of ideality. Saul met
Christ at noon, and was blinded by his vision; and would not all brave
men covet blindness thus incurred? And better to be blinded, as Don
Quixote, by a ravishing ideal, than to see, besotted in soul and shut
out from God. That humorous figure astride lean Rosinante, esquired by
pudgy, sensible Sancho; eager for chances to be of use; faithful to his
love as dawn to sun; strong in his desire of being all eyes to see
distress, all ears to hear a call for succor; sitting a dark night
through in vigil, tireless, courageous, waiting for day to charge on
what proved to be fulling hammers, making tumult with their own
stamping; or, again, asleep in the inn bed, fighting with wine-skins
and dreaming himself battling with giants,--this does not touch me as
being humorous so much as it does as being pathetic, unspeakably
pathetic, and manfully courageous. I see, but do not feel, the humor.
I have followed Don Quixote as faithfully as Sancho Panza on his
"Dapple;" have seen him fight, conquer, suffer defeat, ride through his
land of dreams; have seen his pasteboard helmet; have noted melancholy
settle round him as shadows on the landscape of an autumn day; have
seen him grow sick, weaken, die; but have known in him only high
dreams, attempted high achievings; have found him honor's soul, and
holding high regard for women; have been spectator of goodness as
unimpeachable as heaven, and purity deep, like that which whitens round
the throne--a human soul given over to goodness, and named, for cause,
"Quixada the Good." And his goodness seems a contagion.

For two and a half centuries since Cervantes painted this picture of a
gentleman, literature has given less or more of heed to similar
attempts; though as result, as I suppose, there are but two life-size
pictures which unhesitatingly we name gentlemen as soon as our eyes
light on them. Profile or silhouette of him there has been, but of the
full-length, full-face figure, only two. Shakespeare did not attempt
this task. Aside from Hamlet--who was not meant to sit for this
picture, though he had been no ill character for such sitting--there is
not among Shakespeare's men an intimation of such undertaking. Would
this princely genius had put his hand to this attempt, though, as seems
clear to me, Shakespeare did not conceive a gentleman. His ideas were
not quite whitened with Christ's morning light enough to have perceived
other than the natural man. S