men with slings, and looming through clouds
of dust. At this venta stopped Cardenio,
Dorothea, and the Don. Near Torre Nueva
he liberated the galley slaves. To the right
is the venta where the generous enthusiast
was knighted by the knavish landlord, as we
all remember. To the left is the wise village
of Valdepeñas, where you see the wine
gurgling in great swollen pigskins, such as
the Don slashed open, mistaking for giants.
How you think of the shepherd's feast of
acorns, and the misadventure and blunders of
the Don as you enter the cave of Montesinos,
the mouth of a deserted mine, still the haunt
of bats and birds, and used as a refuge in
rough weather by shepherds and hunters; or
at Toboso, the village where the water-jars
are made, where Dulcinea of the red-brown
cheeks lived; or in the pass between the
olives where the mill was that the Don
recklessly rode a tilt at, and which felled him with
their imperturbable arms. We must always,
in reading Don Quixote, to thoroughly enjoy
him, associate him with that gloomy king,
Philip the Second, with the false eyes, guilty
brow, and projecting under-jaw; who married
our Mary, murdered his own son, and let
loose the Armada at us. We must associate
the lean Don, and beautiful Dorothea, and the
shrewd barber, and the condescending duchess,
so fond of a joke, with the padded doublets
of Shakespeare's men— with his Armado,
spruce and debonair, and stormy Pistol, Nym,
"that's the humour of it," and with rings,
and ruffs, and fardingales, and swords, and
roses in the shoe, with ruffs white, starched,
and tubular, with stately speeches, and
plumed hats and cloaks. Shakespeare and
Cervantes died within ten days of each other,
breathed the same air, and looked at the
same sun. There may have been men who
had seen both; and, although Cervantes does
not rail at England, nor Shakespeare at Spain,
there are glimpses in both of strong national
predilections. When Shakespeare wrote
of Othello, and Cervantes of the renegades
and Moorish dignitaries, these two gigantic
minds were not far apart.

To visit Gil Blas, we must pass on to Van-
dyke's world— to Charles the First and Louis
the Fourteenth— and get to the Asturias,
where that ingenious French translator,
adapter (I believe that is our modern word
for literary thief), and compiler laid the scene
of his delicious but shallow story. Who
will know now whether Le Sage stole the
manuscript from a Spanish one in his
patron's library, or merely pilfered it from
Espinel and others? It was not the first or
the last thing the French have stolen from
Spain. The knavish, unprincipled, sly,
nimble- footed, half-French valet, Gil Blas is
no gentleman like the real Spaniard Don
Quixote. But what could one expect of a
needy and unprincipled French appropriator,
living in a bad age, when Spain had sunk
and France was corrupt? Still for a handbook
of the times of Philip the Fourth,
Gil Blas, the son of the old soldier of Oviedo,
in the Asturias, is still the best guidebook.
No one can ever now go to Oviedo and watch
the rude Asturians, with their blue caps and
yellow jackets, without thinking of the
green student of Salamanca, and Gil Perez,
the fat Canon of Oviedo: " Three feet and a
half high, prodigiously fat, with a head
buried between his shoulders— that was my
uncle." You would not recal much of the
old novel by seeing the single-stick players
and sturdy smugglers of the Asturian city.
Their curious maize-picking and spinning
feasts have no more in common with Gil
Blas' epigrammatic friends, than Louis the
Fourteenth and Versailles had with the
projecting roofs and relic chests of the Asturian
city. The fact is that Gil Blas is a true
Louis the Fourteenth book, flavoured with
Spanish liquorice. His robbers, doctors,
lawyers are Frenchmen in Spanish dresses.
His licentiates and valets and canons are
mere Parisian phantoms, speaking a shrewd,
not very worthy, man of the world's
thoughts. Le Sage had never even been in
Spain, so never could have seen the
aqueducts and convents of the city of
Santillane. And we must remember that while
Don Quixote is a true and complete, guidebook
to the country gentleman and shepherd
and student-life of the times of Elizabeth
and Philip the Second, Gil Blas is but a
second-hand introduction to the far less
heroic and interesting Spain of Philip the
Fourth— Spain viewed afar off by a French
plagiarist, who had spent his life in
translating and rifling Spanish books, which then
and afterwards, as our Dryden and early
comedy-writers learned, were the source of
all dramatic intrigue and constructive
combination.

Let the student then of manners well
ransack these books to become acquainted
with the contemporaries of Elizabeth and
Charles the First: the Dorotheas and
Drakes, the Hidalgos and Sanchos, the Don
Raphaels and Gil Blas, that filled the palaces
and cottages of the one and the other Spain.
Such lean enthusiasts as the Don manned the
Armada, and stared at Drake through smoke
and fire. Such lean, velvet-footed rogues as
Gil Blas handed the Canary to Prince
Charles at Madrid, or laughed with the
Duke of Buckingham; such Captain Rolandos
were to be seen by Puritans in the
crowd round the Whitehall scaffold. Such
men as the great Duke, of Cervantes, were
listening as ambassadors when Hamlet was
played for the first time at Nonsuch or at
Greenwich. History deals with shadows,
smoked on the wall of a vault by dead men's
candles. These are living eternal beings of
real flesh and blood. Oviedo and Segovia echo
for ever with the name of Gil Blas just as
Toboso and other sober La Manchan villages
do with that of Cervantes. But as the one was