and unlettered disburser of royal [Illustration] favours, the Duke of Lerma? But the people who hazarded such wild guesses must have failed to detect the subtle delicacy and nobility of the knight’s nature, and the loving sympathy with which Cervantes dwells upon the wisdom and sterling merit of his hero. Could a man satirise an enemy with such gentleness and affection? Could a genius like Cervantes so far overshoot his bolt as to make not only the other characters in the book, but all the reading world, honour and love the figure that he purposed to hold up to ridicule? If Cervantes, in writing _Don Quixote_, was laughing away Spain’s chivalry, as Lord Byron erroneously declared, then he was the target of his own destructive cynicism, for the story of his career is that of a man who practised a chivalry which was already extinct in Spain, and maintained unswervingly a code of honour which had fallen into desuetude. If Montesquieu’s similarly extravagant comment that “the Spaniards have but one book--that which has made all the others ridiculous” comes nearer to the truth, it must be conceded that the romances which Cervantes exterminated were scarcely worth preserving. But the book affords also another proof that truth surpasses fiction in strangeness, since the popularity of _Don Quixote_, its effect, and its immortality surprised no one so much as its author. Having disposed of his rights in the publication to Francisco de Robles--the sum he obtained for them is nowhere mentioned, but it may be surmised that it was all too small for his need--Cervantes proceeded about his daily task of providing bread for his family, and left this “child of his sterile, ill-cultured wit” to its fate. He remained in Valladolid while his book was being printed at Madrid, and the number of glaring and absurd errors that marred the first edition is proof positive that he did not see a single sheet. Many of these more palpable blunders were absent from the 1608 edition which was revised by the author, who was then resident in the capital.