But this is all that can interest us about the book, which, if not without merit in some respects, is generally low and dull, and would now be forgotten, if it were not connected with the fame of Don Quixote. In its Preface, Cervantes is treated with coarse indignity, his age, his sufferings, and even his honorable wounds, being sneered at;[181] and in the body of the book, the character of Don Quixote, who appears as a vulgar madman, fancying himself to be Achilles, or any other character that happened to occur to the author,[182] is so completely without dignity or consistency, that it is clear the writer did not possess the power of comprehending the genius he at once basely libelled and meanly attempted to supplant. The best parts of the work are those in which Sancho is introduced; the worst are its indecent stories and the adventures of Barbara, who is a sort of brutal caricature of the graceful Dorothea, and whom the knight mistakes for Queen Zenobia.[183] But it is almost always wearisome, and comes to a poor conclusion by the confinement of Don Quixote in a mad-house.[184] [181] “Tiene mas lengua que manos,” says Avellaneda, coarsely. [182] Chapter 8;--just as he makes Don Quixote fancy a poor peasant in his melon-garden to be Orlando Furioso (c. 6);--a little village to be Rome (c. 7);--and its decent priest alternately Lirgando and the Archbishop Turpin. Perhaps the most obvious comparison, and the fairest that can be made, between the two Don Quixotes is in the story of the goats, told by Sancho, in the twentieth chapter of the First Part in Cervantes, and the story of the geese, by Sancho, in Avellaneda’s twenty-first chapter, because the latter professes to improve upon the former. The failure to do so, however, is obvious enough. [183] The whole story of Barbara, beginning with Chapter 22, and going nearly through the remainder of the work, is miserably coarse and dull. [184] In 1824, a curious attempt was made, probably by some ingenious German, to add two chapters more to Don Quixote, as if they had been suppressed when the Second Part was published. But they were not thought worth printing by the Spanish Academy. See Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. VI. p. 296. Cervantes evidently did not receive this affronting production until he was far advanced in the composition of his Second Part; but in the fifty-ninth chapter, written apparently when it first reached him, he breaks out upon it, and from that moment never ceases to persecute it, in every form of ingenious torture, until, in the seventy-fourth, he brings his own work to its conclusion. Even Sancho, with his accustomed humor and simplicity, is let loose upon the unhappy Aragonese; for, having understood from a chance traveller who first brings the book to their knowledge, that his wife is called in it Mary Gutierrez, instead of Teresa Panza,--