‘The Don himself that rul’d the Roast
(Whose Fame we are about to Boast),
Did by his solid Looks appear
Not much behind his Fiftieth year.
In Stature he was Lean and Tall,
Big Bon’d, and very Strong withall;
Sound Wind and Limb, of healthful Body,
Fresh of Complection, somewhat Ruddy;
Built for a Champion ev’ry way,
But turn’d with Age a little Grey.’
But, as a whole, ‘Don Quixote,’ as rendered into rhyme by Mr. Ward, cannot be recommended for general perusal.
There is, however, a ‘Quixote’ literature apart from ‘Don Quixote’ itself. The great romance suggested more than one English counterpart, such as ‘The Spiritual Quixote,’ by Richard Graves, and ‘The Female Quixote,’ by Mrs. Lennox. The latter, published in the middle of last century, was devoted to the adventures of one Arabella. Of her we read that, supposing the fictions of the Scudéri school to be ‘real pictures of life,’ ‘from them she drew all her notions and expectations.’ She became, in fact, quite a monomaniac upon the subject, and, as a sample, is for ever expecting that her lover, Glanville, will speak and act like the heroes of her favourite tales. In the end she throws herself into a river, gets brain-fever, and is brought back to sanity by a benevolent divine. Then there is ‘The Amiable Quixote; or, The Enthusiasm of Friendship,’ a novel issued later in the century, and having for central figure a young gentleman named Bruce, who
‘found in the slightest acquaintance some virtue or some recommendation. As soon as the enthusiasm of friendship was excited, it overwhelmed his discretion and clouded his perspicacity.’
But this work owed very little to ‘Don Quixote’—not more than did ‘Tarrataria; or, Don Quixote the Second,’ a romantic poetical medley in two cantos, which appeared in the interval between the two stories just noticed. Early in this century there was issued, for a short space, a literary miscellany, called The Knight Errant, edited by ‘Sir Hercules Quixote, K.E.,’ who, said the prospectus,
‘following the example of his illustrious namesake and ancestor of La Mancha, has, with the assistance of his friends, commenced an era of Civil Knight Errantry, and zealously devoted himself to the comforting of distressed Damsels and disconsolate Widows, the fathering of wronged and destitute Orphans, the promotion of Virtue and chivalrous feeling generally’—
and so on, and so on. To ‘Don Quixote,’ in some form or other, there will, of course, be literary allusions to the end of time.
