ors of the Church, observing as
they do a decorum so ingenious that in one sentence they describe a
distracted lover and in the next deliver a devout little sermon that it
is a pleasure and a treat to hear and read. Of all this there will be
nothing in my book, for I have nothing to quote in the margin or to note
at the end, and still less do I know what authors I follow in it, to
place them at the beginning, as all do, under the letters A, B, C,
beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, or Zoilus, or Zeuxis,
though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. Also my book must do
without sonnets at the beginning, at least sonnets whose authors are
dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or famous poets. Though if I
were to ask two or three obliging friends, I know they would give me
them, and such as the productions of those that have the highest
reputation in our Spain could not equal.

"In short, my friend," I continued, "I am determined that Senor Don
Quixote shall remain buried in the archives of his own La Mancha until
Heaven provide some one to garnish him with all those things he stands in
need of; because I find myself, through my shallowness and want of
learning, unequal to supplying them, and because I am by nature shy and
careless about hunting for authors to say what I myself can say without
them. Hence the cogitation and abstraction you found me in, and reason
enough, what you have heard from me."

Hearing this, my friend, giving himself a slap on the forehead and
breaking into a hearty laugh, exclaimed, "Before God, Brother, now am I
disabused of an error in which I have been living all this long time I
have known you, all through which I have taken you to be shrewd and
sensible in all you do; but now I see you are as far from that as the
heaven is from the earth. It is possible that things of so little moment
and so easy to set right can occupy and perplex a ripe wit like yours,
fit to break through and crush far greater obstacles? By my faith, this
comes, not of any want of ability, but of too much indolence and too
little knowledge of life. Do you want to know if I am telling the truth?
Well, then, attend to me, and you will see how, in the opening and
shutting of an eye, I sweep away all your difficulties, and supply all
those deficiencies which you say check and discourage you from bringing
before the world the story of your famous Don Quixote, the light and
mirror of all knight-errantry