scription of the life and
character of rogues, pickpockets, vagabonds, and all those wretches
and sorry wits that might be found about the highways, in the country
inns, or in the slums of cities. Of this kind is much of what is best
in his collected stories, the 'Novelas Exemplares.' The talent and the
experience which he betrays in these amusing narratives were to be
invaluable to him later as the author of 'Don Quixote,' where they
enabled him to supply a foil to the fine world of his poor hero's
imagination.

We have now mentioned what were perhaps the chief elements of the
preparation of Cervantes for his great task. They were a great
familiarity with the romances of chivalry, and a natural liking for
them; a life of honorable but unrewarded endeavor both in war and in
the higher literature; and much experience of Vagabondia, with the art
of taking down and reproducing in amusing profusion the typical scenes
and languages of low life. Out of these elements a single spark, which
we may attribute to genius, to chance, or to inspiration, was enough
to produce a new and happy conception: that of a parody on the
romances of chivalry, in which the extravagances of the fables of
knighthood should be contrasted with the sordid realities of life.
This is done by the ingenious device of representing a country
gentleman whose naturally generous mind, unhinged by much reading of
the books of chivalry, should lead him to undertake the office of
knight-errant, and induce him to ride about the country clad in
ancient armor, to right wrongs, to succor defenseless maidens, to kill
giants, and to win empires at least as vast as that of Alexander.

This is the subject of 'Don Quixote.' But happy as the conception is,
it could not have produced a book of enduring charm and well-seasoned
wisdom, had it not been filled in with a great number of amusing and
lifelike episodes, and verified by two admirable figures, Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza, characters at once intimately individual and truly
universal.

Don Quixote at first appears to the reader, and probably appeared to
the author as well, as primarily a madman,--a thin and gaunt old
village squire, whose brain has been turned by the nonsense he has
read and taken for gospel truth; and who is punished for his
ridiculous mania by an uninterrupted series of beatings, falls,
indignities, and insults. But the hero and the author together, with
the ingenuity proper to madness and the i