But afterwards, when chivalry had become established, it developed its Art of Beauty; a fantastic literature about ideal beings, who conformed to an artificial and complicated code of etiquette, and spent their time rescuing beautiful young ladies from the claws of various monsters. There grew up a whole genealogy of these literary knights, and enormous long poems were composed about them. When I was at Columbia University, acquiring culture, one of the tasks set me was the reading of Ariosto, an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, and I valiantly struggled through a dozen cantos of these absurd adventures. They resemble a Griffith moving picture, in which there is a villain engaged in an elaborate process of raping a beautiful virgin, while the gallant hero is galloping on his way to a rescue. But Ariosto regales us with more details of the attempted rape; for in these old times people were not afraid of the animal aspects of life. In the distant island of Britain some rough country fellows trained themselves to shoot arrows through the joints of the knightly armor. A little later came the invention of gunpowder, and that finished the hard-shell crabs on horseback. But the literary world also resembles a crab, in that it walks backward, with its eyes on the past. Invariably you find that what is called scholarship and culture is several generations behind the practical life of men; and so the poets went on composing elaborate and fantastic romances of chivalry. The test of excellence in literature was the refinement and elegance and remoteness from life of this perverted leisure-class art: until Cervantes came along and laughed it to death. He was born in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, noble but poor. He first lived his great book, and then in old age he wrote it. He went to Rome in the retinue of a papal ambassador, and later on took up the chivalrous career, a crusade. The Turks were in possession of the Mediterranean, and the Spaniards were trying to drive them out; Cervantes, though ill of a fever, fought desperately at the battle of Lepanto, and was twice wounded. After five years of such war he was sailing home, when the Turks captured him, and for several years he was a slave in Algiers--a gallant and romantic slave, the darling of his companions and the terror of his masters. He made several attempts to escape, and finally was ransomed by his relatives, and came home to Spain, crippled and poor--to reflect, like so many returned soldiers, upon the bitterness of dead glory.