Cervantes, like Shakespeare, used all the resources of his time, and did not disdain to profit by other men's experiments. _Don Quixote_ owed a triple debt to the common-sensible humorous rogue novel invented seventy years before, as well as to the more serious tales of knights and pastoral life that made his existence possible. Thieves and shepherds and paragons of chivalry assisted at his birth. The thieves in particular were responsible for the design, or lack of design, in the construction of the book. The rogue novels were made by stringing a series of disconnected 'merry quips' along the autobiography or biography of a disreputable hero. They were like Punch and Judy shows. The character of Punch is as stable as his red nose or his hump back. His deeds do not change him, and, so long as he is always well in the front of his stage we ask for no other connecting thread in the entertainment than his habit of punctuating his conversation with a well-directed log of wood. Let him continue his villainous career, let his squeaking inhuman voice continue to exult, and we are perfectly contented. It was so with the rogues, and it is so with _Don Quixote_. As the Bachelor says, 'many of those that love mirth better than melancholy, cry out, give us more Quixoteries: let but Don Quixote lay on, and Sancho talk, be it what it will, we are satisfied.' [Rogue novel and romance.] Three hundred years after the Bachelor, we too are satisfied with Sancho's chatter, and his master's Quixoteries, because they are both pretty closely connected with humanity. If Don Quixote is among the clouds, Sancho Panza sits firm upon his donkey, and between the two of them the book itself moves spaciously upon a mellowed earth. There is a perpetual interplay between dignity and impudence, the ridiculous and the sublime, and the partners, as if at tennis, lend vigour and give opportunity to each other. Sancho is not a mere village bellyful of common sense, whose business is to make the Knight of the Doleful Countenance appear ridiculous. He, too, has his delusions; he, too, prefers sometimes those two birds twittering distantly in the bush; Romance, smilingly enough, has touched his puzzled forehead also. And Don Quixote, with ideals no less noble than those of Amadis of Gaul or Don Belianis of Greece, with notions of life no less exaggerated than those in the interminable pastorals, is yet a man of blood and bone. His ideals and notions are properly fleshed, and are in the book as a soul in a body. _Don Quixote_ is a book of dreams set upon earth, and earthly shrewdness reaching vainly after dreams. The rogue novels and the romances were, either of them, the one without the other. [The ideal not spoilt by the reality.]