Endnotes

1. This book, it may be as well to remind some readers, is not, as it is still often described, one of Defoe’s novels, but the genuine experiences of an English officer in Spain during the Succession War. ↩

2. “I am going through Don Quixote again, and admire it more than ever. It is certainly the best novel in the world beyond all comparison.”

   —⁠Macaulay, Life and Letters

   ↩

3. Proverb 201. In its original and correct form it is “give orders to the king”⁠—“al rey mando”⁠—i.e., recognize no superior. ↩

4. The humor of this, and indeed of the greater part of the Preface, can hardly be relished without a knowledge of the books of the day, but especially Lope de Vega’s, which in their original editions appeared generally with an imposing display of complimentary sonnets and verses, as well as of other adjuncts of the sort Cervantes laughs at. Lope’s Isidro (1599) had ten pieces of complimentary verse prefixed to it, and the Hermosura de Angelica (1602) had seven. Hartzenbusch remarks that Aristotle and Plato are the first authors quoted by Lope in the Peregrino en su Patrin (1604).

   Who the two or three obliging friends may have been is not easy to say. Young Quevedo, who had just then taken his place in the front rank of the poets of the day, was, no doubt, one; Espinel may have been another; and Jáuregui might have been the third. Cervantes had not many friends among the poets of the day. His friendships lay rather among those of the generation that was dying out when Don Quixote appeared. ↩

5. Aesop, “Fable of the Dog and the Wolf.” ↩

6. The distich is not Cato’s, but Ovid’s; but Hartzenbusch points out that there is a distich of Cato’s beginning Cum fueris felix which Cervantes may have originally inserted, substituting the other afterwards as more applicable. Lope de Vega’s second name was Felix, and Hartzenbusch thinks the quotation was aimed at him. The Cato is, of course, Dionysius Cato, author of the Disticha de Moribus. ↩

7. In the “Index of Proper Names” to Lope’s Arcadia there is a description of the Tagus in very nearly these words. ↩

8. The Bishop of Mondoñedo was Antonio de Guevara, in whose epistles the story referred to appears. The introduction of the Bishop and the “creditable reference” is a touch after Swift’s heart. ↩

9. Author of the Dialoghi di Amore, a Portuguese Jew, who settled in Spain, but was expelled and went to Naples in 1492. ↩

10. Amor di Dios, by Cristobal de Fonseca, printed in 1594. ↩

11. “By all that’s good”⁠—Voto á tal⁠—one of the milder forms of asseveration used as a substitute on occasions when the stronger Voto á Dios might seem uncalled for or irreverent; an expletive of the same nature as “Egad!” “Begad!” or the favorite feminine exclamation, “Oh my!” “By all that’s good” has, no doubt, the same origin. Of the same sort are, Voto á Brios, Voto á Rus, Cuerpo de tal, Vida de tal, etc. The last two correspond to our “Od’s body,” “Od’s life.” ↩

12. The gracioso was the “droll” of the Spanish stage. Cervantes repeatedly uses the word to describe Sancho, and, as here, alludes to his gracios or drolleries. ↩

13. All translators, I think, except Shelton and Mr. Duffield, have entirely omitted these preliminary pieces of verse, which, however, should be preserved⁠—not for their poetical merits, which are of the slenderest sort, but because, being burlesques on the pompous, extravagant, laudatory verses usually prefixed to books in the time of Cervantes, they are in harmony with the aim and purpose of the work, and also a fulfilment of the promise held out in the Preface. ↩

14. Or more strictly “the unrecognized”; a personage in Amadís of Gaul somewhat akin to Morgan la Fay and Vivien in the Arthur legend, though the part she plays is more like that of Merlin. She derived her title from the faculty which, like Merlin, she possessed of changing her form and appearance at will. The verses are assigned to her probably because she was the adviser of Amadís. They form a kind of appendix to the author’s Preface. ↩

