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

of it. ↩

Proverb 147. ↩

Literally, “watered the satisfaction.” ↩

Proverb 179. ↩

Proverb 50. ↩

The Horn Sancho refers to is the constellation of Ursa Minor, which has somewhat the shape of a curved hunting horn, and the hour was calculated by extending the arms horizontally so as to represent a cross, the time being indicated by the relative position of the horn to the arms. ↩

Proverb 96. ↩

I.e. Caton Censorino⁠—Cato the Censor; but Sancho’s impression was that the name was derived from zonzo, “stupid,” or zonzorrion, “a blockhead.” ↩

Proverb 198. ↩

The story of the passage of the goats is a very old one. It is the 30th of the Cento Norelle Antiche, into which it was imported, no doubt, from the Latin of the Aragonese Jew, Pedro Alfonso. There is a Provençal tale to the same effect; but the original was probably Oriental. ↩

An “old Christian” was one who had no trace of Moorish blood in his veins. The remark is somewhat inconsistent in the mouth of Cid Hamete Benengeli. ↩

Proverb 53. ↩

Proverb 130. ↩

The “Insula Firme” was apparently part of Brittany. ↩

The Rev. John Bowie, the learned editor and annotator of Don Quixote, was painstaking enough to verify this statement. It shows how closely Cervantes must have at one time read the Amadís. ↩

Proverb 34. In full it is, “Whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher.” ↩

Proverb 194. ↩

Proverb 160. In full, “Plegue a Dios que orégano sea, y no se nos vuelva alcaravea.”⁠—“Pray God it may prove wild marjoram, and not turn out caraway on us.” Shelton and Jervas not knowing the proverb have mistranslated the passage; the latter shirks the difficulty, and the former translates orégano “a purchase of gold.” ↩

Mal-andante, meaning also “unlucky.” ↩

The eight-real piece = about 1s. 8d. ↩

Proverb 10. ↩

A blunder of Sancho’s for Mambrino. ↩

The mutatio capparum was the change of hoods authorized by the Roman ceremonial, when the cardinals exchanged the fur-lined hoods worn in winter for lighter ones of silk. There is a certain audacity of humor in the application of the phrase here. ↩

Cervantes gives here an admirable epitome, and without any extravagant caricature, of a typical romance of chivalry. For every incident there is ample authority in the romances. ↩

Hartzenbusch, considering “adventure” unintelligible, would substitute “enigma” or “prophecy” for it; and “explain” for “achieve;” but absolute consistency in a burlesque passage like this is scarcely worth insisting upon. ↩

An “hidalgo de devengar quinientos sueldos,” was one who by the ancient fueros of Castile had a right to recover 500 sueldos for an injury to person or property. This is the common explanation; Huarte, in the Examen de Ingenios, says it means the descendant of one who enjoyed a grant of 500 sueldos for distinguished services in the field. The sueldo was an old coin varying in value from a halfpenny to three-halfpence. ↩

Proverb 107. ↩

Proverb 212. “Mas vale salto de mata que ruego de hombres buenos.” Mata is here an old equivalent of matanza = “slaughter;” in modern Spanish the word means a bush or hedge, in consequence of which the proverb is generally misunderstood and mistranslated. ↩

Proverb 210. ↩

Proverb 61. See this note. ↩

Literally “at the Court”⁠—la Corte. ↩

No doubt Pedro Telloz Giron, third Duke of Osuna, afterwards Viceroy in Sicily and Naples; “a little man, but of great fame and fortunes,” as Howell, writing twenty years later, calls him. ↩

Gurapas a word from the “Germanía,” or rogue’s dialect, of which there are many specimens in this chapter and scattered through Don Quixote. Indeed, Juan Hidalgo’s Vocabulario of the Germanía tongue is absolutely necessary to anyone reading the book in the original. ↩

Proverb 32. ↩

Proverb 126. ↩

Malefactors were commonly whipped in this way, and the ceremony is frequently alluded to in the Picaresque novels. ↩

Proverb 186. ↩

Proverb 79. ↩

At the time Cervantes was writing the only book of the kind (i.e. picaresque fiction) that had appeared besides Lazarillo de Tormes was Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, at which, it has been suggested, this passage is aimed. ↩

Proverb. 53. Clemencín thinks that there is an allusion here to Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, the hero of which is sent to the galleys like Ginés de Pasamonte, and at an inn on the road ingratiates himself with the commissary by presenting him with a pig he had stolen. But Clemencín forgot that this incident occurs in the Second Part of Guzman, which was not published till after Don Quixote. ↩

Proverb. 103. Of course it should be “five;” and the proverb is so given by Blasco de Garay. ↩

At the beginning of the chapter we were told there were only two on horseback, and that both of them had muskets. ↩

To pray for “the intention” of another is a