a century. This final rightness the first readers of Don Quixote could not have. But we can. We share their pleasure and their confidence in it; and we add another pleasure and another confidence, or rather certainty, of our own. They could not know, what we know, that the humanity and humour of Cervantes have stood the difficult test of time, and have proved to be founded on what is eternal and universal in our nature, and so to have those qualities about which it is so hard for contemporaries to be certain, the qualities that make a classic. Nor could they know that the hero of Cervantes would become, for all nations, the very name and symbol of an unworldly, unpractical, partly noble and wholly lovable temper, the temper or character which we call quixotic. And there is yet another thing. No one in the sixteenth century, either Spaniard or foreigner, could know that the author of Don Quixote was to stand for ever, even to his own countrymen and still more to the world outside, as the accepted and authentic voice of one of the greatest of European nations. All these things are possessions which those first readers could not have and which we cannot lose.

I have been lingering over these general questions and must now come more directly to the book itself. And to its author. There may be a few of you who do not very well know who he was, or when he lived. No one has a right even to touch on history or biography without an outline of dates. Let me give you those that are necessary-they are very few-in the case of Cervantes.

Miguel Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547. (I give for once his full name in Spanish but I leave the insolence and folly of depriving either him or his hero of the names which English ears have so long known and loved to the pedants who talk about Muhammad and Jahveh and write Virgil with an 'e'.) He fought, with remarkable gallantry, at the famous battle of Lepanto in 1570; but a few years later was

captured by Moorish pirates and kept for five years in slavery at Algiers. Returning to Spain in 1580 he wrote many plays for the stage. But as a dramatist he was soon superseded by Lope de Vega; and it was not till 1605, when the First Part of Don Quixote appeared, that his fame and genius were established beyond dispute. It had at once so great a success that it went through five editions in the first half of 1605. Its popularity tempted an impostor to produce a spurious Second Part which appeared in 1614 and gives occasion to some of the most entertaining conversations in the genuine Second Part which appeared in 1615. Cervantes died in 1616, on the 23rd April; that is, nominally, though not really (for Spain already had the New Calendar), on the same day as Shakespeare. He left one illegitimate daughter; through whom he had one granddaughter who died childless before her mother; so that, like Shakespeare and Milton and so many of the greatest, his only ultimate descendants are his books.

That is his life: not a very successful one during its first fifty-seven years. His soldiering had cost him a maimed hand and made him a pirate's slave: his poems and novels and dramas had brought him little return his activities as royal requisitioner or tax-collector-for he had tried that trade had turned out even worse, for they had landed him in excommunication and prison. But while he was fighting or gathering taxes so unsuccessfully for the king he was gathering something better for himself: that knowledge of human nature so very seldom attained by the mere booklover whose life is perhaps the one he would have chosen if it had been his to choose. That rare knowledge, and rarer sympathy and humour, were the immortality of Don Quixote. Its Spanish success was soon confirmed by foreign admiration. It was translated into English in 1612, and into French in 1614 and has now, says Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, been more translated than any book except three. I wonder how he

makes this calculation and how many people could guess the three which, if it be correct, have alone beaten Don Quixote in this, which is not the worst, test of literary greatness. The first is the Bible, of course, and many people would guess the second which is the Imitation of Christ. But I have found no one who guessed the third: and I should certainly not have guessed it myself. It is The Pilgrim's Progress, which I should never have supposed to be so very widely read outside England. But those at any rate are Mr. Fitz Maurice-Kelly's three. And that means that, if he is right, Don Quixote has been more translated than any book in the world which has not had the advantage of being bought and circulated for purposes of religion. Of all the books of Europe none has been so much read simply for its own sake, for the pleasure of it. That early translation into English had one result which is of great interest at this double Tercentenary; and if fortune had been kinder, might have been of much greater. There is a play called The History of Cardenio which is included among those which the Stationers' Company licensed one Moseley to publish in 1653. It was ascribed by him to Fletcher and Shakespeare, was probably, as Sir Sidney Lee safely conjectures, the same play as that called Cardenno or Cardenna which was twice acted before the Court in 1613, and must have been founded on the adventures of Cardenio as related in the First Part of Don Quixote. But, as Moseley did not after all publish it and as no trace of it remains, we cannot now enjoy the study of this curious link, possibly between the two greatest geniuses of Spain and England, certainly between Cervantes and one or other of the dramatists of the great age of English drama.

