There is a difficulty in speaking of _Don Quixote_. One has to come after Fielding and Scott, Heine, Thackeray, and Sainte-Beuve, not to mention many others hardly less illustrious. These are great names, and it may seem that after they have spoken there is nothing left to say. The first duty which this position imposes is not to endeavour deliberately to be different, in the vain hope of attaining originality. But the cloud of witnesses who might be summoned to prove the enduring interest of _Don Quixote_ is itself a part of the critical history of the book, and a tribute to its solitary place in Spanish literature. The ascetic and so-called mystic writers had their day of influence among us in the seventeenth century. Crashaw alone is enough to prove that here, and in a certain section of English life and literature, Santa Teresa and Juan de la Cruz were living forces. Quevedo had his day, and the _Novela de Pícaros_ their following. During the romantic movement, the dramatists were much in men’s mouths. But in each case the Spaniard remained only for a time. Calderon once had his place in Lord Tennyson’s _Palace of Art_, but he fell out, and that has been the fate of all things Spanish in literature. They have given an indication, have been used--and forgotten, or they have been welcomed as strange, mysterious, probably beautiful, and then silently dropped as too exclusively Spanish, too entirely belonging to a long past century. But _Don Quixote_ has been always with us since Shelton’s translation of the first part appeared in 1612. This of itself is proof enough that there is something in _Don Quixote_ which is absent from other Spanish work, whether his own or that of other men.