for he had already told them that he was mad, and as a madman he would
not be accountable even if he killed them all. Still louder shouted Don
Quixote, calling them knaves and traitors, and the lord of the castle,
who allowed knights-errant to be treated in this fashion, a villain and
a low-born knight whom, had he received the order of knighthood, he
would call to account for his treachery. “But of you,” he cried, “base
and vile rabble, I make no account; fling, strike, come on, do all ye
can against me, ye shall see what the reward of your folly and
insolence will be.” This he uttered with so much spirit and boldness
that he filled his assailants with a terrible fear, and as much for
this reason as at the persuasion of the landlord they left off stoning
him, and he allowed them to carry off the wounded, and with the same
calmness and composure as before resumed the watch over his armour.

But these freaks of his guest were not much to the liking of the
landlord, so he determined to cut matters short and confer upon him at
once the unlucky order of knighthood before any further misadventure
could occur; so, going up to him, he apologised for the rudeness which,
without his knowledge, had been offered to him by these low people,
who, however, had been well punished for their audacity. As he had
already told him, he said, there was no chapel in the castle, nor was
it needed for what remained to be done, for, as he understood the
ceremonial of the order, the whole point of being dubbed a knight lay
in the accolade and in the slap on the shoulder, and that could be
administered in the middle of a field; and that he had now done all
that was needful as to watching the armour, for all requirements were
satisfied by a watch of two hours only, while he had been more than
four about it. Don Quixote believed it all, and told him he stood there
ready to obey him, and to make an end of it with as much despatch as
possible; for, if he were again attacked, and felt himself to be dubbed
knight, he would not, he thought, leave a soul alive in the castle,
except such as out of respect he might spare at his bidding.

Thus warned and menaced, the castellan forthwith brought out a book in
which he used to enter the straw and barley he served out to the
carriers, and, with a lad carrying a candle-end, and the two damsels
already mentioned, he returned to where Don Quixote stood, and bade him
kneel down. Then, reading from his account-book as if he were repeating
some devout prayer, in the middle of his delivery he raised his hand
and gave him a sturdy blow on the neck, and then, with his own sword, a
smart slap on the shoulder, all the while muttering between his teeth
as if he was saying his prayers. Having done this, he directed one of
the ladies to gird on his sword, which she did with great
self-possession and gravity, and not a little was required to prevent a
burst of laughter at each stage of the ceremony; but what they had
already seen of the novice knight’s prowess kept their laughter within
bounds. On girding him with the sword the worthy lady said to him, “May
God make your worship a very fortunate knight, and grant you success in
battle.” Don Quixote asked her name in order that he might from that
time forward know to whom he was beholden for the favour he had
received, as he meant to confer upon her some portion of the honour he
acquired by the might of his arm. She answered with great humility that
she was called La Tolosa, and that she was the daughter of a cobbler of
Toledo who lived in the stalls of Sanchobienaya, and that wherever she
might be she would serve and esteem him as her lord. Don Quixote said
in reply that she would do him a favour if thenceforward she assumed
the “Don” and called herself Doña Tolosa. She promised she would, and
then the other buckled on his spur, and with her followed almost the
same conversation as with the lady of the sword. He asked her name, and
she said it was La Molinera, and that she was the daughter of a
respectable miller of Antequera; and of her likewise Don Quixote
requested that she would adopt the “Don” and call herself Doña
Molinera, making offers to her further services and favours.

Having thus, with hot haste and speed, brought to a conclusion these
never-till-now-seen ceremonies, Don Quixote was on thorns until he saw
himself on horseback sallying forth in quest of adventures; and
saddling Rocinante at once he mounted, and embracing his host, as he
returned thanks for his kindness in knighting him, he addressed him in
language so extraordinary that it is impossible to convey an idea of it
or report it. The landlord, to get him out of the inn, replied with no
less rhetoric though with shorter words, and without calling upon him
to pay the reckoning let him go with a Godspeed.



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CHAPTER IV.
OF WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR KNIGHT WHEN HE LEFT THE INN




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Day was dawning when Don Quixote quitted the inn, so happy, so gay, so
exhilarated at finding himself now dubbed a knight, that his joy was
like to burst his horse-girths. However, recalling the advice of his
host as to the requisites he ought to carry with him, especially that
referring to money and shirts, he determined to go home and provide
himself with all, and also with a squire, for he reckoned upon securing
a farm-labourer, a neighbour of his, a poor man with a family, but very
well qualified for the office of squire to a knight. With this object
he turned his horse’s head towards his village, and Rocinante, thus
reminded of his old quarters, stepped out so briskly that he hardly
seemed to tread the earth.

He had not gone far, when out of a thicket on his right there seemed to
come feeble cries as of someone in distress, and the instant he heard
them he exclaimed, “Thanks be to heaven for the favour it accords me,
that it so soon offers me an opportunity of fulfilling the obligation I
have undertaken, and gathering the fruit of my ambition. These cries,
no doubt, come from some man or woman in want of help, and needing my
aid and protection;” and wheeling, he turned Rocinante in the direction
whence the cries seemed to proceed. He had gone but a few paces into
the wood, when he saw a mare tied to an oak, and tied to another, and
stripped from the waist upwards, a youth of about fifteen years of age,
from whom the cries came. Nor were they without cause, for a lusty
farmer was flogging him with a belt and following up every blow with
scoldings and commands, repeating, “Your mouth shut and your eyes
open!” while the youth made answer, “I won’t do it again, master mine;
by God’s passion I won’t do it again, and I’ll take more care of the
flock another time.”

Seeing what was going on, Don Quixote said in an angry voice,
“Discourteous knight, it ill becomes you to assail one who cannot
defend himself; mount your steed and take your lance” (for there was a
lance leaning against the oak to which the mare was tied), “and I will
make you know that you are behaving as a coward.” The farmer, seeing
before him this figure in full armour brandishing a lance over his
head, gave himself up for dead, and made answer meekly, “Sir Knight,
this youth that I am chastising is my servant, employed by me to watch
a flock of sheep that I have hard by, and he is so careless that I lose
one every day, and when I punish him for his carelessness and knavery
he says I do it out of niggardliness, to escape paying him the wages I
owe him, and before God, and on my soul, he lies.”

“Lies before me, base clown!” said Don Quixote. “By the sun that shines
on us I have a mind to run you through with this lance. Pay him at once
without another word; if not, by the God that rules us I will make an
end of you, and annihilate you on the spot; release him instantly.”



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The farmer hung his head, and without a word untied his servant, of
whom Don Quixote asked how much his master owed him.

He replied, nine months at seven reals a month. Don Quixote added it
up, found that it came to sixty-three reals, and told the farmer to pay
it down immediately, if he did not want to die for it.

The trembling clown replied that as he lived and by the oath he had
sworn (though he had not sworn any) it was not so much; for there were
to be taken into account and deducted three pairs of shoes he had given
him, and a real for two blood-lettings when he was sick.

“All that is very well,” said Don Quixote; “but let the shoes and the
blood-lettings stand as a setoff against the blows you have given him
without any cause; for if he spoiled the leather of the shoes you paid
for, you have damaged that of his body, and if the barber took blood
from him when he was sick, you have drawn it when he was sound; so on
that score he owes you nothing.”

“The difficulty is, Sir Knight, that I have no money here; let Andres
come home with me, and I will pay him all, real by real.”

“I go with him!” said the youth. “Nay, God forbid! No, señor, not for
the world; for once alone with me, he would flay me like a Saint
Bartholomew.”

“He will do nothing of the kind,” said Don Quixote; “I have only to
command, and he will obey me; and as he has sworn to me by the order of
knighthood which he has received, I leave him free, and I guarantee the
payment.”

“Consider what you are saying, señor,” said the youth; “this master of
mine is not a knight, nor has he received any order of knighthood; for
he is Juan Haldudo the Rich, of Quintanar.”

“That matters little,” replied Don Quixote; “there may be Haldudos
knights; moreover, everyone is the son of his works.”

“That is true,” said Andres; “but this master of mine—of what works is
he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?”

