history of a nation, what is now called
history being the mere dull narrative of the
crimes of royal puppets— it is to be found
in pamphlets, chap-books, songs, novels,
dramas. There was no real history, no means.
that is, of knowing what a nation thought,
intended, did; of how it lived, and moved, and
died, till novels were written; and of these,
one of the earliest and best is Don Quixote,
written in Shakespeare's life-time; and one of
the next best is Gil Blas, written before we had
any novel worth mentioning, except Robinson
Crusoe. We had really no novelist in England
till Fielding wrote, and set the world ever since
writing. The great misfortune of the Greek
dramatists, except Aristophanes, is, that they
give us no sense of the times that they lived
in. Every man must feel strongest the times
he lives in, and though imagination disliking
the severity of facts, may fly easier in the thick
and cloudy air of past times, the greatest men
always write best of their own times, their
own hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows.

People not knowing the Elizabethan times
do not yet see clearly how entirely, except
in his great idealisms— as Lear, Macbeth and
Othello (which are of no time) how entirely
Shakespeare deals with the life he lived, in
town and country, Stratford and London; its
impish pages (Moths); its punctilious
courtiers (Sir Armados); its bewildering wit-
quibbling Beatrices; its twaddling fogy
Shallows; its tavern oracles, Sir John Falstatf;
its wild-blood Mercutios; its introspective
Falklands (Hamlets); its bullying Pistols— all
these characters because we find them more
fully pourtrayed in him than in all the other
playwrights, many of whom never attempt or
pretend to rise beyond the Mermaid and Bow
Steeple— we know to have been photographs
of Elizabethan men. Abstractions of human
passions like Milton's Satan and Belial may
arise from reading and thinking, but
Shakespeare's men arise only from seeing.

In the same vein of reasoning, I would
assure you from long (I am not ashamed to
assert it) study of contemporaneous
literature that the Spain of Don Quixote is the
true unexaggerated Spain of the time of
Cervantes?— why should he who knows all
his own country invent another? For the
human mind rejoices to see in book or
picture what it never cared to see in nature
—being forced and led to see in the book
or picture what it never could see in
nature, having the faculty of observation
either not at all, or cultivated to a limited
degree; being too hasty or too purblind, or
indifferent.

Cervantes was imprisoned in La Mancha,
whose brown bare mountains I have seen
from Gibraltar with a start and kindle of
delight. It was a lucky and sunny day for the
world when, on a certain afternoon, a Spanish
gentleman, with chestnut hair and aquiline
nose (slightly awry), pale complexion, silver
beard, and large moustachios, shut up in the
sordid gaol of Argamasilla de Alba, laid his left
hand, crippled by an arquebus-shot at the
great battle of Lepanto, on a piece of paper
(duly paged), and wrote upon its upper half
those memorable words:

DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA.
PART I.—BOOK I.—CHAP. I.

WHICH TREATS OF THE QUALITY AND MANNER OF LIFE
OF THE RENOWNED DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA.

And goes on to tell us that his chief worldly
possessions were a lance, a target, a lean horse,
and a thin greyhound; and how his diet was
boiled meat, chitterlings, lentils on Fridays,
and a small pigeon on Sundays.

It is to me, at least (not being of the grand
ideal school) a most comforting and rejoicing
thought that all world-wide books are, after all,
but memories. Shakespeare sketches a poor
village suicide, or a London tavern character,
and they become the types recognised and
current of all the world's suicides and tavern
wits. He paints a streamlet or a cedar-tree,
and they stand for all streamlets and all
cedar-trees. So Don Quixote is really a
purely local la Manchan book— a parochial
and entirely Spanish book— and yet it will be
read through all countries and lands as long
as men have eyes and printing-presses. Enter
the table-land, thirsty country of La Mancha
—with its seven thousand square miles, and its
two hundred and fifty thousand thickheads—
through the mountain gateway of Throw-
the-Moors-Over, explore its treeless,
windswept wastes, dry and tawny; talk to its
perpetual brown cloaks and honest faces peering
out of mud-huts, and you will see everywhere
Cervantes and Sancho. Here, by
a rare streamlet, or under a spongy-
barked cork-tree, you find the Pedro and
Andrews that the lanthorn-jawed knight
spoke to. There are the hemp sandals; here
you see the last palm tree of Andalusia,
lingering like a reluctant Moor, and the place
where for the only time the intrepid but fleet-
footed Spaniards defeated the French, much
to their own astonishment. Here the
saltpetre dust almost blinds you as you pull out
your Don Quixote from a chosen side-pocket.
Everywhere in La Mancha is Cervantes;
the Don with bandaged head follows you,
as you watch the strings of sturdy mules
driven by some girl or sturdy grandchild
of Sancho, or watch the corn crops, or the
saffron, or the stubbly vines, bristling up
their grapes with dwarf boughs and red,
scorched porous leaves. Here you see the
true Sancho, fond of his master and of his own
stomach; not quick at quarrel, but simple,
trusty, and affectionate; honest, enduring,
industrious, and temperate; and not (unlike
Sancho in this) " attached and confiding"
when honourably and kindly treated. Here
the Biscayan merchants, with their horse-
litters and umbrellas, no longer pass; nor the
linked galley slaves; but you meet the
muleteers still, and the flocks of sheep driven by