[182] Chapter 8;—just as he makes Don Quixote fancy a poor peasant in his melon-garden to be Orlando Furioso (c. 6);—a little village to be Rome (c. 7);—and its decent priest alternately Lirgando and the Archbishop Turpin. Perhaps the most obvious comparison, and the fairest that can be made, between the two Don Quixotes is in the story of the goats, told by Sancho, in the twentieth chapter of the First Part in Cervantes, and the story of the geese, by Sancho, in Avellaneda’s twenty-first chapter, because the latter professes to improve upon the former. The failure to do so, however, is obvious enough.
[183] The whole story of Barbara, beginning with Chapter 22, and going nearly through the remainder of the work, is miserably coarse and dull.
[184] In 1824, a curious attempt was made, probably by some ingenious German, to add two chapters more to Don Quixote, as if they had been suppressed when the Second Part was published. But they were not thought worth printing by the Spanish Academy. See Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. VI. p. 296.
[185] Parte II. c. 59.
[186] See Appendix (E).
[187] At the end of Cap. 36.
[188] When Don Quixote understands that Avellaneda has given an account of his being at Saragossa, he exclaims, “Por el mismo caso, no pondré los pies en Zaragoza, y así sacaré á la plaza del mundo la mentira dese historiador moderno.” Parte II. c. 59.
[189] Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 4. The style of both parts of the genuine Don Quixote is, as might be anticipated, free, fresh, and careless;—genial, like the author’s character, full of idiomatic beauties, and by no means without blemishes. Garcés, in his “Fuerza y Vigor de la Lengua Castellana,” Tom. II., Prólogo, as well as throughout that excellent work, has given it, perhaps, more uniform praise than it deserves;—while Clemencin, in his notes, is very rigorous and unpardoning to its occasional defects.
[190] The concluding passages of the work, for instance, are in this tone; and this is the tone of his criticism on Avellaneda. I do not count in the same sense the passage, in the Second Part, c. 16, in which Don Quixote is made to boast that thirty thousand copies had been printed of the First Part, and that thirty thousand thousands would follow; for this is intended as the mere rhodomontade of the hero’s folly; but I confess I think Cervantes is somewhat in earnest when he makes Sancho say to his master, “I will lay a wager, that, before long, there will not be a two-penny eating-house, a hedge tavern, or a poor inn, or barber’s shop, where the history of what we have done shall not be painted and stuck up.” Parte II. c. 71.
[191] Los Rios, in his “Análisis,” prefixed to the edition of the Academy, 1780, undertakes to defend Cervantes on the authority of the ancients, as if the Don Quixote were a poem, written in imitation of the Odyssey. Pellicer, in the fourth section of his “Discurso Preliminar” to his edition of Don Quixote, 1797, follows much the same course; besides which, at the end of the fifth volume, he gives what he gravely calls a “Geographico-historical Description of the Travels of Don Quixote,” accompanied with a map; as if some of Cervantes’s geography were not impossible, and as if half his localities were to be found anywhere but in the imaginations of his readers. On the ground of such irregularities in his geography, and on other grounds equally absurd, Nicholas Perez, a Valencian, attacked Cervantes in the “Anti-Quixote,” the first volume of which was published in 1805, but was followed by none of the five that were intended to complete it; and received an answer, quite satisfactory, but more severe than was needful, in a pamphlet, published at Madrid in 1806, 12mo, by J. A. Pellicer, without his name, entitled “Exámen Crítico del Tomo Primero de el Anti-Quixote.” And finally, Don Antonio Eximeno, in his “Apología de Miguel de Cervantes,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), excuses or defends every thing in the Don Quixote, giving us a new chronological plan, (p. 60), with exact astronomical reckonings, (p. 129), and maintaining, among other wise positions, that Cervantes intentionally represented Don Quixote to have lived both in an earlier age and in his own time, in order that curious readers might be confounded, and, after all, only some imaginary period be assigned to his hero’s achievements (pp. 19, etc.). All this, I think, is eminently absurd; but it is the consequence of the blind admiration with which Cervantes was idolized in Spain during the latter part of the last century and the beginning of the present;—itself partly a result of the coldness with which he had been overlooked by the learned of his countrymen for nearly a century previous to that period. Don Quixote, Madrid, 1819, 8vo, Prólogo de la Academia, p. [3].