tion of it. In the middle of the sixteenth century these romances met with two powerful enemies: one was the spirit of the Catholic Reaction, the other the spirit of classical culture. In 1543 Charles V. forbade that any of these books should be printed or sold in the West Indies, and in 1555 the Cortes made its petition to the Emperor to make the like law for Spain. The text of the petition reads thus: "Moreover, we say that it is most notorious, the hurt that has been done and is doing in these kingdoms to young men and maids and to all sorts of people from reading books of lies and vanities, like Amadis and all the books which have been modeled upon its speech and style, also rhymes and plays about love and other vain things; for young men and maids, being moved by idleness to occupy themselves with these books, abandon themselves to folly, and, in a measure, imitate the adventures which they read in those books to have happened, both of love and war and other vanities; and they are so affected thereby that whenever any similar case arises they yield to it with less restraint than if they had not read the books; and often a mother leaves her daughter locked up in the house, thinking that she has left her to her meditations (recogida), and the girl falls to reading books of that kind, so that it were better if the mother had taken her with her. And that it is to the great hurt of the consciences, because the more people take to these vanities, the more they backslide from and cease to find enjoy ment in the Holy, True, and Christian Doctrine." Wherefore the petition asks that no more such books be printed, and that all those existing be gathered up and burned, and that no book be printed thereafter without a license; "for that in so doing your Majesty will render a great service to God, taking persons from the reading of books of vanities, and bringing them back to read religious books which edify the mind and reform In the body, and will do these kingdoms great good and mercy." Mr. Ticknor and other commentators have gathered together condemnations upon these romances uttered by various persons of note prior to the publication of Don Quixote. There can be little doubt that these faultfinders were puritans of the Catholic Reaction, and that the same spirit influenced the Cortes. In this same feeling the Puritans in England of Queen Elizabeth's time attacked the stage. the preface to Part I., Cervantes represents himself as sitting with his chin on his hand, pondering what he shall do for a preface, when a friend comes in, who, after making some rather dull suggestions, says, "This book of yours is an invective against books of knight-errantry; ... your writing has no other object than to undo the authority which such books have among the uneducated;" and he ends with the advice, "Make it your purpose to pull to pieces the illbased contrivance of these knight-errant books, which are hated by some, but praised by many more; for if you accomplish this, you will have done a great deal." And Part II. ends with a declaration by Cide Hamete Ben Engeli that his "only desire has been to make men dislike the false and foolish stories of knight-errantry, which, thanks to my true Don Quixote, are beginning to stumble, and will fall to the ground without any doubt." These are the arguments for limiting and cutting down the great purposes of the book, a commentary on the life of man, to a mere satire upon silly and extravagant romances. The book speaks for itself. With respect to the other theory, that Cervantes intended a satire upon human enthusiasm, Mr. Lowell, in commenting, discovers two morals: the first," that whoever quarrels with the Nature of Things, wittingly or unwittingly, is cer tain to get the worst of it; "the second, "that only he who has the imagination to conceive and the courage to attempt a trial of strength with what foists itself on our senses as the Order of Nature for the time being can achieve great results or kindle the coöperative and efficient enthusiasm of his fellow-men." By this interpretation the condemnation of the quarrel is itself condemned by the deeper moral. But it little profits to seek after Cervantes' motives; he wrote about life, and he does not draw any final conclusions. He observes and writes. He tells of a gentleman who found the world out of joint, and with a "frolic welcome proclaimed that he was "born to set it right." The attempt is followed by the most disastrous and delightful consequences. Don Quixote is sometimes triumphant, but many more times mocked, mauled, persecuted, and despitefully used by clown and duke, and Sancho shares all his fortunes. Side by side go Imagination on his hippogriff, and Common Sense on his donkey. At the end of the book, the reader, loving and admiring Don Quixote, loving Sancho, and having rejoiced at every piece of good fortune that has come to them on their ill-starred career, hates and despises all those who have ill used them, including those two wiseacres the Parson and the Barber. If the unoffending reader must draw a moral, he would seem to hit near the mark by inferring that enthusiasm justifies its own appellation, and that the divine in us is the only thing worth heeding and loving, though it behave with lunacies inconstant as the moon, or go to live with publicans and sinners. But why draw a moral at all? Life is very big, and there is less dogma now than there used to be about the meaning or the worth of it, and an observer of life may travel about and note what he sees without being compelled to stand and deliver his conclusions. What should we say if Cide Hamete Ben Engeli had made an end in good Arabic with "Life is but an integration of Matter with a concomitant dissipation of Motion"? Let the great books of the world escape these hewers of epigrams and drawers of morals. Hamlet has escaped to a place of safety; so has the book of Job. Faust is on the way thither, and Don Quixote will one day keep them company. It is a tale of life drawn from the author's imagination, and it is enough to know that a man who had lost an arm in a sea-fight and had been a captive slave for five