iscayan, the adversary of Don Quixote, is made a native of
Azpeitia--this being the name of the obscure village where Loyola was
born.

[15] The question is reopened in the _Espana Moderna_ (1894), by
my good friend Asensio, who quotes from one of the histories of
Charles V how that as a youth he would draw his sword and lay about
him at the figures in the tapestry, and how once he was discovered
teasing a caged lion with a stick. This is slender material on
which to base the theory of Charles V being the original of Don
Quixote.

A sufficient answer to all these theories is that contained in the book
itself. Surely no one has read _Don Quixote_ with profit to himself who
has been unable to see that the hero is not one whom the author desired
to revile or to malign. Never was a satire like this, which leaves us
full of love and sympathy for the object. And why cannot we believe the
author when he avers that never did his humble pen stoop to satire? He
meant, of course, the satire of persons as distinguished from the
reprehension and the ridicule of human follies and general vices. As a
lampoon, _Don Quixote_ could hardly have endured to this day. The spirit
which has given it eternal life is love, and not hate.

To estimate the worth of the service performed by Cervantes--not in
abolishing romance, as has been absurdly said, still less in discrediting
chivalry, as with even a more perverse misconception of his purpose has
been suggested, but in purging books of fiction of their grossness and
their extravagance, and restoring romance to truth and to nature--we have
to consider the enormous influence exercised by this pernicious
literature over the minds of the people of Spain in the sixteenth
century.

The ceaseless wars with the Moors had trained the whole manhood of the
nation to soldiership. The trade of fighting was familiar to every man of
good birth, so that the word for "knight" (_caballero_) came to be
synonymous with that for "gentleman." The constant exercise in arms made
of chivalry, in Spain, a more solemn and serious calling than elsewhere.
As a native writer says, with equal point and spirit, there was developed
by the chronic war with the Moor a _caballerismo_--there is none but
a Spanish word for a quality purely indigenous--essentially distinct from
the gay, fantastic chivalry of the North. It extended to all classes of
the people. It was not confined to the