n Quixote de la Mancha, if haply this name hath come to
your hearing." Illustrious Romancer! were the "fine frenzies," which
possessed the brain of thy own Quixote, a fit subject, as in this
Second Part, to be exposed to the jeers of Duennas and Serving Men? to
be monstered, and shown up at the heartless banquets of great men? Was
that pitiable infirmity, which in thy First Part misleads him, _always
from within_, into half-ludicrous, but more than half-compassionable
and admirable errors, not infliction enough from heaven, that men by
studied artifices must devise and practise upon the humour, to inflame
where they should soothe it? Why, Goneril would have blushed to
practise upon the abdicated king at this rate, and the she-wolf Regan
not have endured to play the pranks upon his fled wits, which thou
hast made thy Quixote suffer in Duchesses' halls, and at the hands of
that unworthy nobleman.[1]

In the First Adventures, even, it needed all the art of the most
consummate artist in the Book way that the world hath yet seen,
to keep up in the mind of the reader the heroic attributes of the
character without relaxing; so as absolutely that they shall suffer no
alloy from the debasing fellowship of the clown. If it ever obtrudes
itself as a disharmony, are we inclined to laugh; or not, rather,
to indulge a contrary emotion?--Cervantes, stung, perchance, by the
relish with which _his_ Reading Public had received the fooleries of
the man, more to their palates than the generosities of the master, in
the sequel let his pen run riot, lost the harmony and the balance, and
sacrificed a great idea to the taste of his contemporaries. We know
that in the present day the Knight has fewer admirers than the Squire.
Anticipating, what did actually happen to him--as afterwards it did
to his scarce inferior follower, the Author of "Guzman de
Alfarache"--that some less knowing hand would prevent him by a
spurious Second Part: and judging, that it would be easier for his
competitor to out-bid him in the comicalities, than in the _romance_,
of his work, he abandoned his Knight, and has fairly set up the Squire
for his Hero. For what else has he unsealed the eyes of Sancho; and
instead of that twilight state of semi-insanity--the madness at
second-hand--the contagion, caught from a stronger mind infected--that
war between native cunning, and hereditary deference, with which he
has hitherto accompanied his master--two for a pair almost--does