Nationality in literature never had a more striking example than is furnished by _Don Quixote_. It is Spanish through and through; an open-air romance, much of the action of which takes place on the road or in the wayside inns where the Knight and his squire tarry for the night. It swarms with characters that were common in the Spain of the close of the sixteenth and the early days of the seventeenth centuries. Cervantes never attempts to paint the life of the court or the church; he never introduces any great dignitaries, but he is thoroughly at home with the common people, and he tells his story apparently without any effort, yet with a keen appreciation of the natural humor that seasons every scene. And yet through it all Don Quixote moves a perfect figure of gentle knighthood, a man without fear and without reproach. You laugh at him but at the same time he holds your respect. Genius can no further go than to produce a miracle like this: the creation of a character that compels your respect in the face of childish follies and hallucinations. [Illustration: DON QUIXOTE DISCOURSING TO SANCHO PANZA IN THE YARD OF THE INN WHICH THE KNIGHT IMAGINED WAS A LORDLY CASTLE FROM GUSTAVE DORE'S ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE CLARK EDITION] No one can read _Don Quixote_ carefully without getting rich returns from it in entertainment and culture. The humor is often coarse, but it is hearty and wholesome, and underlying all the fun is the sober conviction that the hero of all these adventures is a man whom it would have been good to know. It is difficult for any one of Anglo-Saxon strain to understand those of Latin blood, but it seems to me that the American of New England ancestry is nearer to the Spaniard than to the Frenchman or the Italian. Underneath the surface there is a lust for adventure and an element of enduring stubbornness in the Spaniard which made him in the heyday of his nation the greatest of explorers and conquerors. And as a basis of character is his love of truth and his sterling honesty, traits that have survived through centuries of decay and degeneracy, and that may yet restore Spain to something of her old prestige among the nations of Europe. So, in reading _Don Quixote_ one may see in it an epitome of that old Spain which has so glorious a history in adventures that stir the blood, as in the conquests of Cortez and Pizarro, and in that higher realm of splendid sacrifice for an ideal, which witnessed the sale of Isabella's jewels to aid Columbus in his plans to discover a new world. THE IMITATION OF CHRIST FEATURES OF GREAT WORK BY OLD THOMAS A KEMPIS--MEDITATIONS OF A FLEMISH MONK WHICH HAVE NOT LOST THEIR INFLUENCE IN FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.