DON QUIXOTE'S PREDECESSORS.
Spain is not the only country which for a time has set an extravagant estimate on some books or class of books. Even in our own days and in those of the last generation, have not literary furors prevailed for picturesque banditti, and feudal castles, and caverns, and awful noises in vast and dimly lighted bedchambers, for poetry beckoning its victims to despair and suicide, for novels stamped with the silver fork of high life, and lastly, for those which enlarge on the physiology of forbidden fruit? M. Chasles will pleasantly explain the literary penchants of the peninsula two hundred and sixty odd years since:
"We have seen the France of the seventeenth century enthusiastic for the Astrea and the Clelia, [Footnote 10] and the England of the eighteenth assume shield and spear for Clarissa Harlowe, [Footnote 11] but in 1598 and in Spain, the extraordinary popularity of the Amadises resembled a brain fever at which no one dared laugh. One day a certain nobleman coming home found his wife in tears. 'What is the matter? What bad news have you heard?' 'My dear, Amadis is dead.' They could not suffer the writers to put their heroes to death. The infant Don Alonzo personally interceded with the author of the Portuguese Amadis to rewrite the chapter in which the Signora Briolana was sacrificed. These creatures of the imagination assumed a personal reality among the people of that era in the mind of every one. Every one was convinced that Arthur of Britain would one day return among men. Julian of Castile, who wrote in 1587, affirmed (could we believe him) that when Philip II. espoused Mary of England, he was obliged to reserve the claims of King Arthur, and engage to yield him the throne when he returned. Chivalric fictions became an article of faith. A certain gentleman, Simon de Silveyra, swore one day on the Holy Gospel that he held the history of Amadis de Gaul [Footnote 12] for true and certain."
[Footnote 10: For information concerning these slow romances and their contemporaries, and the great Honore d'Urfy. see University Magazine for February, 1844.]
[Footnote 11: A school of simple and warm-hearted working-class folk nightly assembled at a forge in Windsor to hear the perilous trials of Pamela read out to them. They watched with unflagging interest her progress through her ticklish trials, and showed their joy in her final triumph by running in a body to the church and ringing the bells.]
[Footnote 12: This first and best of the chivalric romances was composed by Vasco de Lobeira of Oporto, who died in 1406. It was written between 1342 and 1367, and first printed between 1492 and 1500. There is some uncertainty concerning the given dates.]
Such were a few characteristics of Spanish life when Cervantes thought of writing his Don Quixote. In his numerous works he had it in purpose to improve the state of things in his native country, and to correct this or that abuse, but he obtained no striking success till the publication of this his greatest work. Alas! while it established his character as master in literature, it excited enmities and troubles in abundance.
YOUTH OF CERVANTES.
Miguel de Cervantes y Saavedra was born in 1547 at Alcala de Hénarès. His parents, both of gentle birth, were Rodrigo de Cervantes and Leonor de Cortinas. Their other children born before Michael were Rodrigo, Andrea, and Luisa. His family belonged to the class of impoverished gentlefolk, poor but intensely proud of their descent from one of those hardy mountaineers the Saavedras, who, five centuries before, so heroically defended the northern portion of Spain against the Moors. While the hereditary possessions were growing less and less, the heads of the family would endeavor to compensate for present privations, by relating to their children the noble deeds and the great estates of their ancestors.
Cervantes' paternal roof was probably surrounded by some of the paternal fields, and it is likely that the domestic economy was similar to that described in the first chapter of Don Quixote, where translators have still left us at a loss as to the Saturday's fare, duelos y quebrantos (griefs and groans), some, guessing it to be eggs and bacon; others, a dish of lentils; others, brains fried in oil; others, the giblets of fowl.
Alcala de Hénarès [Footnote 13] was worthy to be the birthplace of Spain's best writer. The archbishops of Toledo owned a palace there, and there the great Cardinal Ximenes, an ex-student of its [{17}] college, returned when somewhat under a cloud, and prepared his world-famous polyglot Bible in Hebrew, Syriac, Greek, and Latin. From the date when the great scholar and statesman made the town his permanent residence it aimed to become, and did eventually become, the intellectual Metropolis of the native country of Cervantes. It possessed a University, nineteen colleges, thirty-eight churches, and works of art in profusion.