“I do not refuse, brother Andres,” said the farmer, “be good enough to
come along with me, and I swear by all the orders of knighthood there
are in the world to pay you as I have agreed, real by real, and
perfumed.”

“For the perfumery I excuse you,” said Don Quixote; “give it to him in
reals, and I shall be satisfied; and see that you do as you have sworn;
if not, by the same oath I swear to come back and hunt you out and
punish you; and I shall find you though you should lie closer than a
lizard. And if you desire to know who it is lays this command upon you,
that you be more firmly bound to obey it, know that I am the valorous
Don Quixote of La Mancha, the undoer of wrongs and injustices; and so,
God be with you, and keep in mind what you have promised and sworn
under those penalties that have been already declared to you.”

So saying, he gave Rocinante the spur and was soon out of reach. The
farmer followed him with his eyes, and when he saw that he had cleared
the wood and was no longer in sight, he turned to his boy Andres, and
said, “Come here, my son, I want to pay you what I owe you, as that
undoer of wrongs has commanded me.”

“My oath on it,” said Andres, “your worship will be well advised to
obey the command of that good knight—may he live a thousand years—for,
as he is a valiant and just judge, by Roque, if you do not pay me, he
will come back and do as he said.”

“My oath on it, too,” said the farmer; “but as I have a strong
affection for you, I want to add to the debt in order to add to the
payment;” and seizing him by the arm, he tied him up again, and gave
him such a flogging that he left him for dead.

“Now, Master Andres,” said the farmer, “call on the undoer of wrongs;
you will find he won’t undo that, though I am not sure that I have
quite done with you, for I have a good mind to flay you alive.” But at
last he untied him, and gave him leave to go look for his judge in
order to put the sentence pronounced into execution.

Andres went off rather down in the mouth, swearing he would go to look
for the valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha and tell him exactly what had
happened, and that all would have to be repaid him sevenfold; but for
all that, he went off weeping, while his master stood laughing.

Thus did the valiant Don Quixote right that wrong, and, thoroughly
satisfied with what had taken place, as he considered he had made a
very happy and noble beginning with his knighthood, he took the road
towards his village in perfect self-content, saying in a low voice,
“Well mayest thou this day call thyself fortunate above all on earth, O
Dulcinea del Toboso, fairest of the fair! since it has fallen to thy
lot to hold subject and submissive to thy full will and pleasure a
knight so renowned as is and will be Don Quixote of La Mancha, who, as
all the world knows, yesterday received the order of knighthood, and
hath to-day righted the greatest wrong and grievance that ever
injustice conceived and cruelty perpetrated: who hath to-day plucked
the rod from the hand of yonder ruthless oppressor so wantonly lashing
that tender child.”

He now came to a road branching in four directions, and immediately he
was reminded of those cross-roads where knights-errant used to stop to
consider which road they should take. In imitation of them he halted
for a while, and after having deeply considered it, he gave Rocinante
his head, submitting his own will to that of his hack, who followed out
his first intention, which was to make straight for his own stable.
After he had gone about two miles Don Quixote perceived a large party
of people, who, as afterwards appeared, were some Toledo traders, on
their way to buy silk at Murcia. There were six of them coming along
under their sunshades, with four servants mounted, and three muleteers
on foot. Scarcely had Don Quixote descried them when the fancy
possessed him that this must be some new adventure; and to help him to
imitate as far as he could those passages he had read of in his books,
here seemed to come one made on purpose, which he resolved to attempt.
So with a lofty bearing and determination he fixed himself firmly in
his stirrups, got his lance ready, brought his buckler before his
breast, and planting himself in the middle of the road, stood waiting
the approach of these knights-errant, for such he now considered and
held them to be; and when they had come near enough to see and hear, he
exclaimed with a haughty gesture, “All the world stand, unless all the
world confess that in all the world there is no maiden fairer than the
Empress of La Mancha, the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso.”

The traders halted at the sound of this language and the sight of the
strange figure that uttered it, and from both figure and language at
once guessed the craze of their owner; they wished, however, to learn
quietly what was the object of this confession that was demanded of
them, and one of them, who was rather fond of a joke and was very
sharp-witted, said to him, “Sir Knight, we do not know who this good
lady is that you speak of; show her to us, for, if she be of such
beauty as you suggest, with all our hearts and without any pressure we
will confess the truth that is on your part required of us.”

“If I were to show her to you,” replied Don Quixote, “what merit would
you have in confessing a truth so manifest? The essential point is that
without seeing her you must believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend
it; else ye have to do with me in battle, ill-conditioned, arrogant
rabble that ye are; and come ye on, one by one as the order of
knighthood requires, or all together as is the custom and vile usage of
your breed, here do I bide and await you relying on the justice of the
cause I maintain.”

“Sir Knight,” replied the trader, “I entreat your worship in the name
of this present company of princes, that, to save us from charging our
consciences with the confession of a thing we have never seen or heard
of, and one moreover so much to the prejudice of the Empresses and
Queens of the Alcarria and Estremadura, your worship will be pleased to
show us some portrait of this lady, though it be no bigger than a grain
of wheat; for by the thread one gets at the ball, and in this way we
shall be satisfied and easy, and you will be content and pleased; nay,
I believe we are already so far agreed with you that even though her
portrait should show her blind of one eye, and distilling vermilion and
sulphur from the other, we would nevertheless, to gratify your worship,
say all in her favour that you desire.”

“She distils nothing of the kind, vile rabble,” said Don Quixote,
burning with rage, “nothing of the kind, I say, only ambergris and
civet in cotton; nor is she one-eyed or humpbacked, but straighter than
a Guadarrama spindle: but ye must pay for the blasphemy ye have uttered
against beauty like that of my lady.”

And so saying, he charged with levelled lance against the one who had
spoken, with such fury and fierceness that, if luck had not contrived
that Rocinante should stumble midway and come down, it would have gone
hard with the rash trader. Down went Rocinante, and over went his
master, rolling along the ground for some distance; and when he tried
to rise he was unable, so encumbered was he with lance, buckler, spurs,
helmet, and the weight of his old armour; and all the while he was
struggling to get up he kept saying, “Fly not, cowards and caitiffs!
stay, for not by my fault, but my horse’s, am I stretched here.”



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One of the muleteers in attendance, who could not have had much good
nature in him, hearing the poor prostrate man blustering in this style,
was unable to refrain from giving him an answer on his ribs; and coming
up to him he seized his lance, and having broken it in pieces, with one
of them he began so to belabour our Don Quixote that, notwithstanding
and in spite of his armour, he milled him like a measure of wheat. His
masters called out not to lay on so hard and to leave him alone, but
the muleteer’s blood was up, and he did not care to drop the game until
he had vented the rest of his wrath, and gathering up the remaining
fragments of the lance he finished with a discharge upon the unhappy
victim, who all through the storm of sticks that rained on him never
ceased threatening heaven, and earth, and the brigands, for such they
seemed to him. At last the muleteer was tired, and the traders
continued their journey, taking with them matter for talk about the
poor fellow who had been cudgelled. He when he found himself alone made
another effort to rise; but if he was unable when whole and sound, how
was he to rise after having been thrashed and well-nigh knocked to
pieces? And yet he esteemed himself fortunate, as it seemed to him that
this was a regular knight-errant’s mishap, and entirely, he considered,
the fault of his horse. However, battered in body as he was, to rise
was beyond his power.



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CHAPTER V.
IN WHICH THE NARRATIVE OF OUR KNIGHT’S MISHAP IS CONTINUED




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Finding, then, that, in fact he could not move, he thought himself of
having recourse to his usual remedy, which was to think of some passage
in his books, and his craze brought to his mind that about Baldwin and
the Marquis of Mantua, when Carloto left him wounded on the
mountainside, a story known by heart by the children, not forgotten by
the young men, and lauded and even believed by the old folk; and for
all that not a whit truer than the miracles of Mahomet. This seemed to
him to fit exactly the case in which he found himself, so, making a
show of severe suffering, he began to roll on the ground and with
feeble breath repeat the very words which the wounded knight of the
wood is said to have uttered:

Where art thou, lady mine, that thou
My sorrow dost not rue?
Thou canst not know it, lady mine,
Or else thou art untrue.


