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DON QUIXOTE.

The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. We have no reason, I believe, to suppose it was written long before. It became immediately popular; and the admiration of the world raised up envious competitors, one of whom, Avellanada, published a continuation in a strain of invective against the author. Cervantes, who cannot be imagined to have ever designed the leaving his romance in so unfinished a state, took time about the second part, which did not appear until 1615. Don Quixote is the only book in the Spanish language which can now be said to possess much of a European reputation. It has, however, enjoyed enough to compensate for the neglect of all the rest. It is to Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspere to England; the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations and countless editions of them, in every language, bespeak its adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to withhold his admiration, no reader has ventured to confess a want of relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have, age after age, taken delight. They have, doubtless, believed that they understood the author's meaning: and, in giving the reins to the gaiety that his fertile invention and comic humour inspired, never thought of any deeper meaning than he announces, or delayed their enjoyment for any metaphysical investigation of his plan.

A new school of criticism, however, has of late years arisen in Germany, acute, ingenious, and sometimes eminently successful in philosophical, or, as they denominate it, æsthetic analysis of works of taste, but gliding too much into refinement and conjectural hypothesis, and with a tendency to mislead men of inferior capacities for this kind of investigation into mere paradox and absurdity. An instance is supplied, in my opinion, by some remarks of Bouterwek, still more explicitly developed by Sismondi, on the design of Cervantes in Don Quixote, and which have been repeated in other publications. According to these writers, the primary idea is that of a "man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic feelings to the extravagant pitch of wishing to restore the age of chivalry: nor is it possible to form a more mistaken notion of this work, than by considering it merely as a satire, intended by the author to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances." "The fundamental idea of Don Quixote," says Sismondi, "is the eternal contrast between the spirit of poetry and that of prose.

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Men of an elevated soul propose to themselves, as the object of life, to be the defenders of the weak, the support of the oppressed, the champions of justice and innocence. Like Don Quixote, they find on every side the image of the virtues they worship: they believe that disinterestedness, nobleness, courage, in short, knighterrantry, are still prevalent, and, with no calculation of their own powers, they expose themselves as a sacrifice to the laws and rules of an imaginary state of society."

If this were a true representation of the scheme of Don Quixote, we cannot wonder that some persons should, as M. Sismondi tells they do, consider it as the most melancholy book that has ever been written. They consider it also, no doubt, one of the most immoral, as chilling and pernicious in its influence on the social converse of mankind, as the "Prince" of Machiavel is on their political intercourse. "Cervantes," he proceeds, "has shown us, in some measure, the vanity of greatness of soul, and the delusion of heroism. He has drawn in Don Quixote a perfect man (un homme accompli), who is nevertheless the constant object of ridicule. Brave beyond the fabled knights he imitates, disinterested, honourable, generous, the most faithful and respectful of lovers, the best of masters, the most accomplished and well educated of gentlemen, all his enterprises end in discomfiture to himself, and in mischief to others." M. Sismondi descants on the perfections of the Knight of La Mancha with a gravity which is not quite easy for his readers to preserve.

It might be answered by a phlegmatic observer, that a mere enthusiasm for doing good, if excited by vanity, and not accompanied by common sense, will seldom be very serviceable to ourselves or to others; that men who, in their heroism and care for the oppressed, would throw open the cages of lions, and set galley-slaves at liberty, not forgetting to break the limbs of harmless persons whom they mistake for wrong-doers, are a class of whom Don Quixote is the real type; and that the world being much the worse for such heroes, it might not be immoral, notwithstanding their benevolent enthusiasm, to put them out of countenance by a little ridicule. This, however, is not, as I conceive, the primary aim of Cervantes; nor do I think that the exhibition of one great truth, as the predominant, but concealed moral of a long work, is in the spirit of his age. He possessed a very thoughtful mind and a profound knowledge of humanity; yet the generalization which the hypothesis of Bouterwek and Sismondi requires for the leading conceptions of Don Quixote, besides its being a little inconsist

ent with the valorous and romantic character of its author, belongs to a more advanced period of philosophy than his own. It will, at all events, I presume, be admitted that we cannot reason about Don Quixote except from the book, and I think it may be shown in a few words that these ingenious writers have been chiefly misled by some want of consistency which circumstances produced in the author's delineation of his hero.