So much for the author. And now what of the book? Its scheme is of the simplest. The story is that of a small country squire who gets his head turned by reading those romances of chivalry which had been so universally popular in Spain that even St. Theresa, who might have lived to read

Don Quixote, is described as going crazy over them. He resolves to start out as a knight-errant on the pattern of Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of England and the rest; and, feeling bound to imitate his heroes in having a lady to whose honour he may dedicate his achievements, chooses a country girl of his neighbourhood to whom, as she had been born at Toboso, he gives the fine name of Dulcinea del Toboso: calls his horse, a sorry jade, by the high sounding, yet comic, name of Rosinante (formerly a drudge-horse') in imitation of Bucephalus, Babieca and other steeds of famous name; and, after one solitary excursion, remembers that a knight should have a squire, and induces a peasant of his village, one Sancho Panza, to share his delusions at least so far as to expect the reward of an island such as victorious knights had been wont to give their squires, and in that hope to accompany him in his subsequent journeys. And so from that time forward the two are inseparable companions, not only in the travels and adventures recorded in the book but in the greater journey to posterity and immortality. After all, Sancho won something much greater than the island of his hopes and something which no one would have enjoyed more than he. For the Second Part shows him getting a foretaste of it and exhibiting all a peasant's delight at finding himself in print both in the true First and in the false Second Part.

And he deserved his pleasure. For he has served his master as well in the greater journey as in the less. The book is the record of the adventures which result from such a knight and such a squire setting out on such a quest in the midst of a work-a-day world. The humour of it which, like all the greatest, has in it an element of sadness, lies in the clash, not merely between the adventurers and the world but between the two adventurers themselves. Don Quixote alone would not have been enough. The ideal is scarcely visible without the fact to challenge it, nor the heroic without

the contrast of the commonplace. The two together are life itself, its struggle of elemental duality. Common sense needs its spokesman in every story which is to be true and it has seldom found a better than Sancho. With his help the book gives us the two extremes between which it is our eternal business to find the middle way: the man of vision who is eager to right all wrongs, especially those which exist only in his own imagination, and the man of no vision who is quite content with things as they are and perceives no wrongs in the way of the world, not even those which are plain as the sun at noon. The temper of poetry has rarely had a finer charm than it has in the knight that of prose and matter-of-fact was never pleasanter than in the squire. And note there a point of contrast with Dickens. I said just now that Dickens was like Cervantes in having set out to make his central figure ridiculous and ended by making him lovable. But the note of comedy, almost of burlesque, which Pickwick shares with Don Quixote is, in Pickwick's case, unrelieved by anything better than an unintelligent and sentimental kindliness. Mr. Pickwick is a very kind old gentleman as well as a very ridiculous old gentleman. But if we go so far as to love him, which we hardly do, our love has in it nothing of admiration. He never inspires us, never greatly moves us: we have no particular feeling about him. With Don Quixote it is quite the reverse. As the book progresses we come to love him, yes, and to admire him, as, apart from his central delusion, and not altogether apart from it, one of the most beautiful and moving figures ever created by the human imagination. He is mad, it is true. But it is only on one subject and with a noble sort of madness. On all others, on art, politics, poetry, religion, he is full of good sense, and of more than good sense, of wisdom, of imagination, of charity. Nobody would for a moment dream of saying that of our pleasant English Mr. Pickwick. His is a figure who belongs exclusively to prose comedy. He