description of persons is so devoted to it as your pages; there is not a nobleman’s ante-chamber in which you will not find a _Don Quixote_. If one lays it down, another takes it up; while one is asking for it, another one snatches it; in short, this history affords the most pleasing and least prejudicial entertainment that ever was published, for there is not so much as the appearance of an immodest word in it, nor a thought that is not entirely catholic.” Concerning the publication and popularity of _Don Quixote_, many stories of varying degrees of improbability have sprung up, and are common to most of the biographies of Cervantes. But the following incident, showing that “even in his lifetime the author obtained the glory of having his work receive a royal approbation,” is culled from an anonymous “tract” published in 1853. The author does not quote any authority for the narrative, which I have not encountered elsewhere. “As Philip III.,” says this chronicler, “was standing in a balcony of his palace at Madrid, viewing the country, he observed a student on the banks of the river Manzanares reading in a book, and from time to time breaking off and beating his forehead with extraordinary tokens of pleasure and delight; upon which the king observed to those about him: ‘That scholar is either mad, or he is reading _Don Quixote_.’ The biographer rounds up his story with the gratifying assurance that ‘the latter proved to be the case.’” It must not be supposed that, amid the almost universal applause which welcomed the appearance of _Don Quixote_, some discordant notes were not heard. People of fashion, whose chief literary recreation was the reading of the very books of chivalry, which Cervantes so boldly and humourously satirised, regarded it with cold displeasure; the clergy frowned upon it, and rival authors professed to find it vulgar, unbecoming, and absurd. But its popularity increased, despite, if not even by reason of these captious criticisms, and the object of the author in writing it gave rise to more speculation and disputings than the interpretation of Ibsen has provoked in recent times. Cervantes himself declared that he compiled his romance for the purpose of “causing the false and silly books of chivalries to be abhorred by mankind,” and in the attainment of this object he was wholly successful. The publication of such romances suddenly ceased; the writing of them was abandoned; the creation of these lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, and of impossible cavaliers was arrested as if by magic. And having marked the effect of the book, the public sought for some hidden intention that was supposed to work behind the author’s pages, and were content to find it in the character of the Knight of La Mancha. They concluded that _Don Quixote_ was intended to satirise someone; but whom? Was it the prosaic sovereign, Charles V., who was here held up to ridicule, or the least romantic King Philip II., or that contemptuous