indeed,
have been little less than Quixotism itself to hope any other
fruits from attempting characters wherein the inimitable Cervantes
so far excelled.'

He found it, he says, infinitely more difficult than he imagined to give
his knight an opportunity of displaying himself in a different manner
from that wherein he appears in the romance. However, he was induced to
allow his work to be performed, and then it was seen that he had
brought the Don and Sancho to an English inn, where the landlord,
Guzzle, tries in vain to get the former to pay his bill, and whither
comes one Dorothea Loveland to meet her sweetheart, Fairlove, spending
the interval between her coming and his arrival in persuading the Don
that she is a persecuted princess and that her maid Jezebel is Dulcinea.
Dorothea is promised by her father to one Squire Badger, but the squire
proves to be a sot, and at the Don's especial request the lady and her
lover are united. The piece is by no means without humour, and it would
deserve to live in remembrance if only because it was for 'Don Quixote
in England' that Fielding wrote the song of 'The Roast Beef of Old
England,' which consisted of two verses only until Richard Leveridge
added five more and wrote the music for the whole.

'Don Quixote' has made other appearances on the English boards, but none
of any very great importance. There was an entertainment written in
verse, and 'sung at Marybone Gardens,' for which Dr. Arnold wrote the
music, and in which the Don, Sancho, Nicholas, Teresa, and Maritornes
figure. There was a pantomime at Covent Garden, 'Harlequin and Quixote;
or, The Magic Arm,' for which Reeve composed the melodies, and in which
Harlequin, the son of Inca, carries off Columbine, the daughter of a
Spanish grandee, to whom Don Quixote is affianced. There was, too, a
'ballad-farce' called 'Don Quixote in Barcelona; or, The Beautiful
Moor,' which, however, was never represented; and there were at least
two other efforts of the kind, an 'opera-comedy' and a 'farce-comedy,'
which had the illustrious Sancho for their hero, portraying him in the
character of 'the mock Governor' of Barataria.

It was, no doubt, inevitable that 'Don Quixote,' having been translated
into English prose, should make its appearance also in English verse.
And so it did--early in the eighteenth century--in the form of 'The
Life and Notable Adventures of that Renown'd Knight, Don Quixote de la
Mancha, Merrily