SANCHO PANZA TOSSED IN THE BLANKET.
Boston, 1837.
38th Edition.
in its inspiration and execution. Avellaneda, whoever the man was who clothed his identity beneath this sobriquet, was a person of some literary talent, but his malice outstripped his wit, and his humour is choked with lewdness. The aim and purpose of the book is deliberately divulged in the prologue, which is nothing less than a savage revilement of Cervantes. His literary defects are assailed with ungovernable fury; his age, his poverty, even the wounds, of which he was so proud, are hurled in his teeth. He is described as having “more tongue than hands;” his impediment in his speech is made matter for mockery; his state is compared with the ruined castle of San Cervantes; and his person, temperament, and condition are summarised in a venemous sentence, in which he is called “a cripple, a soldier old in years, though youthful in spirit; envious, discontented, a back-biter, a malefactor, or, at least, a jail-bird.” It is curious and characteristic of the tone of this attack that Cervantes, the gallant soldier who had won his wounds in the service of his country, but who had not allowed his buoyant spirit or kindliness of heart to be conquered by hardship, penury, and suffering, should be villified for the very things for which the world now holds him in love and esteem. Finally, having attempted to belittle his achievements, and blast his character, his assailant acknowledges that his book is a deliberate attempt to deprive Cervantes of the profit expected from his labours.
In the false Don Quixote thus thrust upon the public the whole design of the original is studied only for the purpose of destroying it; it is written with the set and determined idea of making the name of the Knight of La Mancha stink in the nostrils of the admirers of Cervantes. Here the Don is represented as a common lunatic, who disappears from the story into an asylum for the insane. Sancho Panza is transformed into a gluttonous, vulgar, ignoramus. Dorothea, whose grace and daintiness add fragrance and wit to the original story, becomes a mere wanton. The whole story reeks of obscenity, vulgarity, and dullness, yet an eminent cleric licensed it; Le Sage professed to see in it merits equal to the true history; and the Spanish Academy has preserved the work as being worthy a place in the national collection of classics. Not a detail is wanting to detract from the enormity of the outrage, to give Cervantes the unenviable distinction of being the most basely treated man among the many unfortunates in literature; for surely, never before or since, was an author so villainously used.
Nearly three centuries have elapsed since Cervantes laid aside his pen and rested from the indignities which his generation piled upon him, but the identity of the author of the crowning indignity of his career is still to be revealed. Cervantes himself must have had a shrewd suspicion of the author of this conspiracy, but he either refrained from publishing his name, or felt too insecure in his facts, to be
ADVENTURE WITH THE LIONS.
Paris, 1844.