In the first chapter of this romance, Cervantes, with a few strokes of a great master, sets before us the pauper gentleman, an early riser and keen sportsman, who, "when he was idle, which was most part of the year," gave himself up to reading books of chivalry till he lost his wits. The events that follow are in every one's recollection: his lunacy consists, no doubt, only in one idea; but this is so absorbing that it perverts the evidence of his senses, and predominates in all his language. It is to be observed, therefore, in relation to the nobleness of soul ascribed to Don Quixote, that every sentiment he utters is borrowed with a punctilious rigour from the romances of his library: he resorts to them on every occasion for precedents. If he is intrepidly brave, it is because his madness and vanity have made him believe himself unconquerable; if he bestows kingdoms, it is because Amadis would have done the same; if he is honourable, courteous, a redresser of wrongs, it is in pursuance of these prototypes, from whom, except that he seems rather more scrupulous in chastity, it is his only boast not to diverge. Those who talk of the exalted character of Don Quixote seem really to forget, that, on these subjects, he has no character at all: he is the echo of romance; and to praise him is merely to say, that the tone of chivalry, which these productions studied to keep up, and, in the hands of inferior artists, foolishly exaggerated, was full of moral dignity, and has, in a subdued degree of force, modelled the character of a man of honour in the present day. But throughout the first two volumes of Don Quixote, though in a few unimportant passages he talks rationally, I cannot find more than two in which he displays any other knowledge or strength of mind than the original delineation of the character would have led us to expect.

The case is much altered in the last two volumes. Cervantes had acquired an immense popularity, and perceived the opportunity, of which he had already availed himself, that this romance gave for displaying his own mind. He had become attached to a hero who had made him illustrious, and suffered himself to lose sight of the clear outline he had once traced for Quixote's

personality. Hence we find in all this second part, that, although the lunacy as to knights-errant remains unabated, he is, on all other subjects, not only rational in the low sense of the word, but clear, acute, profound, sarcastic, cool-headed. His philosophy is elevated, but not enthusiastic: his imagination is poetical, but it is restrained by strong sense. There are, in fact, two Don Quixotes: one whom Cervantes first designed to draw, the foolish gentleman of La Mancha, whose foolishness had made him frantic; the other a highly-gifted, accomplished model of the best chivalry, trained in all the court, the camp, or the college could impart, but scathed in one portion of his mind by an inexplicable visitation of monomania. One is inclined to ask why this Don Quixote, who is Cervantes, should have been more likely to lose his intellects by reading romances than Cervantes himself. As a matter of bodily disease, such an event is doubtless possible; but nothing can be conceived more improper for fiction, nothing more incapable of affording a moral lesson than the insanity which arises wholly from disease. Insanity is in no point of view a theme for ridicule; and this is an inherent fault of the romance (for those who have imagined that Cervantes has not rendered Quixote ridiculous, have a strange notion of the word); but the thoughtlessness of mankind, rather than their insensibility, for they do not connect madness with misery, furnishes some apology for the first two volumes. In proportion as we perceive, below the veil of mental delusion, a noble intellect, we feel a painful sympathy with its humiliation; the character becomes more complicated and interesting, but has less truth and naturalness: an objection which might also be made, comparatively speaking, to the incident in the latter volumes, wherein I do not find the admirable probability that reigns through the former.... But this contrast of wisdom and virtue with insanity in the same subject, would have been repulsive in the primary delineation, as I think any one may judge by supposing Cervantes had, in the first chapter, drawn such a picture of Quixote as Bouterwek and Sismondi have drawn for him.

