How different was Byron's painting of Spanish life from that of the immortal Cervantes, whom Lowell places among the five master geniuses of the world! In "Don Quixote" there is not a sentence which does not exalt woman, or which degrades man. A lofty ideal of purity and chivalrous honor permeates every page, even in the most ludicrous scenes. The whole work blazes with wit, and with the wisdom of a proverbial philosophy, uttered by the ignorant squire of a fanatical and bewildered knight; but amidst the practical jokes and follies of all the characters in that marvellous work of fiction, we see also a moral beauty, idealized of course, such as was rivalled only in Spanish art in the Madonnas of Murillo. I believe that in the imaginary sketches of Spanish life as portrayed by Byron, slanders and lies deface the poem from beginning to end. Who is the best authority for truthfulness in the description of Spanish people, Cervantes or Byron? The spiritual loftiness portrayed in the lives of Spanish heroes and heroines, mixed up as it was with the most ludicrous pictures of common life, has made the Spaniard's work of fiction one of the most treasured and enduring monuments of human fame; whereas the insulting innuendoes of the English poet have gone far to rob him of the glory which he had justly won in his earlier productions, and to make his name a doubt. If, in the course of generations yet to come, the evil which Byron did by that one poem alone shall be forgotten in the services he rendered to our literature by other works, which cannot die, then he may some day be received into the Pantheon of the benefactors of mind.