And so he went on with the ballad as far as the lines:

O noble Marquis of Mantua,
My Uncle and liege lord!



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As chance would have it, when he had got to this line there happened to
come by a peasant from his own village, a neighbour of his, who had
been with a load of wheat to the mill, and he, seeing the man stretched
there, came up to him and asked him who he was and what was the matter
with him that he complained so dolefully.

Don Quixote was firmly persuaded that this was the Marquis of Mantua,
his uncle, so the only answer he made was to go on with his ballad, in
which he told the tale of his misfortune, and of the loves of the
Emperor’s son and his wife all exactly as the ballad sings it.

The peasant stood amazed at hearing such nonsense, and relieving him of
the visor, already battered to pieces by blows, he wiped his face,
which was covered with dust, and as soon as he had done so he
recognised him and said, “Señor Quixada” (for so he appears to have
been called when he was in his senses and had not yet changed from a
quiet country gentleman into a knight-errant), “who has brought your
worship to this pass?” But to all questions the other only went on with
his ballad.

Seeing this, the good man removed as well as he could his breastplate
and backpiece to see if he had any wound, but he could perceive no
blood nor any mark whatever. He then contrived to raise him from the
ground, and with no little difficulty hoisted him upon his ass, which
seemed to him to be the easiest mount for him; and collecting the arms,
even to the splinters of the lance, he tied them on Rocinante, and
leading him by the bridle and the ass by the halter he took the road
for the village, very sad to hear what absurd stuff Don Quixote was
talking.



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Nor was Don Quixote less so, for what with blows and bruises he could
not sit upright on the ass, and from time to time he sent up sighs to
heaven, so that once more he drove the peasant to ask what ailed him.
And it could have been only the devil himself that put into his head
tales to match his own adventures, for now, forgetting Baldwin, he
bethought himself of the Moor Abindarraez, when the Alcaide of
Antequera, Rodrigo de Narvaez, took him prisoner and carried him away
to his castle; so that when the peasant again asked him how he was and
what ailed him, he gave him for reply the same words and phrases that
the captive Abindarraez gave to Rodrigo de Narvaez, just as he had read
the story in the “Diana” of Jorge de Montemayor where it is written,
applying it to his own case so aptly that the peasant went along
cursing his fate that he had to listen to such a lot of nonsense; from
which, however, he came to the conclusion that his neighbour was mad,
and so made all haste to reach the village to escape the wearisomeness
of this harangue of Don Quixote’s; who, at the end of it, said, “Señor
Don Rodrigo de Narvaez, your worship must know that this fair Xarifa I
have mentioned is now the lovely Dulcinea del Toboso, for whom I have
done, am doing, and will do the most famous deeds of chivalry that in
this world have been seen, are to be seen, or ever shall be seen.”

To this the peasant answered, “Señor—sinner that I am!—cannot your
worship see that I am not Don Rodrigo de Narvaez nor the Marquis of
Mantua, but Pedro Alonso your neighbour, and that your worship is
neither Baldwin nor Abindarraez, but the worthy gentleman Señor
Quixada?”

“I know who I am,” replied Don Quixote, “and I know that I may be not
only those I have named, but all the Twelve Peers of France and even
all the Nine Worthies, since my achievements surpass all that they have
done all together and each of them on his own account.”

With this talk and more of the same kind they reached the village just
as night was beginning to fall, but the peasant waited until it was a
little later that the belaboured gentleman might not be seen riding in
such a miserable trim. When it was what seemed to him the proper time
he entered the village and went to Don Quixote’s house, which he found
all in confusion, and there were the curate and the village barber, who
were great friends of Don Quixote, and his housekeeper was saying to
them in a loud voice, “What does your worship think can have befallen
my master, Señor Licentiate Pero Perez?” for so the curate was called;
“it is three days now since anything has been seen of him, or the hack,
or the buckler, lance, or armour. Miserable me! I am certain of it, and
it is as true as that I was born to die, that these accursed books of
chivalry he has, and has got into the way of reading so constantly,
have upset his reason; for now I remember having often heard him saying
to himself that he would turn knight-errant and go all over the world
in quest of adventures. To the devil and Barabbas with such books, that
have brought to ruin in this way the finest understanding there was in
all La Mancha!”

The niece said the same, and, more: “You must know, Master
Nicholas”—for that was the name of the barber—“it was often my uncle’s
way to stay two days and nights together poring over these unholy books
of misventures, after which he would fling the book away and snatch up
his sword and fall to slashing the walls; and when he was tired out he
would say he had killed four giants like four towers; and the sweat
that flowed from him when he was weary he said was the blood of the
wounds he had received in battle; and then he would drink a great jug
of cold water and become calm and quiet, saying that this water was a
most precious potion which the sage Esquife, a great magician and
friend of his, had brought him. But I take all the blame upon myself
for never having told your worships of my uncle’s vagaries, that you
might put a stop to them before things had come to this pass, and burn
all these accursed books—for he has a great number—that richly deserve
to be burned like heretics.”

“So say I too,” said the curate, “and by my faith to-morrow shall not
pass without public judgment upon them, and may they be condemned to
the flames lest they lead those that read to behave as my good friend
seems to have behaved.”

All this the peasant heard, and from it he understood at last what was
the matter with his neighbour, so he began calling aloud, “Open, your
worships, to Señor Baldwin and to Señor the Marquis of Mantua, who
comes badly wounded, and to Señor Abindarraez, the Moor, whom the
valiant Rodrigo de Narvaez, the Alcaide of Antequera, brings captive.”

At these words they all hurried out, and when they recognised their
friend, master, and uncle, who had not yet dismounted from the ass
because he could not, they ran to embrace him.

“Hold!” said he, “for I am badly wounded through my horse’s fault;
carry me to bed, and if possible send for the wise Urganda to cure and
see to my wounds.”

“See there! plague on it!” cried the housekeeper at this: “did not my
heart tell the truth as to which foot my master went lame of? To bed
with your worship at once, and we will contrive to cure you here
without fetching that Hurgada. A curse I say once more, and a hundred
times more, on those books of chivalry that have brought your worship
to such a pass.”

They carried him to bed at once, and after searching for his wounds
could find none, but he said they were all bruises from having had a
severe fall with his horse Rocinante when in combat with ten giants,
the biggest and the boldest to be found on earth.

“So, so!” said the curate, “are there giants in the dance? By the sign
of the Cross I will burn them to-morrow before the day is over.”

They put a host of questions to Don Quixote, but his only answer to all
was—give him something to eat, and leave him to sleep, for that was
what he needed most. They did so, and the curate questioned the peasant
at great length as to how he had found Don Quixote. He told him, and
the nonsense he had talked when found and on the way home, all which
made the licentiate the more eager to do what he did the next day,
which was to summon his friend the barber, Master Nicholas, and go with
him to Don Quixote’s house.



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CHAPTER VI.
OF THE DIVERTING AND IMPORTANT SCRUTINY WHICH THE CURATE AND THE BARBER
MADE IN THE LIBRARY OF OUR INGENIOUS GENTLEMAN




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He was still sleeping; so the curate asked the niece for the keys of
the room where the books, the authors of all the mischief, were, and
right willingly she gave them. They all went in, the housekeeper with
them, and found more than a hundred volumes of big books very well
bound, and some other small ones. The moment the housekeeper saw them
she turned about and ran out of the room, and came back immediately
with a saucer of holy water and a sprinkler, saying, “Here, your
worship, señor licentiate, sprinkle this room; don’t leave any magician
of the many there are in these books to bewitch us in revenge for our
design of banishing them from the world.”

The simplicity of the housekeeper made the licentiate laugh, and he
directed the barber to give him the books one by one to see what they
were about, as there might be some to be found among them that did not
deserve the penalty of fire.

“No,” said the niece, “there is no reason for showing mercy to any of
them; they have every one of them done mischief; better fling them out
of the window into the court and make a pile of them and set fire to
them; or else carry them into the yard, and there a bonfire can be made
without the smoke giving any annoyance.” The housekeeper said the same,
so eager were they both for the slaughter of those innocents, but the
curate would not agree to it without first reading at any rate the
titles.

