oratorical manner; Sancho's language is of the coarsest kind, and
is interlarded with the vulgarest illustrations and proverbs. His
master is tall, attenuated, in fact, merely skin and bone; his face is
long, his nose prominent, his eyes hollow and very bright; Sancho, on
the contrary, is short, fat, his face is round, eyes small and
pig-like, mouth large and coarse, nose nothing to speak of; in fact,
it is a contrast between the poetical gone mad and the coarsest
realism.

This work was the delight of Spain; it was read with shouts of
laughter by the king and the peasant. Poor Don Quixote is a type of
the fatal results which follow the possession of romantic feelings and
enthusiasm without common-sense to guide and control them. On the
other hand, and that is the priceless lesson of the book, his man,
Sancho Panza, shows what the mere worship of ease and vulgar prudence
will degrade a man to. If the enthusiasm and mad exaltation of Don
Quixote could have been combined with a little of the vulgar self-love
of Sancho, one extreme might have corrected the other, and we might
have had a wise gentleman instead of a maniac and a brute.

Such was the success of this wonderful work that, as Philip III. was
one afternoon standing in a balcony of his palace at Madrid, he
observed a student on the banks of the river Manzanares, with a book
in his hand, which delighted him so that, every now and then, he broke
into an ecstasy of laughter. The king looked at him, and, turning to
his courtiers, said, "That man is either mad or reading 'Don
Quixote.'"

Although the king thought so highly of this great work, its author was
bowed down by poverty and infirmities, and nothing was done for him by
the king or his courtiers. The last glimpse of the life of Cervantes I
have space for, is from his own inimitable pen, and is taken from the
preface to the "Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda," which was
published by the author's widow.

'It happened afterward, dear reader, that as two of my friends and
myself were coming from Esquivias, a place famous for twenty reasons,
but more especially for illustrious families and for its excellent
wines, I heard a man coming behind us, whipping his nag with all his
might, and seemingly very desirous of overtaking us. Presently he
called out to us to stop, which we did; and when he came up he turned
out to be a country student, dressed in brown, with spatterdashes and
round-toed shoes. He had a sword i