it. The ribaldry was Aristophanic or Rabelaisian with as
little power to offend, so much was it consecrated and refined by
immemorial usages. Michael wished that all the world could be touched by
the magical freedom and equally magical restraint of the Academic Muse,
and as he sat here in this ancient room, hoped almost violently that
never again would he be compelled to smirch the present clarity and
steadiness of his vision.

CHAPTER IX

THE LESSON OF SPAIN

Perhaps Michael enjoyed more than anything else during his accumulation
of books the collection of as many various editions of Don Quixote as
possible. He had brought up from London the fat volume illustrated by
Dore over which he had fallen asleep long ago and of which owing to
Nurse's disapproval he had in consequence been deprived. Half the pages
still showed where they had been bent under the weight of his small
body: this honorable scar and the familiar musty smell and the book's
unquestionable if slightly vulgar dignity prevented Michael from
banishing it from the shelf that now held so many better editions.
However much the zest in Dore's illustrations had died away in the
flavor of Skelton's English, Michael could not abandon the big volume
with what it held of childhood's first intellectual adventure. The shelf
of Don Quixotes became in all his room one of the most cherished objects
of contemplation. There was something in the "Q" and the "X" repeated on
the back of volume after volume that positively gave Michael an
impression in literal design of the Knight's fantastic personality. The
very soul of Spain seemed to be symbolized by those sere quartos of the
seventeenth century, nor was it imperceptible even in Smollett's cockney
rendering bound in marbled boards. Staring at the row of Don Quixotes on
a dull December afternoon, Michael felt overwhelmingly a desire to go to
Spain himself, to drink at the source of Cervantes' mighty stream of
imagination which with every year's new reading seemed to him to hold
more and more certainly all that was most vital to life's appreciation.
He no longer failed to see the humor of Don Quixote, but even now tears
came more easily than laughter, and he regretted as poignantly as the
Knight himself those times of chivalry which with all the extravagance
of their decay were yet in essence superior to the mode that ousted them
into ignominy. Something akin to Don Quixote's impulsive dismay Michael
experienced i