Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 25, 2025
We left here at noon, and reached the ranch early that evening. One-eyed Maria Antonia took us in.... She asked after you, Pancracio. Next morning Luis Cervantes wakes me up. 'Quail, Quail, saddle the horses. Leave me mine but take the General's mare back to Moyahua. I'll catch up after a bit. The sun was high when he arrived with Camilla. She got off and we stuck her on the General's mare."
Only a coarse-minded man would care to make merry with the former, but to one of Cervantes' humour the latter was naturally an attractive subject for ridicule. Like everything else in these romances, it is a gross exaggeration of the real sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influence of those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets.
"I studied everything in a jumble without system, without selection: chemistry, alchemy, history, astronomy, philosophy, law, anatomy, and literature; I read Homer, Virgil, Ossian, Schiller, Goethe, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Voltaire, Moliere, the Koran, the Kosmos, Casanova's Memoirs. I grew more confused each day, more fantastical, more supersensual.
So good a book must have had a better reason for being than Cervantes' dislike of the fantastic books of the later chivalry. Who, then, was the man the original of Don Quixote? Against whom was the satire levelled? Of course nothing was then known to the world outside of poor Don Rodrigo de Pacheco, the Argamasillan hidalgo. Some great man Cervantes must have intended to ridicule.
He had ridden all day through the bare country of Cervantes, where to this day Spain rears her wittiest men and plainest women. The sun had just set behind the distant hills of Old Castile, and from the east, over Aranjuez, where the great river cuts Spain in two parts from its centre to the sea, a grey cloud a very shade of night was slowly rising.
"You know, I've a notion he was having a bit of a laugh on me when I started asking him questions." "But didn't he have anything to say?" "Nothing, save what he said last night." "I've a hunch he didn't come here to shoot you at all, Compadre," said Anastasio. "Give him something to eat and guard him." On the morrow, Luis Cervantes was barely able to get up.
We are told that when the young King Philip III. saw from his window a man striking his forehead and laughing immoderately he said: "That man is either mad, or he is reading 'Don Quixote'" which latter was the case. But the story written by Cervantes did more than entertain.
In his Life of Cervantes, Don Gregorio Mayano throws some doubt upon this.
Of all the absurdities that, thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's chivalry had been dead for more than a century.
She confidently informed us that Cervantes was in the habit of writing at the farthest end, and that he was allowed a lamp for the purpose. We accepted the information with implicit faith; silently picturing on our mental retinas the image of him whose genius had brightened the dark hours of millions for over three hundred years.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking