the victim of a monomania on this one subject, and resolves to revive the order of chivalry in his own proper person.  He persuades a somewhat prosaic neighbor of his to accompany him as squire.  They sally forth, and meet with various adventures, from which they reap no benefit but the sad experience of plentiful rib-roasting.  Now if this were all of “Don Quixote,” it would be simply broad farce, as it becomes in Butler’s parody of it in Sir Hudibras and Ralpho so far as mere external characteristics are concerned.  The latter knight and his squire are the most glaring absurdities, without any sufficient reason for their being at all, or for their adventures, except that they furnished Butler with mouthpieces for his own wit and wisdom.  They represent nothing, and are intended to represent nothing.

I confess that, in my judgment, Don Quixote is the most perfect character ever drawn.  As Sir John Falstaff is, in a certain sense, always a gentleman,—­that is, as he is guilty of no crime that is technically held to operate in defeasance of his title to that name as a man of the world,—­so is Don Quixote, in everything that does not concern his monomania, a perfect gentleman and a good Christian besides.  He is not the merely technical gentleman of three descents—­but the true gentleman, such a gentleman as only purity, disinterestedness, generosity, and fear of God can make.  And with what consummate skill are the boundaries of his mania drawn!  He only believes in enchantment just so far as is necessary to account to Sancho and himself for the ill event of all his exploits.  He always reasons rightly, as madmen do, from his own premises.  And this is the reason I object to Cervantes’s treatment of him in the second part—­which followed the other after an interval of nearly eight years.  For, except in so far as they delude themselves, monomaniacs are as sane as other people, and besides shocking our feelings, the tricks played on the Don at the Duke’s castle are so transparent that he could never have been taken in by them.

Don Quixote is the everlasting type of the disappointment which sooner or later always overtakes the man who attempts to accomplish ideal good by material means.  Sancho, on the other hand, with his proverbs, is the type of the man with common sense.  He always sees things in the daylight of reason.  He is never taken in by his master’s theory of enchanters,—­although superstitious enough to believe such things possible,—­but he does believe, despite all reverses, in his promises of material prosperity and advancement.  The island that has been promised him always floats before him like the air-drawn dagger before Macbeth, and beckons him on.  The whole character is exquisite.  And, fitly enough, when he at last becomes governor of his imaginary island of Barataria, he makes an excellent magistrate—­because statesmanship depends for its success so much less on abstract principle than on precisely that traditional wisdom in which Sancho was rich.