The first that Master Nicholas put into his hand was “The four books of
Amadis of Gaul.” “This seems a mysterious thing,” said the curate,
“for, as I have heard say, this was the first book of chivalry printed
in Spain, and from this all the others derive their birth and origin;
so it seems to me that we ought inexorably to condemn it to the flames
as the founder of so vile a sect.”

“Nay, sir,” said the barber, “I too, have heard say that this is the
best of all the books of this kind that have been written, and so, as
something singular in its line, it ought to be pardoned.”

“True,” said the curate; “and for that reason let its life be spared
for the present. Let us see that other which is next to it.”

“It is,” said the barber, “the ‘Sergas de Esplandian,’ the lawful son
of Amadis of Gaul.”

“Then verily,” said the curate, “the merit of the father must not be
put down to the account of the son. Take it, mistress housekeeper; open
the window and fling it into the yard and lay the foundation of the
pile for the bonfire we are to make.”

The housekeeper obeyed with great satisfaction, and the worthy
“Esplandian” went flying into the yard to await with all patience the
fire that was in store for him.

“Proceed,” said the curate.

“This that comes next,” said the barber, “is ‘Amadis of Greece,’ and,
indeed, I believe all those on this side are of the same Amadis
lineage.”

“Then to the yard with the whole of them,” said the curate; “for to
have the burning of Queen Pintiquiniestra, and the shepherd Darinel and
his eclogues, and the bedevilled and involved discourses of his author,
I would burn with them the father who begot me if he were going about
in the guise of a knight-errant.”

“I am of the same mind,” said the barber.

“And so am I,” added the niece.

“In that case,” said the housekeeper, “here, into the yard with them!”

They were handed to her, and as there were many of them, she spared
herself the staircase, and flung them down out of the window.

“Who is that tub there?” said the curate.

“This,” said the barber, “is ‘Don Olivante de Laura.’”

“The author of that book,” said the curate, “was the same that wrote
‘The Garden of Flowers,’ and truly there is no deciding which of the
two books is the more truthful, or, to put it better, the less lying;
all I can say is, send this one into the yard for a swaggering fool.”

“This that follows is ‘Florismarte of Hircania,’” said the barber.

“Señor Florismarte here?” said the curate; “then by my faith he must
take up his quarters in the yard, in spite of his marvellous birth and
visionary adventures, for the stiffness and dryness of his style
deserve nothing else; into the yard with him and the other, mistress
housekeeper.”

“With all my heart, señor,” said she, and executed the order with great
delight.

“This,” said the barber, “is ‘The Knight Platir.’”

“An old book that,” said the curate, “but I find no reason for clemency
in it; send it after the others without appeal;” which was done.

Another book was opened, and they saw it was entitled, “The Knight of
the Cross.”

“For the sake of the holy name this book has,” said the curate, “its
ignorance might be excused; but then, they say, ‘behind the cross
there’s the devil;’ to the fire with it.”

Taking down another book, the barber said, “This is ‘The Mirror of
Chivalry.’”

“I know his worship,” said the curate; “that is where Señor Reinaldos
of Montalvan figures with his friends and comrades, greater thieves
than Cacus, and the Twelve Peers of France with the veracious historian
Turpin; however, I am not for condemning them to more than perpetual
banishment, because, at any rate, they have some share in the invention
of the famous Matteo Boiardo, whence too the Christian poet Ludovico
Ariosto wove his web, to whom, if I find him here, and speaking any
language but his own, I shall show no respect whatever; but if he
speaks his own tongue I will put him upon my head.”

“Well, I have him in Italian,” said the barber, “but I do not
understand him.”

“Nor would it be well that you should understand him,” said the curate,
“and on that score we might have excused the Captain if he had not
brought him into Spain and turned him into Castilian. He robbed him of
a great deal of his natural force, and so do all those who try to turn
books written in verse into another language, for, with all the pains
they take and all the cleverness they show, they never can reach the
level of the originals as they were first produced. In short, I say
that this book, and all that may be found treating of those French
affairs, should be thrown into or deposited in some dry well, until
after more consideration it is settled what is to be done with them;
excepting always one ‘Bernardo del Carpio’ that is going about, and
another called ‘Roncesvalles;’ for these, if they come into my hands,
shall pass at once into those of the housekeeper, and from hers into
the fire without any reprieve.”

To all this the barber gave his assent, and looked upon it as right and
proper, being persuaded that the curate was so staunch to the Faith and
loyal to the Truth that he would not for the world say anything opposed
to them. Opening another book he saw it was “Palmerin de Oliva,” and
beside it was another called “Palmerin of England,” seeing which the
licentiate said, “Let the Olive be made firewood of at once and burned
until no ashes even are left; and let that Palm of England be kept and
preserved as a thing that stands alone, and let such another case be
made for it as that which Alexander found among the spoils of Darius
and set aside for the safe keeping of the works of the poet Homer. This
book, gossip, is of authority for two reasons, first because it is very
good, and secondly because it is said to have been written by a wise
and witty king of Portugal. All the adventures at the Castle of
Miraguarda are excellent and of admirable contrivance, and the language
is polished and clear, studying and observing the style befitting the
speaker with propriety and judgment. So then, provided it seems good to
you, Master Nicholas, I say let this and ‘Amadis of Gaul’ be remitted
the penalty of fire, and as for all the rest, let them perish without
further question or query.”

“Nay, gossip,” said the barber, “for this that I have here is the
famous ‘Don Belianis.’”

“Well,” said the curate, “that and the second, third, and fourth parts
all stand in need of a little rhubarb to purge their excess of bile,
and they must be cleared of all that stuff about the Castle of Fame and
other greater affectations, to which end let them be allowed the
over-seas term, and, according as they mend, so shall mercy or justice
be meted out to them; and in the mean time, gossip, do you keep them in
your house and let no one read them.”

“With all my heart,” said the barber; and not caring to tire himself
with reading more books of chivalry, he told the housekeeper to take
all the big ones and throw them into the yard. It was not said to one
dull or deaf, but to one who enjoyed burning them more than weaving the
broadest and finest web that could be; and seizing about eight at a
time, she flung them out of the window.

In carrying so many together she let one fall at the feet of the
barber, who took it up, curious to know whose it was, and found it
said, “History of the Famous Knight, Tirante el Blanco.”

“God bless me!” said the curate with a shout, “‘Tirante el Blanco’
here! Hand it over, gossip, for in it I reckon I have found a treasury
of enjoyment and a mine of recreation. Here is Don Kyrieleison of
Montalvan, a valiant knight, and his brother Thomas of Montalvan, and
the knight Fonseca, with the battle the bold Tirante fought with the
mastiff, and the witticisms of the damsel Placerdemivida, and the loves
and wiles of the widow Reposada, and the empress in love with the
squire Hipolito—in truth, gossip, by right of its style it is the best
book in the world. Here knights eat and sleep, and die in their beds,
and make their wills before dying, and a great deal more of which there
is nothing in all the other books. Nevertheless, I say he who wrote it,
for deliberately composing such fooleries, deserves to be sent to the
galleys for life. Take it home with you and read it, and you will see
that what I have said is true.”

“As you will,” said the barber; “but what are we to do with these
little books that are left?”

“These must be, not chivalry, but poetry,” said the curate; and opening
one he saw it was the “Diana” of Jorge de Montemayor, and, supposing
all the others to be of the same sort, “these,” he said, “do not
deserve to be burned like the others, for they neither do nor can do
the mischief the books of chivalry have done, being books of
entertainment that can hurt no one.”

“Ah, señor!” said the niece, “your worship had better order these to be
burned as well as the others; for it would be no wonder if, after being
cured of his chivalry disorder, my uncle, by reading these, took a
fancy to turn shepherd and range the woods and fields singing and
piping; or, what would be still worse, to turn poet, which they say is
an incurable and infectious malady.”

