Cervantes, in truth, came, at last, to love these creations of his marvellous power, as if they were real, familiar personages, and to speak of them and treat them with an earnestness and interest that tend much to the illusion of his readers. Both Don Quixote and Sancho are thus brought before us, like such living realities, that, at this moment, the figures of the crazed, gaunt, dignified knight and of his round, selfish, and most amusing esquire dwell bodied forth in the imaginations of more, among all conditions of men throughout Christendom, than any other of the creations of human talent. The greatest of the great poets--Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton--have no doubt risen to loftier heights, and placed themselves in more imposing relations with the noblest attributes of our nature; but Cervantes--always writing under the unchecked impulse of his own genius, and instinctively concentrating in his fiction whatever was peculiar to the character of his nation--has shown himself of kindred to all times and all lands; to the humblest degrees of cultivation as well as to the highest; and has thus, beyond all other writers, received in return a tribute of sympathy and admiration from the universal spirit of humanity. It is not easy to believe, that, when he had finished such a work, he was insensible to what he had done. Indeed, there are passages in the Don Quixote itself which prove a consciousness of his own genius, its aspirations, and its power.[190] And yet there are, on the other hand, carelessnesses, blemishes, and contradictions scattered through it, which seem to show him to have been almost indifferent to contemporary success or posthumous fame. His plan, which he seems to have modified more than once while engaged in the composition of the work, is loose and disjointed; his style, though full of the richest idiomatic beauties, abounds with inaccuracies; and the facts and incidents that make up his fiction are full of anachronisms, which Los Rios, Pellicer, and Eximeno have in vain endeavoured to reconcile, either with the main current of the story itself, or with one another.[191] Thus, in the First Part, Don Quixote is generally represented as belonging to a remote age, and his history is supposed to have been written by an ancient Arabian author;[192] while, in the examination of his library, he is plainly contemporary with Cervantes himself, and, after his defeats, is brought home confessedly in the year 1604. To add further to this confusion, when we reach the Second Part, which opens only a month after the conclusion of the First, and continues only a few weeks, we have, at the side of the same claims of an ancient Arabian author, a conversation about the expulsion of the Moors,[193] which happened after 1609, and a criticism on Avellaneda, whose work was published in 1614.[194]