years, who had been poor and persecuted, began this joyous and merry history in prison, and continued it in the same strain of joy and merriment to the end. Let any man tired "to behold Desert a beggar born, And needy Nothing trimmed in jollity," betake himself "en un lugar de La Mancha." The very words conjure up springtime, holidays, and morning sun, and he shall feel like the poet "Quant erba vertz e fuehla par, Leva sa votz e mov son chan." Some there "C'est un pays interdit à la mélancolie." The joy of it is masculine and boyish; it maketh for life, like all good things. The reader never stops to think whether there be wit or humor, irony or optimism. These questionings are foisted upon you by the notes. If you read a Spanish edition, beware of the notes. are who, in their schooldays, acquired a wise preference of ignorance to notes, but I have known many who would stop in the middle of a sentence to read a note, and then begin again exactly at the asterisk where they had left off. The notes in the editions by the Spanish Academy, Dr. Bowle, Pellicer, and Clemencin are all to be skipped. There is a tale that two gentlemen clapped hands to their swords over the last copy of the second edition of Gil Blas in a bookseller's shop in Paris; and I would not part with my Pellicer to any lesser person than the sheriff, but it would require that gentleman and at least one of his posse to make me read the notes. In Don Quixote we believe that we have a partial portrait of Cervantes. He has described somewhere his own physical appearance in a manner very like to the description of the knight, and in the latter's character we feel sure that we have the real Cervantes. Certainly there is there the likeness of a high-spirited Spanish gentleman at a time when Spanish gentlemen were the first in the world. Every little detail about the knight is told with such an intimate affection that Cervantes must have been writing down whatever he believed was true of his own best self. The ready knowledge with which he wrote is manifest from the carelessness with which he makes mistakes, as with Sancho's ass, on which Sancho suddenly mounts half a page after losing him forever, and in the names of la Señora Panza, and in various details. Certainly Cervantes is very fond of Don Quixote, and does him justice; and he has a kindliness for the reader, too, and pays him for his sore sympathies every now and then by the joyous feeling of victory which he receives when Don Quixote, in the midst of a company that think him mad, delivers a brilliant harangue, leaving them confounded and the reader exultant. Sancho said Don Quixote ought to have been a parson, and you feel that he would have adorned any position of dignity within the gift of the Majesty of Spain. The art with which the story is told and the characters are drawn grows upon one's wonder. For example, Don Quixote has been lowered down into the cave of Montesinos, and after some hours, during which Sancho has become much alarmed for his master's safety, he reappears and gives an account of the most marvelous adventures. Sancho and the reader are aghast; they know that the adventures cannot be true, and they know equally well that Don Quixote is incapable of telling a lie, and the wonder is whether he is mad or has been dreaming. This same wonder finally overtakes Don Quixote, and you feel, without being told, that he is struggling with his memory to find out what did really happen as he faces the awful possibility that what he related may not have been true. There is a certain low fellow in the book, one Samson Carrasco, a friend of the Parson and the Barber, of good purposes, but of no imagination, who devises a scheme to fetch Don Quixote home. This plan was to arm himself as a knighterrant and take Don Quixote captive. The approach of the combat is very disagreeable; you cover over with your hand the lines ahead of where you are reading, so that you may not read faster than you shall acquire fortitude to bear whatever may happen. And behold, Rosinante breaks into a gallop, dear horse, — Boiardo and Bucephalus never did as much for their readers, and the counterfeit knight is hurled to the ground. By the same dull device this vulgar Carrasco finally, near the end of the story, ran atilt with Don Quixote and unhorsed him. He dismounted, and stood over our hero with his spear. The terms of the combat were that he who was conquered should confess that the other's lady was the more beautiful. "Don Quixote, without raising his visor, with weak and feeble voice, as if he were speaking from within a tomb, replied: Dulcinea of Toboso is the most beautiful woman in the world, and I am the most miserable knight on earth, and it were not right that the truth should suffer hurt from my weakness; thrust home your lance, Sir Knight, and since you have taken my honor, take away my life also." It were difficult to imagine that this is a satire upon human nature, and that Cervantes made mock of the spirit of chivalry. One of the deepest and most delightful elements of the book is the relation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; in fact, it is Sancho's obedience, his profound loyalty and belief in his master, that throw both their characters into high relief: and here lies one of the hardest tasks for the translator; for unless their conversations are given with the delicacy and grace of the original, they cease to be Don Quixote and Sancho, and become mere comic figures. Sancho has never had full justice done to him. Affection and regard he has had in full measure, no doubt. One loves him as one loves a dog; not the noble, fairlimbed, fine-haired aristocrat, but the shag-haired little villain, nullius filius, who barks at your guests, and will gnaw a drumstick in my lady's chamber unless he be prevented. But Sancho's character and intelligence have not had their due. He is commonly spoken of as if he were one of old Gobbo's family, selfish and of loutish appetites; but in truth he is not related at all. Sancho stands charged with greediness; and as to eat ing, he ate well whenever he had an opportunity, but he worked very