It is in such a tale as the above that we observe how Cervantes' style grows more supple and adaptable as his work proceeds. It is clear that he has made an effort to shake off the literary trammels of his time, and that he has succeeded. No longer does he find it necessary to imitate such writers as Antonio de Guevara, as in the passage in which Don Quixote describes the Age of Gold. He has shaken off the rather recondite euphuism of some of the earlier passages, and has become more human and familiar. His speeches are appropriate to his characters; his dialogue is full of life and his narrative of incident. But although in these pages we behold the evolution of a realist, Cervantes never altogether throws off the cloak of academic eloquence--only it becomes a carefully restrained eloquence which has left affectation far behind. The great and immediate success of Don Quixote was, however, principally due to its large humour, and to its faithful portraiture of the Spanish types of Cervantes' day. Into juxtaposition with figures that were familiar to all he brought the extraordinary character of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, a burlesque original out of another age, and yet not lacking in the dignity and greater qualities of the times whose spirit he strove to imitate. Into the environment of seventeenth-century Spain stalked the antiquated figure of Don Quixote, disturbing its ordinary routine and quarrelling with its conventions, carrying the days of chivalry in his head, and projecting their phantasms on the landscape by means of the all too powerful light of his imagination. But if the incongruity of the Don in a modern setting roused grave and sober Spain to inextinguishable laughter, his character and that of Sancho Panza were still recognized as triumphs of creative fiction--the representatives of imagination run mad and of the grossest common sense.