Cervantes was unlucky in life, nor did his misfortunes end with his days. Posthumous idolatry seeks to atone for contemporary neglect, and there has come into being a tribe of ignorant fakirs, assuming the title of "Cervantophils," and seeking to convert a man of genius into a common Mumbo-Jumbo. A master of invention, a humourist beyond compare, an expert in ironic observation, a fellow meet for Shakespeare's self: all that suffices not for these fanatical dullards. Their deity must be accepted also as a poet, a philosophic thinker, a Puritan tub-thumper, a political reformer, a finished scholar, a purist in language, and—not least amazing—an ascetic in private morals. A whole shelf might be filled with works upon Cervantes the doctor, Cervantes the lawyer, the sailor, the geographer, and who knows what else? Like his contemporary Shakespeare, Cervantes took a peculiar interest in cases of dementia; and, in England and Spain, the afflicted have shown both authors much reciprocal attention. We must even take Cervantes as he was: a literary artist stronger in practice than in theory, great by natural faculty rather than by acquired accomplishment. His learning is naught, his reasonings are futile, his speculation is banal. In short passages he is one of the greatest masters of Castilian prose, clear, direct, and puissant: but he soon tires, and is prone to lapse into Italian idioms, or into irritating sentences packed with needless relatives. Cervantes lives not as a great practitioner in style, a sultan of epithet—though none could better him when he chose; nor is he potent as a purely intellectual influence. He is immortal by reason of his creative power, his imaginative resource, his wealth of invention, his penetrating vision, his inimitable humour, his boundless sympathy. Hence the universality of his appeal: hence the splendour of his secular renown. It is certain that he builded better than he knew, and that not even he realised the full scope of his work: we know from Goethe that the maker has to be taught his own meaning. The contemporary allusions, the sly hits at foes, are mostly mysteries for us, though they amuse the laborious leisure of the commentator. Chivalresque romances are with last year's snows: but the interest of _Don Quixote_ abides for ever. Cervantes set out intending to write a comic short story, and the design grew under his hand till at length it included a whole Human Comedy. He himself was as near akin to Don Quixote as a man may be: he knew his chivalresque romances by heart, and accounted _Amadís de Gaula_ as "the very best contrived book of all those of that kind." Yet he has been accused by his own people of plotting his country's ruin, and has been held up to contempt as "the headsman and the ax of Spain's honour." Byron repeats the ridiculous taunt:—