The great importance of the work, and the key to the almost unexampled favor it has won, must be sought in a quite different direction--in the close relation to the real and actual in our present social condition, maintained throughout its pages. Such a relation is manifested, in very various ways, in every novel of distinguished excellence. The object of all alike is the same--to exhibit and establish, by means of a narrative more or less fictitious, the really true and enduring elements in the complicated or contradictory phenomena of a period or a character. The poetic truthfulness of the immortal _Don Quixote_ lies not so much in the absurdities of an effete Spanish chivalry as in the portraiture that lies beneath, of the insignificance and profligacy of the life of the higher ranks, which had succeeded the more decorous manners of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote is not the only hero of the book, but also the shattered Spanish people, among whom he moves with gipsies and smugglers for companions, treading with all the freshness of imperishable youth upon the buried ruins of political and spiritual life, rejoicing in the geniality of the climate and the tranquillity of the country, reposing proudly on his ancestral dignity. This conception--and not alone the pure and lofty nature of the crazy besieger of wind-mills, who, in spite of all, stands forth as at once the worthiest, and fundamentally the wisest character in the book--constitutes the poetic background, and the twilight glimmer amid the prevailing darkness in the life of the higher classes. We feel that there is assuredly something deeply human and of living power in these elements, and this reality will one day obtain the victory over all opponents. By what an entirely different atmosphere do we feel ourselves to be surrounded in _Gil Blas_, where the highest poetry, the cunning dexterity of the modern Spanish Figaro, is manifested in the midst of a depraved nobility, and a priesthood alive only to their own material interests. It is only the most perfect art that could have retained for this novel readers in every quarter of the world. The _denouement_ is as perfect as with such materials it can be; and we feel that, instead of Voltaire's withering and satiric contempt of all humanity, an element of unfeigned good-humor lies in the background of the picture. How far inferior is Swift! and how utterly horrible is the abandoned humor of a despair that leaves all in flames behind it, which breathes upon us from the pages of the unhappy _Rabelais_!