DON QUIXOTE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1515, 15 January 1886, Page 3

DON QUIXOTE.

In the composition of " Don Quixote," Cervantes had, besides the general intention of producing an amusing work, tho special design of casting ridicule on the follies of those books of knight-errantry to which the hidalgo of La Mancha I s * «io passionately devoted. With a hyperbolical race like the Spaniards, it is easy to believe that such stories may have done actual harm by fostering a habit of boastfulness and aggression, and discouraging the sober and reasonable pursuits of civil lite. Quixote is represented as a gentleman of La Mancha, who sits in his library the greater part of the year reading romances of chivalry uutil his brain i» literally disordered. " His fancy," says Cervantes," was tilled with the things he read of—enchantments quarrels, battel o , challanges, wounds, wcoings, loves, terapasts, and impossible follies. And these toys did so tirmly possess his imagination with an infallible opinion of all the machinerv of dreamed inventions which he reai was true, that he accounted no history in the world to be so certaiu and sincere as they were." After much brooding over these fancies, Don Quixote resolves to go forth in the true fashion of knight - errantry, and reform the abuses of the world It appears to him that the old habit of self-devotion to high purposes is dying out, and that it is his task to re-awaken it. He will ride in quest of adventures. He will deliver distressed lfdies, chastise and humble tyrants, break up wicked enchantments, slay dragons, and griffins, and other terrors of the earth. He will be the champion of Christendom against the Moslem and the intidel. Let it be observed that there is a noble as well a ludicrous side of this conception of the mad knight—for crazed be assuredly is. The thoughtful reader will even find a touch of pathoi in the j ptrange, distraught, fantastic figure

-the pathos of an unfulfilled ideal, of illusions shattered. The aims of Quixote are high and magnanimous, hut his mind is out of joint with facts. Sancho Panza is a character admirably contrasted with that of the Don, whom he serves as a squire. His «ross, sen?uil, prosaic nature is the exact apposite of the dreamy, imaginative, self-sacrificing disposition of his master. Faithful he is, with touches of homely nffection; yet his great idea is to benefit himself, and to get something substantial for his pains. In the matter of the governorship of Barataria, he is as much befooled as Quixote himself, but the motive is sordid. Usually, however, he sees through the delusions of the knighfc, and corrects them with shrewdiu ss nnd rative sense. He has at his. command a.o pxhaustless stock of proverbs, embodying in the briefest compass the motherwit of Spanish peasants; and altogether he is one of the most amusing ftliows in fiction. The other characters in the book are less strongy marked, but show the hand of the master. The first portion of this wonderful work wis published in 160-3; the second in 1615. It has been said that the earlier part was written when *he author was in prison for debt; hut I ; he tradition is very doubtfu'. The life of Cervantes, however, was much | chequered; his fame alone stands ! high above the accidents of the world.