Quixote (Don), a gaunt country gentleman of La Mancha, about 50 years of age, gentle, and dignified, learned and high-minded; with strong imagination perverted by romance, and crazed with ideas of chivalry. He is the hero of a Spanish romance by Cervantes. Don Quixote feels himself called on to become a knight-errant to defend the oppressed, and succor the injured. He engages for his squire Sancho Panza, a middle-aged, ignorant rustic, selfish, but full of good sense, a gourmand, attached to his master, shrewd and credulous. The knight goes forth on his adventures, thinks wind-mills to be giants, flocks of sheep to be armies, inns to be castles, and galley-slaves oppressed gentlemen; but the squire sees them in their true light. Ultimately, the knight is restored to his right mind, and dies like a peaceful Christian. The object of this romance was to laugh down the romances of chivalry of the Middle Ages.
(Quixote means “armor for the thighs,” but Quixada means “lantern jaws.” Don Quixote’s favorite author was Feliciano de Sylva; his model knight was Am´adis de Gaul. The romance is in two parts, of four books each. Pt. I. was published in 1605, and pt. II. in 1615.)
The prototype of the knight was the duke of Lerma.
Don Quixote is a tall, meagre, lantern-jawed, hawk-nosed, long-limbed, grizzle-haired man, with a pair of large black whiskers, and he styles himself “The Knight of the Woeful Countenance.”—Cervantes, Don Quixote, II. i. 14 (1615).
Don Quixote’s Horse, Rosinantê (4 syl.), all skin and bone.
Quixote (The Female), or Adventures of Arabella, a novel by Mrs. Lennox (1752).
Quixote of the North (The), Charles XII. of Sweden; sometimes called “The Madman” (1682, 1697-1718).
Quodling (The Rev. Mr.), chaplain to the duke of Buckingham.—Sir W. Scott, Peveril of the Peak (time, Charles II.).
Quos Ego—, a threat intended but withheld; a sentence broken off. Eŏlus, angry with the winds and storms which had thrown the sea into commotion without his sanction, was going to say he would punish them severely for this act of insubordination; but having uttered the first two words, “Whom I——,” he says no more, but proceeds to the business in hand.—Virgil, Æneid, i.
“Next Monday,” said he, “you will be a ‘substance,’ and then——;” with which quos ego he went to the next boy.—Dasent, Half a Life (1850).