eded, in the discussion of that question
which has occupied so largely the ingenuity of writers, native and
foreign, as to what was the object of Cervantes in writing _Don Quixote_.
There are those who insist upon seeking in every work of humor or of wit
some meaning other and deeper than in the book appears, as though it were
impossible that an author should be disinterested or write merely out of
the fulness of his heart or pride in his work. With Cervantes' own
declaration, more than once repeated, of the purpose of his book the
critics will not be content. So good a book must have had a better reason
for being than Cervantes' dislike of the fantastic books of the later
chivalry. Who, then, was the man--the original of Don Quixote? Against
whom was the satire levelled? Of course nothing was then known to the
world outside of poor Don Rodrigo de Pacheco, the Argamasillan _hidalgo_.
Some great man Cervantes must have intended to ridicule. It was Charles
V, said some. It was his son Philip, cried others--ignoring the absurdity
of the Prudent one losing his wits through excessive reading of romances.
It was the Duke of Lerma--or the Duke of Osuna--or some other great man,
or Cervantes' wife's cousin, who opposed his marriage with Catalina. It
was Ignatius Loyola--our own countryman, the good John Bowle, suggested.

Surely these various theories are a little far-fetched and not a little
grotesque and absurd. What there is in either of the two Spanish monarchs
to liken him to the Knight of La Mancha it is difficult to see. Those who
have looked upon that wonderful equestrian picture of Titian's in the
Museo at Madrid, with its weird, weary, far-off expression, are
irresistibly led to think of Don Quixote; but the converse is by no means
so clear that on looking at Don Quixote we are tempted to think of that
most unromantic of monarchs, Carlos Quinto.[15] His son is still more
unlike his supposed portrait. As to the Duke of Lerma, they who can
believe, on the faith of the cock-and-bull stories told by the Abbe
Lenglet du Fresnoy and the Jesuit Rapin, that Cervantes satirized the
all-powerful minister in revenge for personal injuries suffered at
his hands, may be consigned to the same limbo with the believers in
the Bacon-Shakespeare. The theory about Loyola, first mooted by Bowle,
the English commentator, is of all, perhaps, not the least absurd. The
one shred by which it hangs is a passage in _Don Quixote_ where the
angry B