“The damsel is right,” said the curate, “and it will be well to put
this stumbling-block and temptation out of our friend’s way. To begin,
then, with the ‘Diana’ of Montemayor. I am of opinion it should not be
burned, but that it should be cleared of all that about the sage
Felicia and the magic water, and of almost all the longer pieces of
verse: let it keep, and welcome, its prose and the honour of being the
first of books of the kind.”

“This that comes next,” said the barber, “is the ‘Diana,’ entitled the
‘Second Part, by the Salamancan,’ and this other has the same title,
and its author is Gil Polo.”

“As for that of the Salamancan,” replied the curate, “let it go to
swell the number of the condemned in the yard, and let Gil Polo’s be
preserved as if it came from Apollo himself: but get on, gossip, and
make haste, for it is growing late.”

“This book,” said the barber, opening another, “is the ten books of the
‘Fortune of Love,’ written by Antonio de Lofraso, a Sardinian poet.”

“By the orders I have received,” said the curate, “since Apollo has
been Apollo, and the Muses have been Muses, and poets have been poets,
so droll and absurd a book as this has never been written, and in its
way it is the best and the most singular of all of this species that
have as yet appeared, and he who has not read it may be sure he has
never read what is delightful. Give it here, gossip, for I make more
account of having found it than if they had given me a cassock of
Florence stuff.”

He put it aside with extreme satisfaction, and the barber went on,
“These that come next are ‘The Shepherd of Iberia,’ ‘Nymphs of
Henares,’ and ‘The Enlightenment of Jealousy.’”

“Then all we have to do,” said the curate, “is to hand them over to the
secular arm of the housekeeper, and ask me not why, or we shall never
have done.”

“This next is the ‘Pastor de Fílida.’”

“No Pastor that,” said the curate, “but a highly polished courtier; let
it be preserved as a precious jewel.”

“This large one here,” said the barber, “is called ‘The Treasury of
various Poems.’”

“If there were not so many of them,” said the curate, “they would be
more relished: this book must be weeded and cleansed of certain
vulgarities which it has with its excellences; let it be preserved
because the author is a friend of mine, and out of respect for other
more heroic and loftier works that he has written.”

“This,” continued the barber, “is the ‘Cancionero’ of Lopez de
Maldonado.”

“The author of that book, too,” said the curate, “is a great friend of
mine, and his verses from his own mouth are the admiration of all who
hear them, for such is the sweetness of his voice that he enchants when
he chants them: it gives rather too much of its eclogues, but what is
good was never yet plentiful: let it be kept with those that have been
set apart. But what book is that next it?”

“The ‘Galatea’ of Miguel de Cervantes,” said the barber.

“That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to
my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His
book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but
brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it
promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full
measure of grace that is now denied it; and in the mean time do you,
señor gossip, keep it shut up in your own quarters.”

“Very good,” said the barber; “and here come three together, the
‘Araucana’ of Don Alonso de Ercilla, the ‘Austriada’ of Juan Rufo,
Justice of Cordova, and the ‘Montserrate’ of Christobal de Virués, the
Valencian poet.”

“These three books,” said the curate, “are the best that have been
written in Castilian in heroic verse, and they may compare with the
most famous of Italy; let them be preserved as the richest treasures of
poetry that Spain possesses.”

The curate was tired and would not look into any more books, and so he
decided that, “contents uncertified,” all the rest should be burned;
but just then the barber held open one, called “The Tears of Angelica.”

“I should have shed tears myself,” said the curate when he heard the
title, “had I ordered that book to be burned, for its author was one of
the famous poets of the world, not to say of Spain, and was very happy
in the translation of some of Ovid’s fables.”



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CHAPTER VII.
OF THE SECOND SALLY OF OUR WORTHY KNIGHT DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA




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At this instant Don Quixote began shouting out, “Here, here, valiant
knights! here is need for you to put forth the might of your strong
arms, for they of the Court are gaining the mastery in the tourney!”
Called away by this noise and outcry, they proceeded no farther with
the scrutiny of the remaining books, and so it is thought that “The
Carolea,” “The Lion of Spain,” and “The Deeds of the Emperor,” written
by Don Luis de Ávila, went to the fire unseen and unheard; for no doubt
they were among those that remained, and perhaps if the curate had seen
them they would not have undergone so severe a sentence.

When they reached Don Quixote he was already out of bed, and was still
shouting and raving, and slashing and cutting all round, as wide awake
as if he had never slept.

They closed with him and by force got him back to bed, and when he had
become a little calm, addressing the curate, he said to him, “Of a
truth, Señor Archbishop Turpin, it is a great disgrace for us who call
ourselves the Twelve Peers, so carelessly to allow the knights of the
Court to gain the victory in this tourney, we the adventurers having
carried off the honour on the three former days.”

“Hush, gossip,” said the curate; “please God, the luck may turn, and
what is lost to-day may be won to-morrow; for the present let your
worship have a care of your health, for it seems to me that you are
over-fatigued, if not badly wounded.”

“Wounded no,” said Don Quixote, “but bruised and battered no doubt, for
that bastard Don Roland has cudgelled me with the trunk of an oak tree,
and all for envy, because he sees that I alone rival him in his
achievements. But I should not call myself Reinaldos of Montalvan did
he not pay me for it in spite of all his enchantments as soon as I rise
from this bed. For the present let them bring me something to eat, for
that, I feel, is what will be more to my purpose, and leave it to me to
avenge myself.”

They did as he wished; they gave him something to eat, and once more he
fell asleep, leaving them marvelling at his madness.

That night the housekeeper burned to ashes all the books that were in
the yard and in the whole house; and some must have been consumed that
deserved preservation in everlasting archives, but their fate and the
laziness of the examiner did not permit it, and so in them was verified
the proverb that the innocent suffer for the guilty.

One of the remedies which the curate and the barber immediately applied
to their friend’s disorder was to wall up and plaster the room where
the books were, so that when he got up he should not find them
(possibly the cause being removed the effect might cease), and they
might say that a magician had carried them off, room and all; and this
was done with all despatch. Two days later Don Quixote got up, and the
first thing he did was to go and look at his books, and not finding the
room where he had left it, he wandered from side to side looking for
it. He came to the place where the door used to be, and tried it with
his hands, and turned and twisted his eyes in every direction without
saying a word; but after a good while he asked his housekeeper
whereabouts was the room that held his books.

The housekeeper, who had been already well instructed in what she was
to answer, said, “What room or what nothing is it that your worship is
looking for? There are neither room nor books in this house now, for
the devil himself has carried all away.”

“It was not the devil,” said the niece, “but a magician who came on a
cloud one night after the day your worship left this, and dismounting
from a serpent that he rode he entered the room, and what he did there
I know not, but after a little while he made off, flying through the
roof, and left the house full of smoke; and when we went to see what he
had done we saw neither book nor room: but we remember very well, the
housekeeper and I, that on leaving, the old villain said in a loud
voice that, for a private grudge he owed the owner of the books and the
room, he had done mischief in that house that would be discovered
by-and-by: he said too that his name was the Sage Muñaton.”

“He must have said Friston,” said Don Quixote.

“I don’t know whether he called himself Friston or Friton,” said the
housekeeper, “I only know that his name ended with ‘ton.’”

“So it does,” said Don Quixote, “and he is a sage magician, a great
enemy of mine, who has a spite against me because he knows by his arts
and lore that in process of time I am to engage in single combat with a
knight whom he befriends and that I am to conquer, and he will be
unable to prevent it; and for this reason he endeavours to do me all
the ill turns that he can; but I promise him it will be hard for him to
oppose or avoid what is decreed by Heaven.”

“Who doubts that?” said the niece; “but, uncle, who mixes you up in
these quarrels? Would it not be better to remain at peace in your own
house instead of roaming the world looking for better bread than ever
came of wheat, never reflecting that many go for wool and come back
shorn?”

“Oh, niece of mine,” replied Don Quixote, “how much astray art thou in
thy reckoning: ere they shear me I shall have plucked away and stripped
off the beards of all who dare to touch only the tip of a hair of
mine.”

The two were unwilling to make any further answer, as they saw that his
anger was kindling.

