love of romances of chivalry, such as were still the vogue in Spain—he found a patron. But the Duke might almost have been described as an hereditary patron of works of chivalry, and when he learned the nature and object of Don Quixote, for which the influence of his name had been obtained, he withdrew his patronage. Cervantes prevailed upon the Duke to listen to the reading of a chapter from the book before making his decision absolute, and, according to Vicente de los Rios, who is responsible for the story, his Grace was so delighted with the humour and humanity of the history, that he reversed his verdict, and consented to accept the dedication. The king’s printer, Francisco de Robles, having secured a ten years’ copyright in the work, the privilege of publication was granted on 26th September, 1604, and the book was issued from the press of Juan de la Cuesta, at Madrid, in January, 1605.
The success of “the book of humanity,” as Sainte-Beuve has happily described Don Quixote, was instantaneous and unprecedented, up to that date, in the world of letters. Spain rang with admiration and plaudits of this inspired story-teller and of the story, the like of which had never before been told. In an age when readers were few, the book was widely read, and in a country where the buying of books was a limited indulgence, the book sold in its thousands. Mr. Watts estimates that no fewer than 4,000 copies went into circulation in 1605. Copies of six editions, published in that year, are extant—Madrid, Lisbon, and Valencia each being responsible for two editions within a few months of its first appearance. So competent an authority as Señor Gayangos is of opinion that further impressions were printed at Barcelona, Pamplona, and Zaragoza. Prior to the publication of Don Quixote, no masterpiece of fiction had ever found so enthusiastic a public, or a sale so enormous. It became in a flash the common-place book of the nation. Cervantes tells us, through the mouth of the Bachelor Carrasco, in the Second Part, which was not published until ten years later: “I do not in the least doubt but at this day there have been published about 12,000 of it. Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed, can witness that, if there were occasion. It is said that it is also now in the press at Antwerp. And I verily believe there is scarce a language into which it is not to be translated.” In the same forty-fourth Chapter of the Second Part, the rightly proud and complacent author speaks no more than the literal truth when he says of it: “The author has made everything so plain that there is nothing in that book but what anyone may understand. Children handle it, youngsters read it, grown men understand it, and old people applaud it. In short, it is universally so thumbed, so gleaned, so studied, and so known, that if the people do but see a lean horse, they presently cry, ‘There goes Rozinante.’ But no
description of persons is so devoted to it as your pages; there is not a nobleman’s ante-chamber in which you will not find a Don Quixote. If one lays it down, another takes it up; while one is asking for it, another one snatches it; in short, this history affords the most pleasing and least prejudicial entertainment that ever was published, for there is not so much as the appearance of an immodest word in it, nor a thought that is not entirely catholic.”
Concerning the publication and popularity of Don Quixote, many stories of varying degrees of improbability have sprung up, and are common to most of the biographies of Cervantes. But the following incident, showing that “even in his lifetime the author obtained the glory of having his work receive a royal approbation,” is culled from an anonymous “tract” published in 1853. The author does not quote any authority for the narrative, which I have not encountered elsewhere. “As Philip III.,” says this chronicler, “was standing in a balcony of his palace at Madrid, viewing the country, he observed a student on the banks of the river Manzanares reading in a book, and from time to time breaking off and beating his forehead with extraordinary tokens of pleasure and delight; upon which the king observed to those about him: ‘That scholar is either mad, or he is reading Don Quixote.’ The biographer rounds up his story with the gratifying assurance that ‘the latter proved to be the case.’”
It must not be supposed that, amid the almost universal applause which welcomed the appearance of Don Quixote, some discordant notes were not heard. People of fashion, whose chief literary recreation was the reading of the very books of chivalry, which Cervantes so boldly and humourously satirised, regarded it with cold displeasure; the clergy frowned upon it, and rival authors professed to find it vulgar, unbecoming, and absurd. But its popularity increased, despite, if not even by reason of these captious criticisms, and the object of the author in writing it gave rise to more speculation and disputings than the interpretation of Ibsen has provoked in recent times. Cervantes himself declared that he compiled his romance for the purpose of “causing the false and silly books of chivalries to be abhorred by mankind,” and in the attainment of this object he was wholly successful. The publication of such romances suddenly ceased; the writing of them was abandoned; the creation of these lovelorn shepherds and shepherdesses, and of impossible cavaliers was arrested as if by magic. And having marked the effect of the book, the public sought for some hidden intention that was supposed to work behind the author’s pages, and were content to find it in the character of the Knight of La Mancha. They concluded that Don Quixote was intended to satirise someone; but whom? Was it the prosaic sovereign, Charles V., who was here held up to ridicule, or the least romantic King Philip II., or that contemptuous and unlettered disburser of royal
