Verily, society is republican in its very essence. Every sovereignty, intellectual as well as material, is hated by it. The latter oftener gives aid to the former than is generally imagined. We ourselves came to this conclusion soon after the revolution of July, when the spirit of republicanism manifested itself in all social relations. Our republicans hated the laurels of a great poet even as they hated the purple of a great king. They sought to level the intellectual inequalities of mankind, and in as much as they regarded all ideas that had been produced on the soil of the state as general property, nothing remained to be done but to decree an equality of style also. In sooth, a good style was decried as something aristocratic, and we heard manifold assertions: "A true democrat must write in the style of the people--sincere, natural, crude." Most of the Party of Action succeeded easily in doing this, but not every one possesses the gift of writing badly, especially if one has previously formed the habit of writing well, and then it was at once said, "That is an aristocrat, a lover of style, a friend of art, an enemy of the people." They were surely honest in their views, like Saint Hieronymus, who considered his good style a sin, and gave himself sound scourgings for it. Just as little as we find anti-Catholic, so also do we fail to discover anti-absolutist strains in _Don Quixote_. The critics who think that they scent such sentiments therein are clearly in error. Cervantes was the son of a school which went so far as to poetically idealise the idea of unquestioning obedience to the sovereign. And that sovereign was the King of Spain at a time when its majesty dazzled the whole world. The common soldier felt himself a ray in that halo of glory, and willingly sacrificed his individual freedom to gratify the national pride of the Castilian. The political grandeur of Spain at that time contributed not a little to exalt and enlarge the hearts of her poets. In the mind of a Spanish poet, as in the realm of Charles V., the sun never set. The fierce wars against the Moors were ended, and as after a storm the flowers are most fragrant, so poesy ever blooms most grandly after a civil war. We witness the same phenomenon in England at the time of Elizabeth, and at the same time as in Spain there arose a galaxy of poets, which invites the most remarkable parallelisms. There we see Shakespeare, here Cervantes, as the flower of the school. Like the Spanish poets under the three Philips, so also the English poets under Elizabeth present a certain family likeness, and neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes have claim to originality in our sense of the word. They by no means differ from their contemporaries through peculiar modes of thought or feeling, or by an especial manner of portrayal, but only through greater depth, fervour, tenderness, and power. Their creations are more infused and penetrated with the divine spark of poetry.