In short, then, he remained at home fifteen days very quietly without
showing any signs of a desire to take up with his former delusions, and
during this time he held lively discussions with his two gossips, the
curate and the barber, on the point he maintained, that knights-errant
were what the world stood most in need of, and that in him was to be
accomplished the revival of knight-errantry. The curate sometimes
contradicted him, sometimes agreed with him, for if he had not observed
this precaution he would have been unable to bring him to reason.

Meanwhile Don Quixote worked upon a farm labourer, a neighbour of his,
an honest man (if indeed that title can be given to him who is poor),
but with very little wit in his pate. In a word, he so talked him over,
and with such persuasions and promises, that the poor clown made up his
mind to sally forth with him and serve him as esquire. Don Quixote,
among other things, told him he ought to be ready to go with him
gladly, because any moment an adventure might occur that might win an
island in the twinkling of an eye and leave him governor of it. On
these and the like promises Sancho Panza (for so the labourer was
called) left wife and children, and engaged himself as esquire to his
neighbour.



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Don Quixote next set about getting some money; and selling one thing
and pawning another, and making a bad bargain in every case, he got
together a fair sum. He provided himself with a buckler, which he
begged as a loan from a friend, and, restoring his battered helmet as
best he could, he warned his squire Sancho of the day and hour he meant
to set out, that he might provide himself with what he thought most
needful. Above all, he charged him to take alforjas with him. The other
said he would, and that he meant to take also a very good ass he had,
as he was not much given to going on foot. About the ass, Don Quixote
hesitated a little, trying whether he could call to mind any
knight-errant taking with him an esquire mounted on ass-back, but no
instance occurred to his memory. For all that, however, he determined
to take him, intending to furnish him with a more honourable mount when
a chance of it presented itself, by appropriating the horse of the
first discourteous knight he encountered. Himself he provided with
shirts and such other things as he could, according to the advice the
host had given him; all which being done, without taking leave, Sancho
Panza of his wife and children, or Don Quixote of his housekeeper and
niece, they sallied forth unseen by anybody from the village one night,
and made such good way in the course of it that by daylight they held
themselves safe from discovery, even should search be made for them.

Sancho rode on his ass like a patriarch, with his alforjas and bota,
and longing to see himself soon governor of the island his master had
promised him. Don Quixote decided upon taking the same route and road
he had taken on his first journey, that over the Campo de Montiel,
which he travelled with less discomfort than on the last occasion, for,
as it was early morning and the rays of the sun fell on them obliquely,
the heat did not distress them.

And now said Sancho Panza to his master, “Your worship will take care,
Señor Knight-errant, not to forget about the island you have promised
me, for be it ever so big I’ll be equal to governing it.”

To which Don Quixote replied, “Thou must know, friend Sancho Panza,
that it was a practice very much in vogue with the knights-errant of
old to make their squires governors of the islands or kingdoms they
won, and I am determined that there shall be no failure on my part in
so liberal a custom; on the contrary, I mean to improve upon it, for
they sometimes, and perhaps most frequently, waited until their squires
were old, and then when they had had enough of service and hard days
and worse nights, they gave them some title or other, of count, or at
the most marquis, of some valley or province more or less; but if thou
livest and I live, it may well be that before six days are over, I may
have won some kingdom that has others dependent upon it, which will be
just the thing to enable thee to be crowned king of one of them. Nor
needst thou count this wonderful, for things and chances fall to the
lot of such knights in ways so unexampled and unexpected that I might
easily give thee even more than I promise thee.”

“In that case,” said Sancho Panza, “if I should become a king by one of
those miracles your worship speaks of, even Juana Gutierrez, my old
woman, would come to be queen and my children infantes.”

“Well, who doubts it?” said Don Quixote.

“I doubt it,” replied Sancho Panza, “because for my part I am persuaded
that though God should shower down kingdoms upon earth, not one of them
would fit the head of Mari Gutierrez. Let me tell you, señor, she is
not worth two maravedis for a queen; countess will fit her better, and
that only with God’s help.”

“Leave it to God, Sancho,” returned Don Quixote, “for he will give her
what suits her best; but do not undervalue thyself so much as to come
to be content with anything less than being governor of a province.”

“I will not, señor,” answered Sancho, “specially as I have a man of
such quality for a master in your worship, who will know how to give me
all that will be suitable for me and that I can bear.”



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CHAPTER VIII.
OF THE GOOD FORTUNE WHICH THE VALIANT DON QUIXOTE HAD IN THE TERRIBLE
AND UNDREAMT-OF ADVENTURE OF THE WINDMILLS, WITH OTHER OCCURRENCES
WORTHY TO BE FITLY RECORDED




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At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that
there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to
his squire, “Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could
have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza,
where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I
mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin
to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s
good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

“What giants?” said Sancho Panza.

“Those thou seest there,” answered his master, “with the long arms, and
some have them nearly two leagues long.”

“Look, your worship,” said Sancho; “what we see there are not giants
but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned
by the wind make the millstone go.”

“It is easy to see,” replied Don Quixote, “that thou art not used to
this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid,
away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage
them in fierce and unequal combat.”

So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the
cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly
they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however,
was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of
Sancho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them
shouting, “Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight
attacks you.”

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to
move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, “Though ye flourish more arms
than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me.”

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady
Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in
rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante’s fullest
gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as
he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with
such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse
and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition.
Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when
he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante
fallen with him.



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“God bless me!” said Sancho, “did I not tell your worship to mind what
you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have
made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in
his head.”

“Hush, friend Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “the fortunes of war more
than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I
think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off
my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob
me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me;
but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good
sword.”



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“God order it as he may,” said Sancho Panza, and helping him to rise
got him up again on Rocinante, whose shoulder was half out; and then,
discussing the late adventure, they followed the road to Puerto Lapice,
for there, said Don Quixote, they could not fail to find adventures in
abundance and variety, as it was a great thoroughfare. For all that, he
was much grieved at the loss of his lance, and saying so to his squire,
he added, “I remember having read how a Spanish knight, Diego Perez de
Vargas by name, having broken his sword in battle, tore from an oak a
ponderous bough or branch, and with it did such things that day, and
pounded so many Moors, that he got the surname of Machuca, and he and
his descendants from that day forth were called Vargas y Machuca. I
mention this because from the first oak I see I mean to rend such
another branch, large and stout like that, with which I am determined
and resolved to do such deeds that thou mayest deem thyself very
fortunate in being found worthy to come and see them, and be an
eyewitness of things that will with difficulty be believed.”

“Be that as God will,” said Sancho, “I believe it all as your worship
says it; but straighten yourself a little, for you seem all on one
side, may be from the shaking of the fall.”

“That is the truth,” said Don Quixote, “and if I make no complaint of
the pain it is because knights-errant are not permitted to complain of
any wound, even though their bowels be coming out through it.”

“If so,” said Sancho, “I have nothing to say; but God knows I would
rather your worship complained when anything ailed you. For my part, I
confess I must complain however small the ache may be; unless this rule
about not complaining extends to the squires of knights-errant also.”

Don Quixote could not help laughing at his squire’s simplicity, and he
assured him he might complain whenever and however he chose, just as he
liked, for, so far, he had never read of anything to the contrary in
the order of knighthood.

Sancho bade him remember it was dinner-time, to which his master
answered that he wanted nothing himself just then, but that _he_ might
eat when he had a mind. With this permission Sancho settled himself as
comfortably as he could on his beast, and taking out of the alforjas
what he had stowed away in them, he jogged along behind his master
munching deliberately, and from time to time taking a pull at the bota
with a relish that the thirstiest tapster in Malaga might have envied;
and while he went on in this way, gulping down draught after draught,
he never gave a thought to any of the promises his master had made him,
nor did he rate it as hardship but rather as recreation going in quest
of adventures, however dangerous they might be. Finally they passed the
night among some trees, from one of which Don Quixote plucked a dry
branch to serve him after a fashion as a lance, and fixed on it the
head he had removed from the broken one. All that night Don Quixote lay
awake thinking of his lady Dulcinea, in order to conform to what he had
read in his books, how many a night in the forests and deserts knights
used to lie sleepless supported by the memory of their mistresses. Not
so did Sancho Panza spend it, for having his stomach full of something
stronger than chicory water he made but one sleep of it, and, if his
master had not called him, neither the rays of the sun beating on his
face nor all the cheery notes of the birds welcoming the approach of
day would have had power to waken him. On getting up he tried the bota
and found it somewhat less full than the night before, which grieved
his heart because they did not seem to be on the way to remedy the
deficiency readily. Don Quixote did not care to break his fast, for, as
has been already said, he confined himself to savoury recollections for
nourishment.

