What shall be said of _Don Quixote_ that has not been said already? or why should we marvel because different men have read it differently? Is it the joyfullest of books, as Carlyle calls it, or do we find it, with Sismondi and De Amicis, the most melancholy of histories? Humour it has, the ripest and rarest that has ever been translated into our language, and pathos that touches the depths of the human emotion. Sir Walter Scott speaks of Cervantes’ humour as “the very poetry of the comic, founded on a tender sympathy with all forms of existence, though displaying itself in sportive reflection, and issuing, not in superficial laughter, but in still smiles, the source of which lies far deeper”; yet others have declared that it lacks “a thread of pathos.” Edward Fitzgerald praised it as “the most delightful of books.” Dr. Johnson declared it to be one of the three books written by a man which the reader wishes to be longer. From Swift to Heine, from Charles Lamb to Sainte-Beuve, from Johnson to Schlegel, the literary giants of all ages and all nationalities have joined in praise of _Don Quixote_. In England and France and Germany it is still regarded as a romance, unapproachable in its _genre_; a work of true genius, supreme, imperishable. But in Spain it has passed from romance, in the national mind, into the realms of reality. In La Mancha the people point to the windmills as proof of the Don’s existence; in Argamasilla they show you the house in which the Knight lived, and draw attention to the ruins of a large, round window, out of which the curate and the barber consigned Don Quixote’s library to the flames. Here is the sluggish Guadiana, in which Sancho Panza’s daughter washed the family linen, and the parish church which guards the veritable portrait of Rodrigo Pacheco, _alias_ Alonzo Quixano, known to fame as Don Quixote de la Mancha, and variously styled the Knight of the Lions and the Knight of the Rueful Countenance. These good, simple Manchegans, who are too wise to mistake _Don Quixote_ for clumsy satire, and recognise the nobility, and wisdom, and virtue of the gallant, fantastic knight-errant, who is “nobly wild--not mad,” have not failed to detect the moral for the age, indeed for all ages, which Mr. Austin Dobson has used as the kernel of his sonnet on the Don: “Alas! poor Knight! Alas! poor soul possest! Yet would to-day, when courtesy grows chill And life’s fine loyalties are turned to jest, Some fire of thine might burn within us still! Ah, would but one might lay his lance in rest, And charge in earnest--were it but a mill!” [Illustration: WHAT PASSED BETWEEN DON QUIXOTE AND HIS SQUIRE. _Madrid, 1868._ _58th Edition._]