MIGUEL DE (1547-1616). When a hook lives for over three hundred years, appeals to young and old of many nations, and has a new freshness for each new generation of readers, you may he sure that it pos sesses some rare qualities. The Spanish romance entitled (after its hero) Don Quixote' is one of a very few such books.
The son of a small-town apothecary-surgeon, hut brought up in the capital Madrid from his seventh year, young Cervantes from an early age showed a poet's talents and a poet's distaste for prosaic busi ness. At the age of 22 he sought his fortune in Italy, and for a time seemed likely to find it as a member of the household of a cardinal at Rome. Such a life, Cervantes' famous work is a satire or burlesque on the long-drawn-out romances of chivalry such as rAmadis de Gaul', which had so greatly influenced Spanish literary taste, national ideals, and everyday manners. Modeled at first on the fine old stories of King Arthur and other legends, these works had degenerated into sickly mixtures of fairy tales and extravagant melodrama. The genuine chivalry or knighthood was long past, and Cervantes showed that these romances only turned people's heads and gave them mistaken notions of life.
Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza are recognized as Spanish types, drawn with remarkable fidelity. They are today among the most celebrated characters of fiction. The story also presents a brilliant panorama of Spanish society at the close of the 16th century. All classes of people are encoun tered on the highways—grandees and kitchen wenches; priests and traders; poets, farmers, sentimental damsels, and mule drivers; convicts, barbers, and veiled Moorish beauties. Meetings with these way farers give occasion for a bewildering succession of lively episodes, which vary from broad farce to tragedy, from comedy to pathos.
This book of Cervantes, it has been said, "has con tributed more than any other single work to the development of the modern novel." It has been translated into all modern languages, and has been printed, in Spain and abroad, in over 700 separate editions. Cervantes also wrote over 30 poetical dramas, and a large number of other works both in prose and verse.