they have served your worship, when they have brought
you to such a pass that you have to be shut up in a cage and carried on
an ox-cart as one would carry a lion or a tiger from place to place to
make money by showing it. Come, Senor Don Quixote, have some compassion
for yourself, return to the bosom of common sense, and make use of the
liberal share of it that heaven has been pleased to bestow upon you,
employing your abundant gifts of mind in some other reading that may
serve to benefit your conscience and add to your honour. And if, still
led away by your natural bent, you desire to read books of achievements
and of chivalry, read the Book of Judges in the Holy Scriptures, for
there you will find grand reality, and deeds as true as they are heroic.
Lusitania had a Viriatus, Rome a Caesar, Carthage a Hannibal, Greece an
Alexander, Castile a Count Fernan Gonzalez, Valencia a Cid, Andalusia a
Gonzalo Fernandez, Estremadura a Diego Garcia de Paredes, Jerez a Garci
Perez de Vargas, Toledo a Garcilaso, Seville a Don Manuel 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