the fog of the Latin on the opposite page I can make out more or less of the true lineaments of the man.  I can see that he was a master of language, for it becomes alive under his hands—­puts forth buds and blossoms like the staff of Joseph, as it does always when it feels the hand and recognizes the touch of its legitimate sovereigns.  Those prodigious combinations of his are like some of the strange polyps we hear of that seem a single organism; but cut them into as many parts as you please, each has a life of its own and stirs with independent being.  There is nothing that words will not do for him; no service seems too mean or too high.  And then his abundance!  He puts one in mind of the definition of a competence by the only man I ever saw who had the true flavor of Falstaff in him—­“a million a minute and your expenses paid.”  As Burns said of himself, “The rhymes come skelpin, rank and file.”  Now they are as graceful and sinuous as water-nymphs, and now they come tumbling head over heels, throwing somersaults, like clowns in the circus, with a “Here we are!” I can think of nothing like it but Rabelais, who had the same extraordinary gift of getting all the go out of words.  They do not merely play with words; they romp with them, tickle them, tease them, and somehow the words seem to like it.

I dare say there may be as much fancy and fun in “The Clouds” or “The Birds,” but neither of them seems so rich to me as “The Frogs,” nor does the fun anywhere else climb so high or dwell so long in the region of humor as here.  Lucian makes Greek mythology comic, to be sure, but he has nothing like the scene in “The Frogs,” where Bacchus is terrified with the strange outcries of a procession celebrating his own mysteries, and of whose dithyrambic songs it is plain he can make neither head nor tail.  Here is humor of the truest metal, and, so far as we can guess, the first example of it.  Here is the true humorous contrast between the ideal god and the god with human weaknesses and follies as he had been degraded in the popular conception.  And is it too absurd to be within the limits even of comic probability?  Is it even so absurd as those hand-mills for grinding out so many prayers a minute which Huc and Gabet saw in Tartary?

Cervantes was born on October 9, 1547, and died on April 23, 1616, on the same day as Shakespeare.  He is, I think, beyond all question, the greatest of humorists.  Whether he intended it or not,—­and I am inclined to believe he did,—­he has typified in Don Quixote, and Sancho Panza his esquire, the two component parts of the human mind and shapers of human character—­the imagination and understanding.  There is a great deal more than this; for what is positive and intentional in a truly great book is often little in comparison with what is accidental and suggested.  The plot is of the meagrest.  A country gentleman of La Mancha, living very much by himself, and continually feeding his fancy with the romances of chivalry, becomes at last