15. Proverb 15. ↩

16. The Duke of Béjar, to whom the book was dedicated. The Zuñiga family, of which the Duke was the head, claimed descent from the royal line of Navarre. ↩

17. “Le donne, i cavalieri, l’arme, gli amori” —⁠Orlando Furioso, i 1. This is one of many proofs that the Orlando of Ariosto was one of the sources from which Cervantes borrowed. ↩

18. “Figures,” i.e. picture cards. The allusion to vain emblems on the shield is a sly hit at Lope de Vega, whose portrait in the Arcadia, and again in the Rimas (1602), has underneath it a shield bearing nine castles surrounded by an orle with ten more. ↩

19. This refers to the querulous and egotistic tone in which dedications were often written. Álvaro de Luna was the Constable of Castile and favorite of John II, beheaded at Valladolid in 1450. Francis I of France was kept a prisoner at Madrid by Charles V for a year after the battle of Pavia. The last four lines of the stanza are almost verbatim from verses by Fray Domingo de Guzman written as a gloss upon some lines carved by the poet Fray Luis de Leon on the wall of his cell in Valladolid, where he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. ↩

20. Juan Latino, a self-educated negro slave in the household of the Duke of Sesa, who gave him his freedom. He was for sixty years Professor of Rhetoric and Latin at Granada, where he died in 1573. ↩

21. In allusion to Don Quixote’s penance in the Sierra Morena. ↩

22. V. note 35. ↩

23. Oriana, the heroine of Amadís of Gaul. Her castle Miraflores was within two leagues of London. Shelton in his translation puts it at Greenwich. ↩

24. “Rustic kiss and cuff”⁠—buzcorona⁠—a boorish practical joke the point of which lay in inducing some simpleton to kiss the joker’s hand, which as he stoops gives him a cuff on the cheek. The application here is not very obvious, for it is the person who does homage who receives the buzcorona. It is not clear who is meant by the Spanish Ovid; some say Cervantes himself; others, as Hartzenbusch, Lope de Vega. ↩

25. “Motley poet”⁠—Poeta entreverado. Entreverado is properly “mixed fat and lean,” as bacon should be. Commentators have been at some pains to extract a meaning from these lines. The truth is they have none, and were not meant to have any. If it were not profanity to apply the word to anything coming from Cervantes, they might be called mere pieces of buffoonery, mere idle freaks of the author’s pen. The verse in which they are written is worthy of the matter. It is of the sort called in Spanish de pies cortados, its peculiarity being that each line ends with a word the last syllable of which has been lopped off. The invention has been attributed to Cervantes, but the honor is one which no admirer of his will be solicitous to claim for him, and in fact there are half a dozen specimens in the Picara Justina, a book published if anything earlier than Don Quixote. I have here imitated the tour de force as well as I could, an experiment never before attempted and certainly not worth repeating. The “Urganda” verses are written in the same fashion, but I did not feel bound to try the reader’s patience⁠—or my own⁠—by a more extended reproduction of the puerility. ↩

26. Celestina, or Tragicomedy of Calisto and Meliboea (1499), the first act of which is generally attributed to Rodrigo Cota, the remaining nineteen being by Fernando Rojas. There is no mention in it of “Villadiego the Silent;” the name only appears in the proverbial saying about “taking the breeches of Villadiego,” i.e. beating a hasty retreat. ↩

27. Babieca, the famous charger of the Cid. ↩

28. An allusion to the charming little novel of Lazarillo de Tormes, and the trick by which the hero secured a share of his master’s wine. ↩

29. The play upon the word “Peer” is justified by Orlando’s rank as one of the Twelve Peers. This sonnet is pronounced “truly unintelligble and bad” by Clemencín, and it is, it must be confessed, very feeble and obscure. I have adopted a suggestion of Hartzenbusch’s which makes somewhat better sense of the concluding lines, but no emendation can do much. Nor are the remaining sonnets much better; there is some drollery in the dialogue between Babieca and Rocinante, but the sonnets of the Knight of Phoebus and Solisdan are weak. There was no particular call for Cervantes to be funny, but if he thought otherwise it would have been just as well not to leave the fun out. ↩

