Why, then, should we suppose that it was beyond the genius of a Beaumont to conceive, as Peele, Jonson, Chapman, Marston, and others had conceived, a drama which should burlesque the devotees of such romances as were the fad of the day? And to conceive it without the remotest suggestion from _Don Quixote_? Whether Beaumont read Spanish or not, and there is no proof that he did read it; whether he had heard of _Don Quixote_ or not, and there is little doubt that he had, there is nothing in _The Knight of the Burning Pestle_ that in any way presupposes either verbal acquaintance with, or constructive dependence upon, the burlesque of Cervantes.[213] In short, Professor Schevill, in the article cited above, and following him Dr. Murch, in an admirable introduction to his edition of _The Knight_, have shown that Beaumont's conception of the hero, Ralph, not only is not of a piece with, but is fundamentally different from, Cervantes' conception of Don Quixote; and they have demonstrated with a minuteness of chapter and verse that need not be recapitulated here that the motives, machinery and characters, ideas and phrases are, in so far as they have relation to romances of chivalry, drawn out of, or suggested by, the English translations already enumerated. This demonstration applies to the adoption of the squire, the rescue of Mrs. Merrythought, the incident of the casket, the liberation of the barber's patients, the mock-heroic love-affair, as well as to the often adduced barber's basin and the scene of the inn. Of the situations, there is none that is not a logical issue of the local conditions or the presuppositions of an original plot; whereas there are, on the other hand, numerous situations in _Don Quixote_, capable of dramatic treatment, that the Elizabethan playwright of 1607-8 could hardly have refrained from annexing if he had used that story as a source. The setting or background of _The Knight_, as Professor Schevill has said, in no way recalls that of the _Don_, "and it is difficult to see how any inspiration got from Cervantes should have failed to include at least a slight shadow of something which implies an acquaintance with Rocinante and Sancho Panza." Beaumont, in addition, not only satirizes, as I have said, the chivalric and bourgeois dramas of Heywood, _If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody_, etc., and dramas of romantic marvel like _Mucedorus_ and the _Travails_, and parodies with rare humour the rant of Senecan tragedy; he not only ridicules the military ardour and pomp of the London citizens, and pokes fun at their unsophisticated assumption of dramatic insight and critical instinct,--with all this satire of the main plot and of the spectator-gods in the machinery, he has combined a romantic plot of common life--Jasper, Luce, and Humphrey,--and a comic plot of humours in which Jasper's father, mother, and brother live as Merrythoughts should. He has produced a whole that in drama was an innovation and in burlesque a triumph.