eous aliment. Yet there is no evidence
of any decline in the production of these books up to the date of the
appearance of _Don Quixote_.

It was to do battle with this brood of fabled monsters, against whom the
pulpit and the parliament had preached and legislated in vain, that
Cervantes took up his pen. The adventure was one reserved for his single
arm; and it was achieved with a completeness of success such as must have
astonished our hero himself, as we know by many signs that it disgusted
and irritated many of his literary rivals. The true nature of the service
performed, as well as Cervantes' motive in undertaking it, has been
greatly misrepresented. Nothing can be more certain than that his aim
in _Don Quixote_ was, primarily, to correct the prevailing false taste
in literature. What moral and social results followed were the necessary
consequences of the employment of his rare wit and humor on such a work.
There is no reason to believe that Cervantes, at first, had any more
serious intention than that which he avowed, namely, to give "a pastime
to melancholy souls"[19] in destroying "the authority and influence which
the books of chivalries have in the world and over the vulgar." That he
was not impelled to this work by any antipathy to knightly romances as
such--still less by any ambition to repress the spirit of chivalry, or to
purge the commonwealth of social and political abuses--is abundantly
proved by the whole tenor of his book, if not by the evidence of his
life. His own tastes strongly inclined him to books of romance. Perhaps
no one in that age had read more of those books, or was so deeply imbued
with their spirit.

[19] See the _Viaje del Parnaso_, chapter iv:

"Y he dado en _Don Quixote_ pasatiempo
Al pecho melancolico y mohino
En cualquiera sazon, en todo tiempo."

("And I am he in _Quixote_ who has given
A pastime for the melancholy soul
In every age, and all time and season.")

Why cannot we believe the author, when he thus plainly and candidly
avows his purpose?

The opinion of an acute Spanish writer, Don Vicente de Salva, on this
point we hold to be a very sensible one--"Cervantes did not intend to
satirize the substance and essence of books of chivalries, but only to
purge away their follies and impossibilities." What is _Don Quixote_
itself, it is shrewdly added, but a romance of chivalry, "which has