l are
the boundaries of his mania drawn! He only believes in enchantment just
so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill
event of all his exploits. He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from
his own premises. And this is the reason I object to Cervantes's
treatment of him in the second part--which followed the other after an
interval of nearly eight years. For, except in so far as they delude
themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides
shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke's castle
are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.

Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner
or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good
by material means. Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the
type of the man with common sense. He always sees things in the daylight
of reason. He is never taken in by his master's theory of
enchanters,--although superstitious enough to believe such things
possible,--but he _does_ believe, despite all reverses, in his promises
of material prosperity and advancement. The island that has been
promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before
Macbeth, and beckons him on. The whole character is exquisite. And,
fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island
of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate--because statesmanship
depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on
precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.

THE FIVE INDISPENSABLE AUTHORS

(HOMER, DANTE, CERVANTES, GOETHE SHAKESPEARE)

The study of literature, that it may be fruitful, that it may not result
in a mere gathering of names and dates and phrases, must be a study of
ideas and not of words, of periods rather than of men, or only of such
men as are great enough or individual enough to reflect as much light
upon their age as they in turn receive from it. To know literature as
the elder Disraeli knew it is at best only an amusement, an
accomplishment, great, indeed, for the dilettante, but valueless for the
scholar. Detached facts are nothing in themselves, and become of worth
only in their relation to one another. It is little, for example, to
know the date of Shakespeare: something more that he and Cervantes were
contemporaries; and a great deal that he grew up in a time fermenting
with reformatio