This was the end of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha, whose village Cid Hamet desired not to indicate precisely, in order to let all the cities and towns of La Mancha contend among themselves for the honour of giving him birth and adopting him for their own, as the seven cities of Greece contended for Homer. The lamentations of Sancho, of the Niece, and the Housekeeper of Don Quixote are here omitted, as well as the new epitaphs upon his tomb; but this was what Samson Carrasco put there:—
“A valiant gentleman here lies,
Whose courage reached to such a height,
Of death itself he made a prize,
When against Death he lost the fight.
He reck’d not of the world a jot,
The world’s great bugbear and the dread;
Strong was his arm, and strange his lot;
Stark mad in life,—when sober, dead.“
“Don Quixote de La Mancha.” Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616). Trans. H. E. Watts.