Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (mobile ebook reader .txt) 📖

know him, thou shalt warn to leave at rest where they lie the weary mouldering bones of Don Quixote, and not to attempt to carry him off, in opposition to all the privileges of death, to Old Castile, making him rise from the grave where in reality and truth he lies stretched at full length, powerless to make any third expedition or new sally; for the two that he has already made, so much to the enjoyment and approval of everybody to whom they have become known, in this as well as in foreign countries, are quite sufficient for the purpose of turning into ridicule the whole of those made by the whole set of the knights-errant; and so doing shalt thou discharge thy Christian calling, giving good counsel to one that bears ill-will to thee. And I shall remain satisfied, and proud to have been the first who has ever enjoyed the fruit of his writings as fully as he could desire; for my desire has been no other than to deliver over to the detestation of mankind the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry, which, thanks to that of my true Don Quixote, are even now tottering, and doubtless doomed to fall forever.1001 Farewell.” Endnotes

This book, it may be as well to remind some readers, is not, as it is still often described, one of Defoe’s novels, but the genuine experiences of an English officer in Spain during the Succession War. ↩

“I am going through Don Quixote again, and admire it more than ever. It is certainly the best novel in the world beyond all comparison.”

—⁠Macaulay, Life and Letters

↩

Proverb 201. In its original and correct form it is “give orders to the king”⁠—“al rey mando”⁠—i.e., recognize no superior. ↩

The humor of this, and indeed of the greater part of the Preface, can hardly be relished without a knowledge of the books of the day, but especially Lope de Vega’s, which in their original editions appeared generally with an imposing display of complimentary sonnets and verses, as well as of other adjuncts of the sort Cervantes laughs at. Lope’s Isidro (1599) had ten pieces of complimentary verse prefixed to it, and the Hermosura de Angelica (1602) had seven. Hartzenbusch remarks that Aristotle and Plato are the first authors quoted by Lope in the Peregrino en su Patrin (1604).

Who the two or three obliging friends may have been is not easy to say. Young Quevedo, who had just then taken his place in the front rank of the poets of the day, was, no doubt, one; Espinel may have been another; and Jáuregui might have been the third. Cervantes had not many friends among the poets of the day. His friendships lay rather among those of the generation that was dying out when Don Quixote appeared. ↩

Aesop, “Fable of the Dog and the Wolf.” ↩

The distich is not Cato’s, but Ovid’s; but Hartzenbusch points out that there is a distich of Cato’s beginning Cum fueris felix which Cervantes may have originally inserted, substituting the other afterwards as more applicable. Lope de Vega’s second name was Felix, and Hartzenbusch thinks the quotation was aimed at him. The Cato is, of course, Dionysius Cato, author of the Disticha de Moribus. ↩

In the “Index of Proper Names” to Lope’s Arcadia there is a description of the Tagus in very nearly these words. ↩

The Bishop of Mondoñedo was Antonio de Guevara, in whose epistles the story referred to appears. The introduction of the Bishop and the “creditable reference” is a touch after Swift’s heart. ↩

Author of the Dialoghi di Amore, a Portuguese Jew, who settled in Spain, but was expelled and went to Naples in 1492. ↩

Amor di Dios, by Cristobal de Fonseca, printed in 1594. ↩

“By all that’s good”⁠—Voto á tal⁠—one of the milder forms of asseveration used as a substitute on occasions when the stronger Voto á Dios might seem uncalled for or irreverent; an expletive of the same nature as “Egad!” “Begad!” or the favorite feminine exclamation, “Oh my!” “By all that’s good” has, no doubt, the same origin. Of the same sort are, Voto á Brios, Voto á Rus, Cuerpo de tal, Vida de tal, etc. The last two correspond to our “Od’s body,” “Od’s life.” ↩

The gracioso was the “droll” of the Spanish stage. Cervantes repeatedly uses the word to describe Sancho, and, as here, alludes to his gracios or drolleries. ↩

All translators, I think, except Shelton and Mr. Duffield, have entirely omitted these preliminary pieces of verse, which, however, should be preserved⁠—not for their poetical merits, which are of the slenderest sort, but because, being burlesques on the pompous, extravagant, laudatory verses usually prefixed to books in the time of Cervantes, they are in harmony with the aim and purpose of the work, and also a fulfilment of the promise held out in the Preface. ↩

Or more strictly “the unrecognized”; a personage in Amadís of Gaul somewhat akin to Morgan la Fay and Vivien in the Arthur legend, though the part she plays is more like that of Merlin. She derived her title from the faculty which, like Merlin, she possessed of changing her form and appearance at will. The verses are assigned to her probably because she was the adviser of Amadís. They form a kind of appendix to the author’s Preface. ↩

Proverb 15. ↩

The Duke of Béjar, to whom the book