surrendered himself up to the illusion, and was moved to
admiration by the recital of deeds which, viewed in any other light
than as a wild frolic of imagination, would be supremely ridiculous;
for these tales had not the merit of a seductive style and melodious
versification to relieve them. They were, for the most part, an
ill-digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as little
keeping and probability in the characters as in the incidents, while
the whole was told in that stilted "Hercles' vein" and with that
licentiousness of allusion and imagery which could not fail to debauch
both the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The mind,
familiarized with these monstrous, over-colored pictures, lost all
relish for the chaste and sober productions of art. The love of the
gigantic and the marvelous indisposed the reader for the simple
delineations of truth in real history....

Cervantes brought forward a personage, in whom were embodied all those
generous virtues which belong to chivalry; disinterestedness, contempt
of danger, unblemished honor, knightly courtesy, and those aspirations
after ideal excellence which, if empty dreams, are the dreams of a
magnanimous spirit. They are, indeed, represented by Cervantes as too
ethereal for this world, and are successively dispelled as they come
in contact with the coarse realities of life. It is this view of the
subject which has led Sismondi, among other critics, to consider that
the principal end of the author was "the ridicule of enthusiasm--the
contrast of the heroic with the vulgar"--and he sees something
profoundly sad in the conclusions to which it leads. This sort of
criticism appears to be over-refined. It resembles the efforts of some
commentators to allegorize the great epics of Homer and Virgil,
throwing a disagreeable mistiness over the story by converting mere
shadows into substances, and substances into shadows.

The great purpose of Cervantes was, doubtless, that expressly avowed
by himself, namely, to correct the popular taste for romances of
chivalry. It is unnecessary to look for any other in so plain a tale,
altho, it is true, the conduct of the story produces impressions on
the reader, to a certain extent, like those suggested by Sismondi. The
melancholy tendency, however, is in a great degree counteracted by the
exquisitely ludicrous character of the incidents. Perhaps, after all,
if we are to hunt for a moral as the key of the fiction, we m