30. The Knights of Phoebus or of the Sun⁠—Caballero del Febo, Espejo de Principes y Caballeros⁠—a ponderous romance by Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra and Marcos Martinez, in four parts, the first printed at Saragossa in 1562, the others at Alcalá de Henares in 1580. ↩

31. Solisdan is apparently a name invented by Cervantes, for no such personage figures in any known book of chivalry. ↩

32. See here. ↩

33. The national dish, the olla, of which the puchero of Central and Northern Spain is a poor relation, is a stew with beef, bacon, sausage, chickpeas, and cabbage for its prime constituents, and for ingredients any other meat or vegetable that may be available. There is nothing exceptional in Don Quixote’s olla being more a beef than a mutton one, for mutton is scarce in Spain except in the mountain districts. Salpicon (salad) is meat minced with red peppers, onions, oil, and vinegar, and is in fact a sort of meat salad. Duelos y quebrantos, the title of the Don’s Saturday dish, would be a puzzle even to the majority of Spanish readers were it not for Pellicer’s explanation. In the cattle-feeding districts of Spain, the carcasses of animals that came to an untimely end were converted into salt meat, and the parts unfit for that purpose were sold cheap under the name of duelos y quebrantos⁠—“sorrows and losses” (literally “breakings”) and were held to be sufficiently unlike meat to be eaten on days when flesh was forbidden, among which in Castile Saturday was included in commemoration of the battle of Navas de Tolosa. Any rendering of such a phrase must necessarily be unsatisfactory, and in adopting “scraps” I have, as in the other cases, merely gone on the principle of choosing the least of evils. ↩

34. The first passage quoted is from the Chronicle of Don Florisel de Niqaea, by Feliciano de Silva, the volumes of which appeared in 1532, 1536, and 1551, and from the tenth and eleventh books of the Amadís series. The second is from Olivante de Laura, by Torquemada (1564). Clemencín points out that the first passage had been previously picked out as a sample of the absurdity of the school, by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. ↩

35. The History of Don Belianis de Grecia, by the Licentiate Jerónimo Fernández, 1547. It has been by some included in the Amadís series, but it is in reality an independent romance. ↩

36. Sigüenza was one of the Universidades menores, the degrees of which were often laughed at by the Spanish humorists. ↩

37. The Spanish tradition of the battle of Roncesvalles is, of course, at variance with the Chanson de Roland, but it is somewhat nearer historical truth, inasmuch as the slaughter of Roland and the rearguard of Charlemagne’s army was effected not by Saracens, but by the Basque mountaineers. ↩

38. Ganelon, the arch-traitor of the Charlemagne legend. In Spanish he appears as Galalon, in Italian as Gano; but in this as in the cases of Roland, Baldwin, and others, I have thought it best to give the name in the form in which it is best known, and will be most readily recognized, instead of Roldan, Valdovinos, etc. ↩

39. Like Reinaldos or Rinaldo, who came to be Emperor of Trebizond. ↩

40. That is, a simple headpiece without either visor or beaver. ↩

41. An untranslatable pun on the word quarto, which means a sand-crack in a horse’s hoof, as well as the coin equal to one-eighth of the real. Gonela, or Gonnella, was a jester in the service of Borso, Duke of Ferrara (1450⁠–⁠1470). A book of the jests attributed to him was printed in 1568, the year before Cervantes went to Italy. ↩

42. Rocín is a horse employed in labor, as distinguished from one kept for pleasure, the chase, or personal use generally; the word therefore may fairly be translated “hack.” Ante is an old form of Antes⁠—“before,” whether in time or in order. ↩

