uncouth shape'

is of course the Don himself,

the 'dromedary'

is Rozinante, and

the 'Arab'

doubtless is Cid Hamete Benengeli.

"Taking such an one for the guide,

'who with unerring skill
Would through the desert lead me,'

is a most sweet play of humour like to the lambent flame of his whose
satire was as a summer breath, and who smiled all the time he wrote,
although he wrote chiefly in a prison.

'The loud prophetic blast of harmony'

is doubtless a continuation of this humour, down to the lines

'Nor doubted once but that they both were books,
Having a perfect faith in all that passed.'

"Our poet now becomes positive,

'Lance in rest,
He rode, I keeping pace with him; and now
He, to my fancy, had become the knight
Whose tale Cervantes tells; _yet not the knight
But was an Arab of the desert too_,
Of these was neither, and was both at once.'

This is absolutely true, and was one of the earliest complaints made a
century and a half ago, when Spaniards began to criticise their one
great book. They could not tell at times whether Don Quixote was
speaking, or Cervantes, or Cid Hamete Benengeli.

'A bed of glittering light'

is a delightful description of the attitude of Don Quixote's mind
towards external nature while passing through the desert.

'It is,' said he, 'the waters of the deep
Gathering upon us.'

"It was, of course, only the mirage; but this he changed to suit his
own purpose into the 'waters of the deep,' as he changed the row of
Castilian wind-mills into giants, and the roar of the fulling mills
into the din of war.

"Wordsworth is now awake from his dream, but turning all he saw in it
into a reality, as only the poet can, he feels that

'Reverence was due to a being thus employed;
And thought that, _in the blind and awful lair
Of such a madness, reason did lie couched._'

Here again is a most profound description of the creation of
Cervantes. Don Quixote was mad, but his was a madness that proceeded
from that 'blind and awful lair,' a disordered stomach, rather than
from an injured brain. Had Don Quixote not forsaken the exercise of
the chase and early rising, if he had not taken to eating chestnuts at
night, cold spiced meat, together with onions and 'ollas podridas',
then proceeding to read exciting, unnatur