one to another, each the story of a mind disordered by the
burden of setting the world right, were thus born in the same year.

The reception which _Don Quixote_ met with on its first appearance was
cordial beyond all precedent, and such as must have convinced the author,
who was evidently doubtful of his new experiment, that here at last his
genius had found its true field of exercise. The persons of culture,
indeed, received the book coldly. The half-learned sneered at the title
as absurd and at the style as vulgar. Who was this _ingenio lego_--this
lay, unlearned wit--"a poor Latin-less author," which is what they said
of Shakespeare--outside of the _cultos_ proper, of no university
education--who had dared to parody the tastes of the higher circles?
The envy and malice of all his rivals--especially of those who found
themselves included in the satire--even the great Lope himself, the
phoenix of his age, then at the height of his glory--spoke out, with
open mouth, against the author. The chorus of dispraise was swelled by
all those, persons chiefly of high station, whose fashion of reading
had been ridiculed. A book, professing to be of entertainment, in which
knights and knightly exercises were made a jest of--in which peasants,
innkeepers, muleteers, and other vulgar people spoke their own language
and behaved after their own fashion--was a daring innovation, all the
more offensive because the laugh was directed at what was felt to be a
national infirmity. Who was the bold man who, being neither courtier
nor ecclesiastic, made sport for the world out of the weaknesses of
_caballeros_? An old soldier of Lepanto, indeed! Lepanto was a name
outworn. Spain was now in a new world. Crusades against the unbeliever,
even those more popular ones which combined the saving of souls with
the getting of gold, were long out of fashion. Lastly, the entire
ecclesiastical body--the formidable phalanx of the endowed, with their
patrons dependents, and dupes--though they were too dull to perceive
and too dense to feel the shafts aimed at obscurantism and superstition,
had something more than a suspicion that this book called _Don Quixote_
was a book to be discouraged.

In spite of the frowns and sneers of the quality, however, and the
ill-concealed disgust of the learned, _Don Quixote_ was received with
unbounded applause by the common people.[11] Those best critics in
every age and country, the honest readers, who were neithe