They returned to the road they had set out with, leading to Puerto
Lapice, and at three in the afternoon they came in sight of it. “Here,
brother Sancho Panza,” said Don Quixote when he saw it, “we may plunge
our hands up to the elbows in what they call adventures; but observe,
even shouldst thou see me in the greatest danger in the world, thou
must not put a hand to thy sword in my defence, unless indeed thou
perceivest that those who assail me are rabble or base folk; for in
that case thou mayest very properly aid me; but if they be knights it
is on no account permitted or allowed thee by the laws of knighthood to
help me until thou hast been dubbed a knight.”

“Most certainly, señor,” replied Sancho, “your worship shall be fully
obeyed in this matter; all the more as of myself I am peaceful and no
friend to mixing in strife and quarrels: it is true that as regards the
defence of my own person I shall not give much heed to those laws, for
laws human and divine allow each one to defend himself against any
assailant whatever.”

“That I grant,” said Don Quixote, “but in this matter of aiding me
against knights thou must put a restraint upon thy natural
impetuosity.”

“I will do so, I promise you,” answered Sancho, “and will keep this
precept as carefully as Sunday.”

While they were thus talking there appeared on the road two friars of
the order of St. Benedict, mounted on two dromedaries, for not less
tall were the two mules they rode on. They wore travelling spectacles
and carried sunshades; and behind them came a coach attended by four or
five persons on horseback and two muleteers on foot. In the coach there
was, as afterwards appeared, a Biscay lady on her way to Seville, where
her husband was about to take passage for the Indies with an
appointment of high honour. The friars, though going the same road,
were not in her company; but the moment Don Quixote perceived them he
said to his squire, “Either I am mistaken, or this is going to be the
most famous adventure that has ever been seen, for those black bodies
we see there must be, and doubtless are, magicians who are carrying off
some stolen princess in that coach, and with all my might I must undo
this wrong.”

“This will be worse than the windmills,” said Sancho. “Look, señor;
those are friars of St. Benedict, and the coach plainly belongs to some
travellers: I tell you to mind well what you are about and don’t let
the devil mislead you.”

“I have told thee already, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “that on the
subject of adventures thou knowest little. What I say is the truth, as
thou shalt see presently.”

So saying, he advanced and posted himself in the middle of the road
along which the friars were coming, and as soon as he thought they had
come near enough to hear what he said, he cried aloud, “Devilish and
unnatural beings, release instantly the highborn princesses whom you
are carrying off by force in this coach, else prepare to meet a speedy
death as the just punishment of your evil deeds.”

The friars drew rein and stood wondering at the appearance of Don
Quixote as well as at his words, to which they replied, “Señor
Caballero, we are not devilish or unnatural, but two brothers of St.
Benedict following our road, nor do we know whether or not there are
any captive princesses coming in this coach.”

“No soft words with me, for I know you, lying rabble,” said Don
Quixote, and without waiting for a reply he spurred Rocinante and with
levelled lance charged the first friar with such fury and
determination, that, if the friar had not flung himself off the mule,
he would have brought him to the ground against his will, and sore
wounded, if not killed outright. The second brother, seeing how his
comrade was treated, drove his heels into his castle of a mule and made
off across the country faster than the wind.

Sancho Panza, when he saw the friar on the ground, dismounting briskly
from his ass, rushed towards him and began to strip off his gown. At
that instant the friars’ muleteers came up and asked what he was
stripping him for. Sancho answered them that this fell to him lawfully
as spoil of the battle which his lord Don Quixote had won. The
muleteers, who had no idea of a joke and did not understand all this
about battles and spoils, seeing that Don Quixote was some distance off
talking to the travellers in the coach, fell upon Sancho, knocked him
down, and leaving hardly a hair in his beard, belaboured him with kicks
and left him stretched breathless and senseless on the ground; and
without any more delay helped the friar to mount, who, trembling,
terrified, and pale, as soon as he found himself in the saddle, spurred
after his companion, who was standing at a distance looking on,
watching the result of the onslaught; then, not caring to wait for the
end of the affair just begun, they pursued their journey making more
crosses than if they had the devil after them.

Don Quixote was, as has been said, speaking to the lady in the coach:
“Your beauty, lady mine,” said he, “may now dispose of your person as
may be most in accordance with your pleasure, for the pride of your
ravishers lies prostrate on the ground through this strong arm of mine;
and lest you should be pining to know the name of your deliverer, know
that I am called Don Quixote of La Mancha, knight-errant and
adventurer, and captive to the peerless and beautiful lady Dulcinea del
Toboso: and in return for the service you have received of me I ask no
more than that you should return to El Toboso, and on my behalf present
yourself before that lady and tell her what I have done to set you
free.”

One of the squires in attendance upon the coach, a Biscayan, was
listening to all Don Quixote was saying, and, perceiving that he would
not allow the coach to go on, but was saying it must return at once to
El Toboso, he made at him, and seizing his lance addressed him in bad
Castilian and worse Biscayan after his fashion, “Begone, caballero, and
ill go with thee; by the God that made me, unless thou quittest coach,
slayest thee as art here a Biscayan.”

Don Quixote understood him quite well, and answered him very quietly,
“If thou wert a knight, as thou art none, I should have already
chastised thy folly and rashness, miserable creature.” To which the
Biscayan returned, “I no gentleman!—I swear to God thou liest as I am
Christian: if thou droppest lance and drawest sword, soon shalt thou
see thou art carrying water to the cat: Biscayan on land, hidalgo at
sea, hidalgo at the devil, and look, if thou sayest otherwise thou
liest.”

“‘“You will see presently,” said Agrajes,’” replied Don Quixote; and
throwing his lance on the ground he drew his sword, braced his buckler
on his arm, and attacked the Biscayan, bent upon taking his life.

The Biscayan, when he saw him coming on, though he wished to dismount
from his mule, in which, being one of those sorry ones let out for
hire, he had no confidence, had no choice but to draw his sword; it was
lucky for him, however, that he was near the coach, from which he was
able to snatch a cushion that served him for a shield; and they went at
one another as if they had been two mortal enemies. The others strove
to make peace between them, but could not, for the Biscayan declared in
his disjointed phrase that if they did not let him finish his battle he
would kill his mistress and everyone that strove to prevent him. The
lady in the coach, amazed and terrified at what she saw, ordered the
coachman to draw aside a little, and set herself to watch this severe
struggle, in the course of which the Biscayan smote Don Quixote a
mighty stroke on the shoulder over the top of his buckler, which, given
to one without armour, would have cleft him to the waist. Don Quixote,
feeling the weight of this prodigious blow, cried aloud, saying, “O
lady of my soul, Dulcinea, flower of beauty, come to the aid of this
your knight, who, in fulfilling his obligations to your beauty, finds
himself in this extreme peril.” To say this, to lift his sword, to
shelter himself well behind his buckler, and to assail the Biscayan was
the work of an instant, determined as he was to venture all upon a
single blow. The Biscayan, seeing him come on in this way, was
convinced of his courage by his spirited bearing, and resolved to
follow his example, so he waited for him keeping well under cover of
his cushion, being unable to execute any sort of manoeuvre with his
mule, which, dead tired and never meant for this kind of game, could
not stir a step.

