At that time I was of the opinion that the ridiculousness of Don Quixotism consisted in the fact that the noble knight endeavoured to recall a long-perished past back to life, and his poor limbs and back came into painful contact with the harsh realities of the present. Alas! I have since learned that it is an equally ungrateful folly to endeavour to bring the future prematurely into the present, and that for such an assault upon the weighty interests of the day, one possesses but a very sorry steed, a brittle armour, and an equally frail body! And the wise man dubiously shakes his sage head at the one, as well as at the other, of these Quixotisms. But Dulcinea del Toboso is still the most beautiful woman in the world; although I lie stretched upon the earth, helpless and miserable, I will never take back that assertion, I cannot do otherwise--on with your lances, ye Knights of the Silver Moon, ye disguised barbers! What leading idea guided Cervantes when he wrote his great book? Was his purpose merely the destruction of the romances of knight-errantry, the reading of which at that time was so much the rage in Spain that both clerical and secular ordinances against them were powerless? Or did he seek to hold up to ridicule all manifestations of human enthusiasm in general, military heroism in particular? Ostensibly he aimed only to satirise the romances above referred to, and through the exposition of their absurdities deliver them over to universal derision, and thus put an end to them. In this he succeeded most brilliantly; for that which neither the exhortations from the pulpit, nor the threats of the authorities could effect, that a poor writer accomplished with his pen. He destroyed the romances of chivalry so effectually that soon after the appearance of _Don Quixote_ the taste for that class of literature wholly died out in Spain, and no more of that order were printed. But the pen of a man of genius is always greater than he himself; it extends far beyond his temporary purpose, and without being himself clearly conscious of it, Cervantes wrote the greatest satire against human enthusiasm. He had not the least presentiment of this, for he himself was a hero, who had spent the greater portion of his life in chivalrous conflicts, and who in his old age was wont to rejoice that he had participated in the battle of Lepanto, although he paid for this glory with the loss of his left hand. The biographers can tell us but little concerning the person or private life of the poet who wrote _Don Quixote_. We do not lose much by the omission of such details, which are generally picked up from the female gossips of the neighbourhood. They see only the outer shell; but we see the man, his true, sincere, unslandered self.