tes, he held up his head, being a man; plotted
escape in dreams and waking; fought for freedom as a pinioned eagle
might; was at last rescued by the Society for the Redemption of Slaves;
sailed home from slavery to penury; came perilously near the age of
threescore, poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leaps
from sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprang
mid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself,
the marked Spaniard of his era; and on the same day of 1616, Cervantes
and Shakespeare stopped their life in an unfinished line, and not a man
since then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man had
not wine, but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs with
him; though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh and
applaud, Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face,
and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears "rise in
the heart and gather to the eyes." Tears sometimes make laughter and
jest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts from
breaking.

Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact has
painted a gentleman. What his intent was, who can be so bold as to
say? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate a
false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well;
for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen
what a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be.
Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of
movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the
knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the
self-constituted legal force--knight-errantry--was no longer needed.
But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less
than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued
down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some
things must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so that
humor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform.
And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry off
the stage. In long years of soldiery, I doubt not he had grown to hate
this empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano.
This was his apparent purpose--but who can say this was all his
purpose? "King Lear" has a double action. Mayhap,