For many a year the sham romance of chivalry had been regarded as a pest. Serious and responsible writers had thundered against it, and there is every evidence that in a measure it stood between a certain section of the people of Spain and anything like mental advancement. It had, indeed, turned the heads of that portion of the nation unaccustomed to think for itself, and unable to form a rational opinion regarding its demerits. In all countries and at all times, this class, usually impressionable and easily led, falls an easy prey to the blandishments of the hack writer of sensational proclivities. It is not too much to say that unhealthy sensationalism in literature constitutes a real and active danger to national well-being. It seduces the people from their duties, unfits them for the serious business of life, renders them pretentious rather than independent, and leads them to the belief that they reflect the virtues or vices of the absurd heroes and heroines of their favourite tales. The one weapon which the more sensible portion of the community can bring to bear against such a pernicious condition of affairs is healthy ridicule, which it usually meets with from the rational and the well-balanced. But the danger exists that in the revulsion of public feeling against literary extravagance not only the absurdities which have obsessed the thoughtless and irritated the sensible will undergo destruction and banishment, but those higher virtues and graces of which they are the distorted reflection will not be discriminated against, but will be demolished along with them. Such, indeed, was the fate which befell the greater romances, those jewels of human imagination, which, although Cervantes himself made an effort to save them, shared in the general wreck and ruin of the fiction of which they were the flower, until the taste and insight of a later day excavated them from the super-incumbent mass under which they lay buried. The Figure of Don Quixote