no more tincture of romantic idealism than a wine-skin, the
knight addresses, without misgiving, his lofty dissertations on the
glories and the duties of chivalry--the squire responding after
his fashion. And thus these two hold converse, contentedly
incomprehensible to each other, and with no suspicion that they are as
incapable of interchanging ideas as the inhabitants of two different
planets. With what heart-stirring mirth, and yet with what strangely
deeper feeling of the infinite variety of human nature, do we follow
their converse throughout! Yet Quixote and Sancho are not more
life-like and human, nor nearer together at one point and farther
apart at another, than are Walter Shandy and his brother. The squat
little Spanish peasant is not more gloriously incapable of following
the chivalric vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of
grasping the philosophic crotchets of his brother. Both couples are
in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one point; at another
they are "poles asunder" both of them. And in both contrasts there
is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and
misunderstanding--that element of underlying pathos, in short, which
so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is
the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite
of resemblance--of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which
all minor uniformities sink into insignificance.

The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the humour is, of
course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways. In
both cases it is a picture of human simplicity--of a noble and artless
nature out of harmony with its surroundings--which moves us;
but whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of the
_incompris_, in the English novel it is that of the man with whom
the _incompris_ consorts. If there is pathos as well as humour, and
deepening the humour, in the figure of the distraught knight-errant
talking so hopelessly over the head of his attached squire's morality,
so too there is pathos, giving depth to the humour of the eccentric
philosopher, shooting so hopelessly wide of the intellectual
appreciation of the most affectionate of brothers. One's sympathy,
perhaps, is even more strongly appealed to in the latter than in the
former case, because the effort of the good Captain to understand is
far greater than that of the Don to make himself understood, and the
co