Cervantes was one of the world's great satirists, a man gifted with a keen and peculiar sense of the ridiculous. He would himself have been the first to laugh at those modern critics who professed to see in him a great poet, and indeed, at the end of his days, when he assessed his life's work in his mock-heroic Voyage to Parnassus, he admitted that he had not the poetic gift. That he had a golden imagination is obvious to anyone who cares to read his Galatea, imitative as it is, and Don Quixote overflows with imagination and invention, although certain later passages of the wondrous satire are extremely reminiscent of some of its earlier pages. To me Don Quixote has always seemed one of the most precious and curious of books, but probably for very different reasons from those by which it makes its appeal to the majority of people, for it is because of the information it affords concerning romantic literature and customs that I treasure it most. Where the satire is really legitimate I revel in the fun as much as it is possible for anyone to do, but I feel that many of its passages are rather shabbily iconoclastic, and that some of its strictures are levelled not only against the absurdities of chivalric extravagance, but against the whole spirit and structure of romance. It had been well, too, for Cervantes had he confined himself entirely to the satiric vein, for when he essays to employ the very literary vehicle at which he chiefly scoffed he frequently becomes more maudlin--that is the only word for it--than the most sentimental writers against whom he girds. His shepherds and shepherdesses and his runaway nuns are long-winded and pedantic, and he was indeed badly bitten by that tiresome Arcadian phase in European literature which culminated in the prose pastoral, which had its roots in false conventions and employed as its mise en scène an atmosphere of sham rural felicity. Sannazaro, in his Arcadia, had indeed piped the tune to which Cervantes danced for many a day ere his own strong common sense showed him the fatuity of the models which he followed. The author of the Pastor de Filida, Luiz Galvez de Montalvo, was his own close friend, and there is every evidence that he made wholesale raids upon the distinctly minor efforts of such poetasters as Hebrao and Alonso Perez. The works of the men who composed this school of pseudo-Arcadianism had none of the charm of the delightful canvases of Watteau and Fragonard, silk-coated and satin-gowned though their shepherds and shepherdesses be. The country of the Spanish pastoral had a background of pasteboard scenery, and theatrical effects of lighting flashed across its stage. It was peopled by bores of the most intolerable description, who, instead of looking after their live stock, as they were paid to do, wearied each other and the wretched traveller who was unhappy enough to encounter them with their amorous bellowings and interminable tales of misfortune. Little