The greatest men have looked on "Don Quixote" as the best book that ever was written. Godwin said, "At twenty, I thought 'Don Quixote' laughable--at forty, I thought it clever--now, near sixty, I look upon it as the most admirable book in the whole world." In Coleridge's "Literary Remains," there are some admirable remarks on "Don Quixote;" they are too long to be inserted here, but I cannot refrain from quoting the contrast he draws between the Don and Sancho Panza. He says, "Don Quixote grows at length to be a man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence, without the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing the least trait of personal individuality, he becomes a substantial living allegory, or personification of the reason and moral sense divested of the judgment and understanding. Sancho is the converse. He is the common sense without reason or imagination; and Cervantes not only shows the excellence and power of reason in Don Quixote, but in both him and Sancho the mischiefs resulting from a severance of the two main constituents of sound intellectual and moral action. Put him and his master together, and they form a perfect intellect; but they are separated and without cement: and hence, each having need of the other for its whole completeness, each has at times a mastery over the other; for the common sense, though it may see the practical inapplicability of the dictates of the imagination of abstract reason, yet cannot help submitting to them. These two characters possess the world--alternately and interchangeably the cheater and the cheated. To impersonate them, and to combine the permanent with the individual, is one of the highest creations of genius, and has been achieved by Cervantes and Shakspeare almost alone." Of the "Novellas," or tales of Cervantes, I had intended to give a detail, but have no space; they are among the best of his works. They cannot compete with the best of Boccaccio: they have not his energy of passion--his soul-melting tenderness--his tragic power and matchless grace; but the tales of Cervantes are full of interest and amusement: they possess the merit also of being perfectly moral; he calls them himself Novellas Exemplares, and there is not a word that need be slurred over or omitted. It is strange also that as afterwards the intrigue of his comedies was so bad, that of some of his stories is so good, that Beaumont and Fletcher--than whom no dramatists better understood the art of fabricating plays--have adopted two, ("La Señora Cornelia" and "Las Dos Doncellas"), and so adopted them as to follow them line for line, and scene by scene. There is a very beautiful interview in "Las Dos Doncellas," between a cavalier and a lady at night, by the sea-shore; Beaumont and Fletcher have but translated and versified this, and it stands among the most effective of their scenes.[72]