To destroy a passion that had struck its roots so deeply in the character of all classes of men,[175] to break up the only reading which at that time could be considered widely popular and fashionable,[176] was certainly a bold undertaking, and one that marks any thing rather than a scornful or broken spirit, or a want of faith in what is most to be valued in our common nature. The great wonder is, that Cervantes succeeded. But that he did there is no question. No book of chivalry was written after the appearance of Don Quixote, in 1605; and from the same date, even those already enjoying the greatest favor ceased, with one or two unimportant exceptions, to be reprinted;[177] so that, from that time to the present, they have been constantly disappearing, until they are now among the rarest of literary curiosities;--a solitary instance of the power of genius to destroy, by a single well-timed blow, an entire department, and that, too, a flourishing and favored one, in the literature of a great and proud nation. [175] Allusions to the fanaticism of the lower classes on the subject of books of chivalry are happily introduced into Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 32, and in other places. It extended, too, to those better bred and informed. Francisco de Portugal, in the “Arte de Galantería,” cited in a preceding note, and written before 1632, tells the following anecdote: “A knight came home one day from the chase and found his wife and daughters and their women crying. Surprised and grieved, he asked them if any child or relation were dead. ‘No,’ they answered, suffocated with tears. ‘Why, then, do you weep so?’ he rejoined, still more amazed. ‘Sir,’ they replied, ‘Amadis is dead.’ They had read so far.” p. 96. [176] Cervantes himself, as his Don Quixote amply proves, must, at some period of his life, have been a devoted reader of the romances of chivalry. How minute and exact his knowledge of them was may be seen, among other passages, from one at the end of the twentieth chapter of Part First, where, speaking of Gasabal, the esquire of Galaor, he observes that his name is mentioned _but once_ in the history of Amadis of Gaul;--a fact which the indefatigable Mr. Bowle took the pains to verify, when reading that huge romance. See his “Letter to Dr. Percy, on a New and Classical Edition of Don Quixote.” London, 1777, 4to, p. 25.