I must, therefore, venture to think as, I believe, the world has generally thought for two centuries, that Cervantes had no more profound aim than he proposes to the reader. If the fashion of reading bad romances of chivalry perverted the taste of his contemporaries, and rendered their language ridiculous, it was natural that a zealous lover of good literature should expose this folly to the world by exaggerating its effects on a fic

titious personage. It has been said by some died at his seat at Cannes, France, May 9, modern writer, though I cannot remember 1868. Works: Inquiry into the Colonial by whom, that there was a prose side in the Policy of the European Powers, Lond., 1803, mind of Cervantes. There was indeed a side 2 vols. 8vo; Discourse of Natural Theology, of calm strong sense, which some take for Lond., 1835, p. 8vo; Dissertations on Subunpoetical. He thought the tone of those jects of Science Connected with Natural romances extravagant. It might naturally Theology, Lond., 1839, 2 vols. p. 8vo (the occur how absurd any one must appear who two preceding works are commonly adjoined should attempt to realize in actual life the to Lord Brougham and Sir Charles Bell's adventures of Amadis. Already a novelist, edition of Paley's Natural Theology, Lond., he perceived the opportunities this idea sug-1836, 2 vols. p. 8vo: in all 5 vols., or gested. It was a necessary consequence abridged, Knight's shilling volumes, 1853, that the hero must be represented as liter-4 vols. 18mo); Speeches, Edin., 1838, 4 vols ally insane, since his conduct would have been extravagant beyond the probability of fiction on any other hypothesis; and from this happy conception germinated, in a very prolific mind, the whole history of Don Quixote. Its simplicity is perfect; no limit could be found save the author's discretion, or sense, that he had drawn sufficiently on his imagination; but the death of Quixote, which Cervantes has been said to have determined upon lest some one else should a second time presume to continue the story, is in fact the only possible termination that could be given after he had elevated the character to that pitch of mental dignity | which we find in the last two volumes.

Few books of moral philosophy display as deep an insight into the mechanism of mind as Don Quixote. And when we look also at the fertility of invention, the general probability of events, and the great simplicity of the story, wherein no artifices are practised to create suspense or complicate the action, we shall think Cervantes fully deserving of the glory that attends this monument of his genius. It is not merely that he is superior to all his predecessors and contemporaries. This, though it might account for the European fame of his romance, would be an inadequate testimony to its desert. Cervantes stands on an eminence below which we must place the best of his successors. We have only to compare him with Le Sage or Fielding to judge of his vast superiority. To Scott, indeed, he must yield in the variety of his power; but in the line of comic romance, we should hardly think Scott his equal.

Introduction to the Literature of Europe.

HENRY BROUGHAM, LORD
BROUGHAM,

born in Edinburgh, Sept. 19, 1778, and edu-
cated at the High School and the University
of that city, after a brilliant career in the
House of Commons, became Lord Chancellor
of England, and was raised to the peerage
as Baron Brougham and Vaux, Nov. 1830; |

8vo; Speeches, Lond., 1843, 4 vols. 8vo; Historical Sketches of Statesmen who flour ished in the Time of George III., Lond., 1839-43. 3 vols. 8vo; Political Philosophy, Lond., 1840-44, 3 vols. 8vo, 3d edit., 1853, new edit., 1861, 3 vols. 8vo; Albert Lunel; or, The Chateau of Languedoc, Lond., 1844, 3 vols. post 8vo: suppressed, but republished; Lives of Men of Letters and Science of the Time of George III., Lond., 1845-46, 3 vols. royal 8vo; Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, Glasg., 1856, 3 vols. 8vo (he was cofounder with Jeffrey, Murray, and Sydney Smith of the Edinburgh Review); other publications. Works collected by himself, Edin., 1855-57, 10 vols. post 8vo. His Autobiography, Lond., 3 vols. 8vo, appeared after his death. See also his Life by J. McGilchrist, Lond., fp. 8vo, Lord Campbell's Lives of the Lord Chancellors, and Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Esq., Edited by his Son, Macvey Napier, Lond., 1879, 8vo. Index, p. 544.

Lord Brougham gained distinction by his proficiency in many departments: as a natural philosopher, a political philosopher, an essayist, an orator, an historian, a biographer, a pleader, and a fair classical scholar. His efforts for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge deserve all praise.

SIR WILLIAM GRANT.

We have now named in some respects the most extraordinary individual of his time,one certainly than whom none ever better sustained the judicial office, though its functions were administered by him upon a somewhat contracted scale,-one than whom none ever descended from the forum into the senate with more extraordinary powers of argumentation, or flourished there with greater renown. It happened to this great judge to have been for many years at the bar with a very moderate share of practice; and although his parliamentary exertions never tore him away from his profession, yet his public character rested entirely upon their success until he was raised to the bench.

