"To which Rodaja answered, 'You are not asked to bestow a penny, and I have not a grain of the fool about me.'

"One day, being in a publisher's shop, the lunatic remarked, 'This trade would please me well but for its one fault.'

"What may that be?' demanded the publisher.

"To which Rodaja answered, "The airs you give yourselves when you buy the copyright of a book from an author, and the jokes you play on authors when they print at their own cost.'

On the margin of the page in which these words occur in one of the rare editions of this story, some pathetic reader, perhaps himself an author, has written the words-it was his own copy-" O Cervantes, thou shouldst be living now."

The fame of the lunatic spread throughout the whole of Castile, and his sayings were on every one's lips. A prince wrote to a noble of Salamanca, begging him to bring the doctor to the Court, which was then at Valladolid.

666

"I am not good for palaces,' was the reply, 'for I have still left in me some shame, and know not how to flatter.'

"Nevertheless he went, and was cordially received, and the prince asked him of his health and of his journey. No journey is ill if it comes to an end,' was the reply, 'except that of going to the gallows.'

"One day, going out hawking, the lunatic remarked

that

Falconry was a practice worthy of princes, since the cost of the pleasure was about two thousand to one of the profit;' and that 'hare-hunting was fine sport, when followed with your neighbour's hounds."

Finally, he made the acquaintance of a monk of the order of St. Jerome, who had singular gifts and graces, particularly in making the deaf and dumb hear and speak after a certain fashion, and also in the case of insanity. The monk, moved of charity, took Flasket under his care, and recovered him of his affliction. He at length regained his strength of intellect, but the people still held him to be mad. Not being able in such society to earn a living in the pursuit of literature, he resolved on going to Flanders and entering the army. On leaving Madrid, he exclaims—

"O Court, that enlargest the hopes of insolent pretenders, and blightest those of the humble and true; that fillest the saucy fool with abundance, and starvest to death the modest wise, farewell." *

Farewell, quoth I, my humble home and plain!
Farewell Madrid, the Prado, and the springs
Distilling nectar and ambrosial rains!

Farewell, ye gay assemblies-pleasant things
To cheer one careworn, aching heart, and eke
Two thousand faint and starving underlings!

Farewell, thou site befabled and unique,

Where erst two giants great were set ablaze
By thunderbolt of Jove in fiery freak!

Farewell, ye public theatres, which raise

False wit aloft, and give a worthless crown
To quite a hundred thousand foolish plays!

He went to Flanders, "where he finished in arms the life he might have made immortal by letters."

The Novels of Cervantes procured for him the praise of enemies as well as the applause of friends. Lope de Vega wrote in imitation of them, but confessed himself inferior to Cervantes. Tirso de Molina, called the Spanish Boccacio, had no praise left for himself after reading the works of the maimed one of Lepanto; and Calderon, the greatest of all of those times, lavished his encomiums on the purity of spirit and the eagle-pinioned genius that painted so sweetly the portrait of human love. The last and

greatest tribute of all was that of Sir Walter Scott:

Farewell the hunger keen of some grandee,

For sooner than drop dead beside thy door,
From country and from self to-day I fly!

Viage del Parnaso, cap. i.

Gongora's "Sonnet" to the same city will be read with much interest; by some, perhaps, with equal surprise :

A bestial life in witchery enshrined,

:

Harpies that prey on purses, and all grades
Of wrecked ambitions lurking in the shades,

Might make a grave judge talk, and raise the wind;
Broad ways with coaches, lacqueys, pages lined,
Thousands of uniforms with virgin blades,
Ladies loquacious, legatees, broking trades;
Faces like masks, and rogueries refined;
Lawyers long-robed; most bare-faced lies that are;
Clerics on she-mules, mulish tricks and ways;
Streets paved with mud, and filth of endless smell;
Bemaimed and battered heroes of the war;
Titles, and flatteries, and canting phrase;
This is Madrid, or better said, 'tis hell.

"But for the Novelas Exemplares of Miguel de Cervantes, the Waverley Novels would never have been written."

Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda was not printed until after his death, and then by his widow, and for no other purpose or reason than to raise a little money for her poor self. It has gone through several editions. It is now but little read, although formerly it had many admirers; while Master Josef de Valdivieso declares that of all the works left by Cervantes none came up to this, for in genius and cultivation, as well as for pastime, it surpasses them all. Unfortunately we have no means of judging for ourselves whether this witness be true, for I suppose that Master Josef means by "all the works left by Cervantes" such as were left in manuscript.

It is time to turn to the chief purpose for which this Handy Book is written; and although we shall travel a little over the same road by which we have so far come, yet I trust it will be to gather fresh beauties and discover more pleasures.

I say that Don Quixote was mad.

His madness was not the result of an injured or a weakened brain; he does not become ferocious like Cardenio, nor was he an idiot like Anselmo; he was a monomaniac, mad on one idea, and perfectly sane, even wondrous wise, on all others. His madness was seated, not so much in his head, as in his stomach, and he could, any day he chose, have cured himself.

This is not a fancy of mine; it is a statement of the distinctive and discriminating knowledge of the author of The Ingenious Hidalgo, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Spain in the sixteenth century was overrun with madmen of the same type, men of one idea. The country was ruled by madmen-the king, the Inquisition, the nobles, the cardinals, priests, and nuns, who were all dominated by one mastering and overbearing conviction that the way to heaven was through a door, the keys of which were in their keeping. It was this belief, which in some assumed the force of a fierce infatuation, that inflamed the minds of such men as Charles V., Philip II., Ignacio Loyola, Torquemado, the Duke de Avila, Cisneros, with the holy woman Santa Teresa, and almost every other leading spirit in arms, in the Church, even in literature, and in every department of the State; and so far as these were under the influence of monomania, so far did they resemble Don Quixote. It is therefore of the greatest interest to us to be assured that Cervantes knew what he was about when he began to make his map of the human mind. He was perhaps the first to navigate its darkest region, to tell us of the quality of this terrible darkness, and to show how it could be shined upon with the healing blessedness of light. There is as much pleasure to be obtained in proving this statement as in following the adventures of Don Quixote in his native land.

At the very onset we learn that Don Quixote was