hard and needed food, for he often went supperless to bed, and was never sure of the morrow. His desire to be gobernador was the imperial fault of ambition, and most honorable; and when he governed Barataria, he bore his great office meekly, and was a just and beneficent ruler. When Don Quixote first told him of the great fortunes, even of a royal complexion, that sometimes fall to the lot of the esquire to a knight-errant, his first thought was that Teresa Panza would be queen and his children princes. His intelligence bloomed and unfolded under the sunny influence of Don Quixote's company; in fact, one of the most delightful things in the whole book is the elevation of Sancho's understanding as he travels from Part I. into Part II. Preface-makers say that Cervantes discovered how popular Sancho was, and, taking his cue accordingly, developed and expanded Sancho's wit and gifts of speech; but the true reason is that living with a dreamer of dreams ennobles the understanding. When Don Quixote had forbidden the brutal laborer to thrash the boy, and made him promise by the laws of knighthood, the boy said, "My master is no knight; he is rich John Haldudo, and he lives in Quintanar." "No matter," replied Don Quixote; "the Haldudos may become knights; every man is the child of his own actions." By his faithfulness and loyalty to his master, Sancho's condition was made gentle and his intelligence was quickened. Even in the beginning Sancho is by no means backward in comprehension. Don Quixote resolves to get a sword that will cut through any steel and prevail over all enchantment. Sancho apprehends that the virtue of the sword may be personal to Don Quixote, and of no avail to him, as he is only an esquire. And he explains that the reason why Don Quixote was horribly beaten by the Yanguesian cattle-drivers was that he had neglected to observe his vow not to eat baked bread or do sundry other things until he should have obtained Mambrino's helmet. Don Quixote quietly replies that that is so, and that Sancho was beaten also for not reminding him. Sancho has a generous human sympathy, too; for when Don Quixote finds Cardenio's loveletter, he asks him to read it aloud “ que gusto mucho destas cosas de amores." The difference in their views of life, however, and the help they render each other in getting into difficulties, is the precious quality of the book. There are a hundred men who admire and reverence Dante for his fierce seriousness and burning convictions about life, to one who would feel that the like reverence and admiration were due to the laughing seriousness and smiling convictions of Cervantes. Heine somewhere draws a picture of the gods dining and Hephæstos limping among them to pour out the wine, while their laughter floats off over Olympus, when suddenly in the midst of them stalks a Jew and flings down a cross upon the banquet-table, and the laughter dies. But with the revolving years laughter has once more come to take its place as a divine attribute, and Cervantes' seriousness, his sympathy and loving-kindness, may set him, in the estimation of men, as high, as wise, as deep, as Dante. I think with what pleasure he and Shakespeare met in the Happy Isles and laughed together, while Dante, a guisa di leone, sat sternly apart.. What happier time was there ever in those Islands of the Blest than that sweet April wherein those two landed from Charon's bark? For I think that Shakespeare's spirit tarried a few days that they might make their voyage and entrance together. In Cervantes, says Victor Hugo, was the deep poetic spirit of the Renaissance. In him was the milk of loving-kindness. After reading his book, we see a brighter light thrown on the simple human relations, the random meetings of men and women in this world of ours that is not so unlike to La Mancha, and we become more sensitive to the value of words spoken by human lips to human ears, and of the touch of the human hand in our greetings and partings. It is not the usage among soldiers to confess their own tenderness, and Cervantes has thrown over his confession the veil of irony. Heinrich Heine did the like. These proud men would not have their women's hearts show on their sleeves, and they mocked the world. It was easily done. "Diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen, In Algiers, Cervantes, with some of his fellow-captives, devised several plans of escape, all of which failed, and he was threatened with torture if he would not disclose the names of the conspirators and the story of the plot. He told nothing but that he alone was responsible. So he did; so he wrote. He obeyed the great prayer made to each of the children of men: "Peter, lovest thou me? Feed my sheep." Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr. A FEW STORIES. As there is a no-man's land between the novel and the drama in which contemporaneous writers try to find a footing, so is there also a similar vague region between the narrative of genuine adventure and the invented story. Mr. Owen Wister1 takes his characters to play on this ground. In the vigorous preface to his group of tales, he says that "in certain ones the incidents and even some of the names are left unchanged from their original reality," and he takes pains to correct a misstatement which appeared in one of the stories on its first publication; he corrects it in a footnote, so as 1 Red Men and White. By OWEN WISTER. New Illustrated by FREDERIC REMINGTON. not to deprive himself of Mr. Remington's picture which was made to fit the story. In short, the life which Mr. Wister portrays is so real to him in its actual material as to confound a little his own creation, and the very vividness of his actual sight arrests the operation of the sight behind the eye. The reader is, in consequence, a trifle perturbed. He almost wishes for footnotes. He sees General Crook plainly and accepts the portrait as drawn from life, but he is curious as to the actuality of the figures in the half-historic group disclosed to him in The Second Missouri Compromise. He begins to wonder if Specimen Jones may not be taken from life. This is not to complain of the |