colour--the
infirmities and corpulence of a Sir John Falstaff--do they haunt us
perpetually in the reading? or are they obtruded upon our conceptions
one time for ninety-nine that we are lost in admiration at the
respective moral or intellectual attributes of the character? But in
a picture Othello is _always_ a Blackamoor; and the other only Plump
Jack. Deeply corporealised, and enchained hopelessly in the grovelling
fetters of externality, must be the mind, to which, in its better
moments, the image of the high-souled, high-intelligenced Quixote--the
errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse--has never
presented itself, divested from the unhallowed accompaniment of a
Sancho, or a rabblement at the heels of Rosinante. That man has read
his book by halves; he has laughed, mistaking his author's purport,
which was--tears. The artist that pictures Quixote (and it is in this
degrading point that he is every season held up at our Exhibitions)
in the shallow hope of exciting mirth, would have joined the rabble
at the heels of his starved steed. We wish not to see _that_
counterfeited, which we would not have wished to see in the reality.
Conscious of the heroic inside of the noble Quixote, who, on hearing
that his withered person was passing, would have stepped over his
threshold to gaze upon his forlorn habiliments, and the "strange
bed-fellows which misery brings a man acquainted with?" Shade of
Cervantes! who in thy Second Part could put into the mouth of thy
Quixote those high aspirations of a super-chivalrous gallantry, where
he replies to one of the shepherdesses, apprehensive that he would
spoil their pretty networks, and inviting him to be a guest with them,
in accents like these: "Truly, fairest Lady, Actaeon was not more
astonished when he saw Diana bathing herself at the fountain, than
I have been in beholding your beauty: I commend the manner of your
pastime, and thank you for your kind offers; and, if I may serve
you, so I may be sure you will be obeyed, you may command me: for my
profession is this, To shew myself thankful, and a doer of good to all
sorts of people, especially of the rank that your person shows you to
be; and if those nets, as they take up but a little piece of ground,
should take up the whole world, I would seek out new worlds to pass
through, rather than break them: and (he adds,) that you may give
credit to this my exaggeration, behold at least he that promiseth you
this, is Do