Cervantes and Shakespeare very likely died in ignorance of each other's
work. Stoddard has depicted them in Paradise,

Where sweet Cervantes walks,
A smile on his grave face ...
Where, little seen but light,
The only Shakespeare is.

There is no injustice in saying that Shakespeare's nature included that
of Cervantes. Not so inclusive was Dante's; what his nature most lacked
we find in the author of "Don Quixote." Yet personally they are equally
heroic figures, and, one an exile and the other a slave, both drained to
the dregs the cup of human suffering. Cervantes has several great
advantages over most of the world's classic writers: his masterpiece is
a work of humor; it is written in a simple and graceful style, at once
easy and winning; and it is written in prose, which, after all, does not
make so severe a cultural demand on the reader as poetry. For these very
reasons it cannot aspire to the highest rank, but what it loses in fame
it makes up in popularity. Though in a few passages it is not parlor
reading, "Don Quixote" is one of the cleanest of all the world's great
books. It is not merely technically clean, but clean-minded. It has the
form of a satire on chivalry, but its meaning goes much deeper. It is
really a satire on a more persistent weakness of the Spanish character,
visionary unrealism. We have this quality held up to ridicule in the
learned man and the ignorant man, for Sancho Panza is as much of an
unrealist as his master, only he is a groveling visionary while Don
Quixote is a soaring one. This, too, is a book that one does not
outgrow, but finds it a perpetually adequate commentary on his own
widening experience of men and their motives.

In regard to the supreme figure in literature, the least thing that we
can do is to read him, and, having read him, to read him again and to
keep his volumes next to our hands. We shall hardly read Shakespeare
without having the question of commentators come up; and surely
Shakespeare deserves all the attention that we can bestow upon him. But
the general reader should clearly distinguish between the two kinds of
commentary that have appeared regarding Shakespeare, the one having to
do with his text, his historical accuracy, and his use of words, the
other with his meaning. In Hudson's edition these two kinds of notes are
kept separate. Surely it is the thought of Shakespeare that we want, and
not the pedantry of minute scholarship regardin