onal appearance.

It was a great effort of art for Cervantes to maintain the dignity of
his hero's character in the midst of the whimsical and ridiculous
distresses in which he has perpetually involved him. His infirmity
leads us to distinguish between his character and his conduct, and to
absolve him from all responsibility for the latter. The author's art
is no less shown in regard to the other principal figure in the piece,
Sancho Panza, who, with the most contemptible qualities, contrives to
keep a strong hold on our interest by the kindness of his nature and
his shrewd understanding. He is far too shrewd a person, indeed, to
make it natural for him to have followed so crack-brained a master
unless bribed by the promise of a substantial recompense. He is a
personification, as it were, of the popular wisdom--a "bundle of
proverbs," as his master somewhere styles him; and proverbs are the
most compact form in which the wisdom of a people is digested. They
have been collected into several distinct works in Spain, where they
exceed in number those of any other, if not every other country in
Europe. As many of them are of great antiquity, they are of
inestimable price with the Castilian jurists, as affording rich
samples of obsolete idioms and the various mutations of the language.

"Don Quixote" may be said to form an epoch in the history of letters,
as the original of that kind of composition, the novel of character,
which is one of the distinguishing peculiarities of modern literature.
When well executed, this sort of writing rises to the dignity of
history itself, and may be said to perform no insignificant part of
the functions of the latter. History describes men less as they are
than as they appear, as they are playing a part on the great
political theater--men in masquerade. It rests on state documents,
which too often cloak real purposes under an artful veil of policy, or
on the accounts of contemporaries blinded by passion or interest. Even
without these deductions, the revolutions of states, their wars, and
their intrigues do not present the only aspect, nor, perhaps, the most
interesting, under which human nature can be studied. It is man in his
domestic relations, around his own fireside, where alone his real
character can be truly disclosed; in his ordinary occupations in
society, whether for purposes of profit or pleasure; in his every-day
manner of living, his tastes and opinions, as drawn out in social