l de Leon, to
read of whose valiant deeds will entertain and instruct the loftiest
minds and fill them with delight and wonder. Here, Senor Don Quixote,
will be reading worthy of your sound understanding; from which you will
rise learned in history, in love with virtue, strengthened in goodness,
improved in manners, brave without rashness, prudent without cowardice;
and all to the honour of God, your own advantage and the glory of La
Mancha, whence, I am informed, your worship derives your birth."

Don Quixote listened with the greatest attention to the canon's words,
and when he found he had finished, after regarding him for some time, he
replied to him:

"It appears to me, gentle sir, that your worship's discourse is intended
to persuade me that there never were any knights-errant in the world, and
that all the books of chivalry are false, lying, mischievous and useless
to the State, and that I have done wrong in reading them, and worse in
believing them, and still worse in imitating them, when I undertook to
follow the arduous calling of knight-errantry which they set forth; for
you deny that there ever were Amadises of Gaul or of Greece, or any other
of the knights of whom the books are full."

"It is all exactly as you state it," said the canon; to which Don Quixote
returned, "You also went on to say that books of this kind had done me
much harm, inasmuch as they had upset my senses, and shut me up in a
cage, and that it would be better for me to reform and change my studies,
and read other truer books which would afford more pleasure and
instruction."

"Just so," said the canon.

"Well then," returned Don Quixote, "to my mind it is you who are the one
that is out of his wits and enchanted, as you have ventured to utter such
blasphemies against a thing so universally acknowledged and accepted as
true that whoever denies it, as you do, deserves the same punishment
which you say you inflict on the books that irritate you when you read
them. For to try to persuade anybody that Amadis, and all the other
knights-adventurers with whom the books are filled, never existed, would
be like trying to persuade him that the sun does not yield light, or ice
cold, or earth nourishment. What wit in the world can persuade another
that the story of the Princess Floripes and Guy of Burgundy is not true,
or that of Fierabras and the bridge of Mantible, which happened in the
time of Charlemagne? For by all that is good it is as tru