m, has grown wiser, for in past times you used to meet
with praise.' I read my comedies anew, together with some interludes
which I had placed with them. I found that they were not so bad but
that they might pass, from what this author called darkness into what
others might perhaps term noon-day. I was angry, and sold them to the
bookseller, who has now printed them. They have paid me tolerably; and
I have pocketed my money with pleasure, and without troubling myself
about the opinions of the actors; I was willing to make them as
excellent as I could, and if, dear reader, thou findest anything in
them good, I pray thee, when thou meetest any other calumniator, to
tell him to amend his manners, and not to judge so severely, since
after all the plays contain not any incongruities or striking faults."

I must not dwell further on Cervantes's minor works, but will pass to
his great masterpiece, "Don Quixote." This work contains the hoarded
experience of a life. It was written when its author was declining in
years. No young man could have written it, because no young man can be
a master, especially of humor and human nature. Don Quixote himself is
a character of the most complex kind. His single-heartedness, his
enthusiasm, his utter want of the sense of the ridiculous, his power
of adding romantic charms and romantic attributes to a frowsy
servant-girl, are developed and used by the author with a variety of
power that has never been equalled. Don Quixote's life is entirely in
the imagination; this enables him to see castles in windmills, beauty
and refinement in coarseness and vulgarity, and poetry, wisdom, and
genius in bombastic and absurd works on chivalry, love, and
knight-errantry. To emphasize the romantic and preposterous exaltation
of the mad gentleman of La Mancha, we have his coarse, vulgar,
practical, almost grovelling squire, Sancho Panza. The master lives in
the clouds; Sancho is most at home in the mud. Everything that can be
done to bring out the contrast between these two characters is put in
the most amusing and effective manner. No extracts could convey to the
reader the adventures of the master and man at the inn--a very vulgar
inn, too--which Don Quixote takes for an enchanted castle, in spite of
the smell of rancid oil and garlic, and where, as a climax to all the
other piled-up absurdities, poor Sancho, who is short and fat, is
tossed in a blanket. Don Quixote always expresses himself in a stilted
and