But, alas!  Brother Bobus, where to begin our purification, and where to end it?  We may, like the curate in “Don Quixote,” reprieve Amadis de Gaul, but shall we, therefore, make Esplandian, “his lawful-begotten son,” a foundation for the funeral-pile we are to set a-blazing presently?  To be sure, there is sense in the observation of the good and holy priest upon that memorable occasion.  “This,” said the barber, “is Amadis of Greece; and it is my opinion that all those upon this side are of the same family.”  “Then pitch them all into the yard,” responded the priest; “for, rather than miss the satisfaction of roasting Queen Pintiquiniestra and the pastorals of Darinel the Shepherd and his damned unintelligible speculations, I would burn my own father along with them, if I found him playing at knight-errantry.”  So into the yard went “Olivante de Laura, the nonsensical old blockhead,” “rough and dull Florismart of Hyrcania,” “noble Don Platir,” with nothing in him “deserving a grain of pity,” Bernardo del Carpio, and Roncesvalles, and Palmerin de Oliva.  What a delicious scene it is!  The fussy barber, tired of reading titles and proceeding to burn by wholesale, passing down books in armfuls to the eager housekeeper, more ready to burn them than ever she had been to weave the finest lace.  And how charming is the hit of the Curate!  “Certainly, these cannot be books of knight-errantry, they are too small; you’ll find they are only poets,”—­the supplication of the niece that the singers should not be spared, lest her uncle, when cured of his knight-errantry, should read them, become a shepherd, and wander through forests and fields,—­“nay, and what is more to be dreaded, turn poet, which is said to be a disease absolutely incurable.”  So down went “the longer poems” of Diana de Montemayor, the whole of Salmantino, with the Iberian Shepherd and the Nymphs of Henares.  The impatience of the curate, who, completely worn out, orders all the rest to be burned a canga cerrada, fitly rounds the chapter, and sends us in good-humor from the auto da fe, while the poor knight is in his bedchamber, all unconscious of the purification in progress, which, if he had known it, mad as he was, would have made his madness starker still, thrashing about with his sword, back-stroke and fore-stroke, and, as Motteux translates it, “making a heavy bustle.”  ’Tis all droll enough; especially when we find that the housekeeper made such clean work of it in the evening, in spite of the good curate’s reservations, and burnt all the books, not only those in the yard, but all those that were in the house; but I should think twice before I let Freston the necromancer into any library with which I am acquainted.

Let us be gentle with the denizens of Fame’s proud temple, no matter how they came there.  You remember, I suppose, Swift’s couplet,—­

  “Fame has but two gates,—­a white and a black one;
  The worst they can say is I got in at the back one.”