The genius of the man then shone forth with extraordinary lustre. His knowledge of law, which had hitherto been scanty, and never enlarged by practice, was now expanded to whatever dimensions might seem required for performing his high office; nor was he ever remarked as at all deficient even in the branch most difficult to master without forensic habits, the accomplishments of a case-lawyer while his familiarity with the principles of jurisprudence and his knowledge of their foundations were ample, as his application of them was easy and masterly. The Rolls Court, however, in those days, was one of comparatively contracted business; and although he gave the most entire satisfaction there, and in presiding at the Privy Council in Prize and Plantation Appeals, a doubt was always raised by the admirers of Lord Eldon whether Sir William Grant could have as well answered the larger demands upon his judicial resources, had he presided in the Court of Chancery. That doubt appears altogether unfounded. He possessed the first great quality for despatching business (the "real" and not "affected despatch" of Lord Bacon), a power of steadily fixing his attention upon the matter before him, and keeping it invariably directed towards the successive arguments addressed to him. The certainty that not a word was lost deprived the advocate of all excuse for repetition; while the respect which his judge inspired checked needless prolixity, and deterred him from raising desperate points merely to have them frowned down by a tribunal as severe as it was patient. He had not indeed to apprehend any interruption: that was a course never practised in those days at the Rolls or the Cockpit; but while the judge sat passive and unmoved it was plain that though his powers of endurance had no limits, his powers of discriminating were ever active, as his attention was ever awake; and as it required an eminent hardihood to place base coin before so scrutinizing an eye, or tender light money to be weighed in such accurate scales as Sir William Grant's, so few men ventured to exercise a patience which yet all knew to be unbounded. It may, indeed, be fairly doubted whether the main force of muscular exertion, so much more clumsily applied by Sir John Leach in the same court to effect the great object of his efforts, the close compression of the debate,-ever succeeded so well, or reduced the mass to as small a bulk, as the delicate hydraulic press of his illustrious predecessor did, without giving the least pain to the advocate, or in any one instance obstructing the course of calm, deliberate, and unwearied justice.

The court in those days presented a spec

The

tacle which afforded true delight to every person of sound judgment and pure taste. After a long and silent hearing,-a hearing of all that could be urged by the counsel of every party,-unbroken by a single word, and when the spectator of Sir William Grant (for he was not heard) might suppose that his mind had been absent from a scene in which he took no apparent share, the debate was closed, the advocate's hour was passed,— the parties were in silent expectation of the event, the hall no longer resounded with any voice, it seemed as if the affair of the day for the present was over, and the court was to adjourn, or to call for another cause. No! The judge's time had now arrived, and another artist was to fill the scene. great magistrate began to pronounce his judgment, and every eye and every ear were at length fixed upon the bench. Forth came a strain of clear unbroken fluency, disposing alike, in most luminous order, of all the facts and of all the arguments in the cause; reducing into clear and simple arrangement the most entangled masses of broken and conflicting statement; weighing each matter, and disposing of each in succession; settling one doubt by a parenthetical remark; passing over another difficulty by a reason only more decisive that it was condensed; and giving out the whole impression of the case, in every material view, upon the judge's mind, with argument enough to show why he so thought, and to prove him right, and without so much reasoning as to make you forget that it was a judgment you were hearing, by overstepping the bounds which distinguish a judgment from a speech. This is the perfection of judicial eloquence: not avoiding argument, but confining it to such reasoning as beseems him who has rather to explain the grounds of his own conviction, than to labour at convincing others; not rejecting reference to authority, but never betokening a disposition to seek shelter behind other men's names for what he might fear to pronounce in his own person; not disdaining even ornaments, but those of the more chastened graces that accord with the severe standard of a judge's oratory. perfection of judicial eloquence Sir William Grant attained, and its effect upon all lis teners was as certain and as powerful as its merits were incontestable and exalted.

