of all good charities, who once before
Came to Algiers to ransom Christian slaves,
And gave example in himself, and proof
Of a most wise and Christian faithfulness.
His name is Friar Juan Gil.
[95] Cervantes was evidently a person of great kindliness and generosity of disposition; but he never overcame a strong feeling of hatred against the Moors, inherited from his ancestors and exasperated by his own captivity. This feeling appears in both his plays, written at distant periods, on the subject of his life in Algiers; in the fifty-fourth chapter of the second part of Don Quixote; and elsewhere. But except this, and an occasional touch of satire against duennas,—in which Quevedo and Luis Vélez de Guevara are as sever as he is,—and a little bitterness about private chaplains that exercised a cunning influence in the houses of the great, I know nothing, in all his works, to impeach his universal good-nature. See Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Vol. V. p. 260, note, and p. 138, note.
[96] For a beautiful passage on Liberty, see Don Quixote, Parte II., opening of chapter 58.
“Well doth the Spanish hind the difference know
’Twixt him and Lusian slave, the lowest of the low”;—