’Reverence was due to a being thus employed;
    And thought that, in the blind and awful lair
    Of such a madness, reason did lie couched.’

Here again is a most profound description of the creation of Cervantes.  Don Quixote was mad, but his was a madness that proceeded from that ‘blind and awful lair,’ a disordered stomach, rather than from an injured brain.  Had Don Quixote not forsaken the exercise of the chase and early rising, if he had not taken to eating chestnuts at night, cold spiced meat, together with onions and ‘ollas podridas’, then proceeding to read exciting, unnatural tales of love and war, he would not have gone mad.

“But his reason only lay ‘couched,’ not overthrown.  Only give him a dose of the balsam of Fierabras, his reason shall spring out of its lair, like a lion from out its hiding-place, as indeed it did; and you then have that wonderful piece of rhetoric, which describes the army of Alifanfaron in the eighteenth chapter, Part I.

“There are many other things worthy of note, such as

                               ’crazed
    By love and feeling, and internal thought
    Protracted among endless solitudes,’

all of which are ‘fit epithets blessed in the marriage of pure words,’ which the author of ‘The Prelude’, without any special learning, or personal knowledge of Spain, has given us, and are so striking as to compel us once again to go to Wordsworth and say, ’we do not all understand thee yet, not all that thou hast given us.’

Very truly yours, A. J. Duffield.”

Ed.]

[Footnote E:  Compare ‘Paradise Lost’, v. 1. 150: 

  ‘In prose or numerous verse.’

Ed.]

[Footnote F:  Wordsworth’s earliest teachers, before he was sent to Hawkshead School, were his mother and the Rev. Mr. Gilbanks at Cockermouth, and Mrs. Anne Birkett at Penrith.  His mother and Dame Birkett taught him to read, and trained his infant memory.  Mr. Gilbanks also gave him elementary instruction; while his father made him commit to memory portions of the English poets.  At Hawkshead he read English literature, learned Latin and Mathematics, and wrote both English and Latin verse.  There was little or no method, and no mechanical or artificial drill in his early education.  Though he was taught both languages and mathematics he was left as free to range the “happy pastures” of literature, as to range the Hawkshead woods on autumn nights in pursuit of woodcocks.  It is likely that the reference in the above passage is to his education both in childhood and in youth, although specially to the former.  In his ‘Autobiographical Memoranda’, Wordsworth says,