This

In parliament he is unquestionably to be classed with speakers of the first order. His style was peculiar: it was that of the closest and severest reasoning ever heard in any popular assembly; reasoning which would have been reckoned close in the argumentation of the bar or the dialectics of the schools. It was, from the first to the last, throughout, pure reason, and the triumph

of pure reason. All was sterling, all perfectly plain; there was no point in the diction, no illustration in the topics, no or nament of fancy in the accompaniments. The language was choice,-perfectly clear, abundantly correct, quite concise, admirably suited to the matter which the words clothed and conveyed. In so far it was felicitous, no farther; nor did it ever leave behind it any impression of the diction, but only of the things said: the words were forgotten, for they had never drawn off the attention for a moment from the things; those things were alone remembered. No speaker was more easily listened to; none so difficult to answer. Once Mr. Fox, when he was hearing him with a view to making that attempt, was irritated in a way very unwonted to his sweet temper by the conversation of some near him, even to the show of some crossness, and (after an exclamation) sharply said, "Do you think it so very pleasant a thing to have to answer a speech like that?" The two remarkable occasions on which this great reasoner was observed to be most injured by a reply, were in that of Mr. Wilberforce quoting Clarendon's remarks on the conduct of the judges in the Ship Money case, when Sir William Grant had undertaken to defend his friend Lord Melville; and in that of Lord Lansdowne (then Lord Henry Petty), three years later, when the legality of the famous Orders in Council was debated. Here, however, the speech was made on the one day, and the answer, able and triumphant as it was, followed on the next.

It may safely be said that a long time will elapse before there shall arise such a light to illuminate either the senate or the bench, as the eminent person whose rare excellence we have just been pausing to contemplate. That excellence was no doubt limited in its sphere: there was no imagination, no vehemence, no declamation, no wit; but the sphere was the highest, and in that highest sphere its place was lofty. The understanding alone was addressed by the understanding. The faculties that distinguish our nature were those over which the oratory of Sir William Grant asserted its control. His sway over the rational and intellectual portion of mankind was that of a more powerful reason, a more vigorous intellect, than theirs ; a sway which no man had cause for being ashamed of admitting, because the victory was won by superior force of argument; a sway which the most dignified and exalted genius might hold without stooping from its highest pinnacle, and which some who might not deign to use inferior arts of persuasion could find no objection whatever to exercise.

Yet in this purely intellectual picture there remains to be noted a discrepancy, a want of keeping, something more than a shade. The commanding intellect, the close reasoner, who could overpower other men's understanding by the superior force of his own, was the slave of his own prejudices to such an extent, that he could see only the perils of revolution in any reformation of our institutions, and never conceived it possible that the monarchy could be safe, or that anarchy could be warded off, unless all things were maintained upon the same footing on which they stood in early, unenlightened, and inexperienced ages of the world. The signal blunder, which Bacon long ago exposed, of confounding the youth with the age of the species, was never committed by any one more glaringly than by this great reasoner. He it was who first employed the well-known phrase of the "wisdom of our ancestors ;" and the menaced innovation, to stop which he applied it, was the proposal of Sir Samuel Romilly to take the step of reform, almost imperceptibly small, of subjecting men's real property to the payment of all their debts. Historical Sketches of Statesmen, etc.

CONDITION OF THE CHINESE.

The universal respect in which learning is held, and the privileges allowed to it, have not, however, made the Chinese carry far their cultivation of it. They afford, on the contrary, a singular instance of a nation early making some progress, and then stopping short for ages; of a people, all of whom possess the instruments of education, the means of acquiring knowledge, a people most of whom have actually acquired some knowledge, and yet none of whom have ever gone beyond the most elementary studies. This can only be ascribed to the absolute form of their government, and the manifest intention which the sovereigns have always had to limit the literary acquisitions of their subjects. The advantages of keeping quiet and indolent a people so numerous as to be able to crush almost any ruler, and the means of tranquillity which elementary lessons like those of Confucius and his school bestowed, if they were thoroughly learnt, and became, as it were, mixed up with the nature of the people, could not escape the Chinese monarchs. They had a people to deal with whom they found it easy to occupy with such pursuits, and with the innumerable customs and ceremonies which the sacred writings inculcate together with far better things. The occupation was more than harmless, it was most useful in extinguishing fierce and turbulent

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