On, then, as aforesaid, came Don Quixote against the wary Biscayan,
with uplifted sword and a firm intention of splitting him in half,
while on his side the Biscayan waited for him sword in hand, and under
the protection of his cushion; and all present stood trembling, waiting
in suspense the result of blows such as threatened to fall, and the
lady in the coach and the rest of her following were making a thousand
vows and offerings to all the images and shrines of Spain, that God
might deliver her squire and all of them from this great peril in which
they found themselves. But it spoils all, that at this point and crisis
the author of the history leaves this battle impending, giving as
excuse that he could find nothing more written about these achievements
of Don Quixote than what has been already set forth. It is true the
second author of this work was unwilling to believe that a history so
curious could have been allowed to fall under the sentence of oblivion,
or that the wits of La Mancha could have been so undiscerning as not to
preserve in their archives or registries some documents referring to
this famous knight; and this being his persuasion, he did not despair
of finding the conclusion of this pleasant history, which, heaven
favouring him, he did find in a way that shall be related in the Second
Part.



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CHAPTER IX.
IN WHICH IS CONCLUDED AND FINISHED THE TERRIFIC BATTLE BETWEEN THE
GALLANT BISCAYAN AND THE VALIANT MANCHEGAN



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Full Size




In the First Part of this history we left the valiant Biscayan and the
renowned Don Quixote with drawn swords uplifted, ready to deliver two
such furious slashing blows that if they had fallen full and fair they
would at least have split and cleft them asunder from top to toe and
laid them open like a pomegranate; and at this so critical point the
delightful history came to a stop and stood cut short without any
intimation from the author where what was missing was to be found.

This distressed me greatly, because the pleasure derived from having
read such a small portion turned to vexation at the thought of the poor
chance that presented itself of finding the large part that, so it
seemed to me, was missing of such an interesting tale. It appeared to
me to be a thing impossible and contrary to all precedent that so good
a knight should have been without some sage to undertake the task of
writing his marvellous achievements; a thing that was never wanting to
any of those knights-errant who, they say, went after adventures; for
every one of them had one or two sages as if made on purpose, who not
only recorded their deeds but described their most trifling thoughts
and follies, however secret they might be; and such a good knight could
not have been so unfortunate as not to have what Platir and others like
him had in abundance. And so I could not bring myself to believe that
such a gallant tale had been left maimed and mutilated, and I laid the
blame on Time, the devourer and destroyer of all things, that had
either concealed or consumed it.

On the other hand, it struck me that, inasmuch as among his books there
had been found such modern ones as “The Enlightenment of Jealousy” and
the “Nymphs and Shepherds of Henares,” his story must likewise be
modern, and that though it might not be written, it might exist in the
memory of the people of his village and of those in the neighbourhood.
This reflection kept me perplexed and longing to know really and truly
the whole life and wondrous deeds of our famous Spaniard, Don Quixote
of La Mancha, light and mirror of Manchegan chivalry, and the first
that in our age and in these so evil days devoted himself to the labour
and exercise of the arms of knight-errantry, righting wrongs,
succouring widows, and protecting damsels of that sort that used to
ride about, whip in hand, on their palfreys, with all their virginity
about them, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley—for, if it
were not for some ruffian, or boor with a hood and hatchet, or
monstrous giant, that forced them, there were in days of yore damsels
that at the end of eighty years, in all which time they had never slept
a day under a roof, went to their graves as much maids as the mothers
that bore them. I say, then, that in these and other respects our
gallant Don Quixote is worthy of everlasting and notable praise, nor
should it be withheld even from me for the labour and pains spent in
searching for the conclusion of this delightful history; though I know
well that if Heaven, chance and good fortune had not helped me, the
world would have remained deprived of an entertainment and pleasure
that for a couple of hours or so may well occupy him who shall read it
attentively. The discovery of it occurred in this way.

One day, as I was in the Alcana of Toledo, a boy came up to sell some
pamphlets and old papers to a silk mercer, and, as I am fond of reading
even the very scraps of paper in the streets, led by this natural bent
of mine I took up one of the pamphlets the boy had for sale, and saw
that it was in characters which I recognised as Arabic, and as I was
unable to read them though I could recognise them, I looked about to
see if there were any Spanish-speaking Morisco at hand to read them for
me; nor was there any great difficulty in finding such an interpreter,
for even had I sought one for an older and better language I should
have found him. In short, chance provided me with one, who when I told
him what I wanted and put the book into his hands, opened it in the
middle and after reading a little in it began to laugh. I asked him
what he was laughing at, and he replied that it was at something the
book had written in the margin by way of a note. I bade him tell it to
me; and he still laughing said, “In the margin, as I told you, this is
written: ‘_This Dulcinea del Toboso so often mentioned in this history,
had, they say, the best hand of any woman in all La Mancha for salting
pigs_.’”

When I heard Dulcinea del Toboso named, I was struck with surprise and
amazement, for it occurred to me at once that these pamphlets contained
the history of Don Quixote. With this idea I pressed him to read the
beginning, and doing so, turning the Arabic offhand into Castilian, he
told me it meant, “_History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cid
Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian_.” It required great caution to
hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears, and
snatching it from the silk mercer, I bought all the papers and
pamphlets from the boy for half a real; and if he had had his wits
about him and had known how eager I was for them, he might have safely
calculated on making more than six reals by the bargain. I withdrew at
once with the Morisco into the cloister of the cathedral, and begged
him to turn all these pamphlets that related to Don Quixote into the
Castilian tongue, without omitting or adding anything to them, offering
him whatever payment he pleased. He was satisfied with two arrobas of
raisins and two bushels of wheat, and promised to translate them
faithfully and with all despatch; but to make the matter easier, and
not to let such a precious find out of my hands, I took him to my
house, where in little more than a month and a half he translated the
whole just as it is set down here.

In the first pamphlet the battle between Don Quixote and the Biscayan
was drawn to the very life, they planted in the same attitude as the
history describes, their swords raised, and the one protected by his
buckler, the other by his cushion, and the Biscayan’s mule so true to
nature that it could be seen to be a hired one a bowshot off. The
Biscayan had an inscription under his feet which said, “_Don Sancho de
Azpeitia_,” which no doubt must have been his name; and at the feet of
Rocinante was another that said, “_Don Quixote_.” Rocinante was
marvellously portrayed, so long and thin, so lank and lean, with so
much backbone and so far gone in consumption, that he showed plainly
with what judgment and propriety the name of Rocinante had been
bestowed upon him. Near him was Sancho Panza holding the halter of his
ass, at whose feet was another label that said, “Sancho Zancas,” and
according to the picture, he must have had a big belly, a short body,
and long shanks, for which reason, no doubt, the names of Panza and
Zancas were given him, for by these two surnames the history several
times calls him. Some other trifling particulars might be mentioned,
but they are all of slight importance and have nothing to do with the
true relation of the history; and no history can be bad so long as it
is true.

If against the present one any objection be raised on the score of its
truth, it can only be that its author was an Arab, as lying is a very
common propensity with those of that nation; though, as they are such
enemies of ours, it is conceivable that there were omissions rather
than additions made in the course of it. And this is my own opinion;
for, where he could and should give freedom to his pen in praise of so
worthy a knight, he seems to me deliberately to pass it over in
silence; which is ill done and worse contrived, for it is the business
and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from
passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make
them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of
time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel
for the present, and warning for the future. In this I know will be
found all that can be desired in the pleasantest, and if it be wanting
in any good quality, I maintain it is the fault of its hound of an
author and not the fault of the subject. To be brief, its Second Part,
according to the translation, began in this way:

With trenchant swords upraised and poised on high, it seemed as though
the two valiant and wrathful combatants stood threatening heaven, and
earth, and hell, with such resolution and determination did they bear
themselves. The fiery Biscayan was the first to strike a blow, which
was delivered with such force and fury that had not the sword turned in
its course, that single stroke would have sufficed to put an end to the
bitter struggle and to all the adventures of our knight; but that good
fortune which reserved him for greater things, turned aside the sword
of his adversary, so that although it smote him upon the left shoulder,
it did him no more harm than to strip all that side of its armour,
carrying away a great part of his helmet with half of his ear, all
which with fearful ruin fell to the ground, leaving him in a sorry
plight.

Good God! Who is there that could properly describe the rage that
filled the heart of our Manchegan when he saw himself dealt with in
this fashion? All that can be said is, it was such that he again raised
himself in his stirrups, and, grasping his sword more firmly with both
hands, he came down on the Biscayan with such fury, smiting him full
over the 