descriptions of the sufferings of souls in eternal flame than any doctrinal discourses on the life and teachings of Him Whose message was: “Neither do I condemn thee!” So, gradually, fiction emerging with timidity from under the wing of the Church itself took such prentice flights in the direction of pure rendering of life as picaresque novels like _Don Quixote_. It is, however, doubtful if the adventures of the knight of la Mancha would have got past the Index had not the Church been called in in the person of the parish priest who in the end burns the poor hero’s books of romance; and from that point of view Cervantes may be regarded as simply drawing the cord of conventional morality closer round the necks of the unfortunate public. The romance of _The Seven Champions of Christendom_ had to be burned not because it was a silly book but because its morality was insufficiently puritan, the Church of Rome in the throes of the Catholic Reaction having to prove itself at least as puritan as the Anabaptists of Münster. So the body that tolerated Rabelais good-naturedly had to invent an _auto da fé_ in order to deal with Amadis de Gaul; and Cervantes, for all the world like a seventeenth-century Thackeray, had to attune his satire to the pipe of a reacting church. Fiction, in short, had to pay an always greater tribute to morality as it escaped from being the mere servant of established religion. In effect the Church--and then the Churches--said to the novel, the play, the romance, and the ballad: “We are too busy cutting each other’s throats and inventing newer theologies, to bother any more about artistic productions. In the meantime we will remove the benefit of clergy that used to shield those who could manipulate a pen. You may write and compose what lay fictions you like, but the rack, the faggot or the pillory will attend you if you publish anything that we _don’t_ like.” And the novelist, always a timid creature and in England avid of social consideration, was quick to take the hint. So Don Quichotte de la Mancha, the only gentleman produced by the genius of Cervantes, and indeed by all the genius of that age, had to become a pitiable lunatic. Yet it is impossible that a man of the perspicacity of the writer of that work could not have seen that the Don, wiping curds from his benign and tranquil countenance, was godlike in comparison to the crooks and gross peasants--the cats and monkeys!--that surrounded him. Nevertheless the Don must go!