43. Quixote⁠—or, as it is now written, Quijote⁠—means the piece of armor that protects the thigh (cuissan, cuish). Smollett’s Sir Lancelot Greaves is a kind of parody on the name. Quixada and Quesada were both distinguished family names. The Governor of the Goletta, who was one of the passengers on board the unfortunate Sol galley, was a Quesada; and the faithful majordomo of Charles V and guardian of Don John of Austria was a Qixada. ↩

44. Properly “blank” armour, but Don Quixote takes the word in its common sense of white. ↩

45. Flamante. Shelton translates “burnished,” and Jervas “flaming,” but the secondary meaning of the word is “new,” “fresh,” “unused.” ↩

46. The Campo de Montiel was “famous” as being the scene of the battle, in 1369, in which Pedro the Cruel was defeated by his brother Henry of Trastamara supported by Du Gueselin. The actual battlefield, however, lies some considerable distance to the south of Argamasilla, on the slope of the Sierra Morena, near the castle of Montiel in which Pedro took refuge. ↩

47. In the later romances of chivalry, a sage or a magician or some such personage was frequently introduced as the original source of the history. ↩

48. In Spain there are at least half a dozen varieties of inns each with its distinctive name. In Don Quixote the inn is almost always the venta, the solitary roadside inn where travellers of all sorts stop to bait; and it has remained to this day much what Cervantes has described. The particular venta that he had in his eye in this and the next chapter is said to be the Venta de Quesada, about 2½ leagues north of Manzanares, on the Madrid and Seville road. The house itself was burned down about a century ago, and has been rebuilt, but the yard at the back with its draw-well and stone trough are said to remain as they were in his day. ↩

49. The commentators are somewhat exercised by the contradiction here. If Don Quixote raised his visor and disclosed his visage, how was it that the girls were unable “to make out the features which the clumsy visor obscured”? Cervantes probably was thinking of the makeshift pasteboard visor (mala visera, as he calls it), which could not be put up completely, and so kept the face behind it in the shade. Hartzenbusch, however, believes the words to have been interpolated, and omits them. ↩

50. Sano de Castilla⁠—a slang phrase from the Germanía dialect for a thief in disguise (ladron disimilado⁠—Vocabulario de Gemiania de Hidalgo). “Castellano” and “alcaide” both mean governor of a castle or fortress, but the former means also a Castilian. ↩

51. The lines quoted by Don Quixote and the host are, in the original:

    “Mis arreos son las armas,
    Mi descanso el pelear,
    Mi cama, las duras peñas,
    Mi dormir, siempre velar.”

    They occur first in the old, probably fourteenth century, ballad of Moriana en un Castillo, and were afterwards adopted as the beginning of a serenade. In England it would be a daring improbability to represent the landlord of a roadside alehouse capping verses with his guest out of Chevy Chase or Sir Andrew Barton, but in Spain familiarity with the old national ballad-poetry and proverbs is an accomplishment that may, even to this day, be met with in quarters quite as unpromising. ↩

52. A parody of the opening lines of the ballad of Lancelot of the Lake. Their chief attraction for Cervantes was, no doubt, the occurrence of rocino (rocín) in the last line. ↩

53. The original has, la visera alzada, “the visor up,” in which case Don Quixote would have found no difficulty in feeding himself. Hartzenbusch suggests babera, beaver, which I have adopted, as it removes the difficulty, and is consistent with what follows; when the landlord “poured wine into him” it must have been over the beaver, not under the visor. ↩

54. “Pothouse”⁠—venteril, i.e. such as only a venta could produce. ↩

55. The localities here mentioned were, and some of them still are, haunts of the rogue and vagabond, or, what would be called in Spain, the picaro class. The Curing-grounds of Málaga was a place outside the town where fish was dried; “the Isles of Riarán” was the slang name of a low suburb of the same city; the Precinct (compas) of Seville was a district on the river side, not far from the plaza de toros; the Little Market of Segovia was in the hollow spanned by the great aqueduct on the south side of the town; the Olivera of Valencia was a small plaza in the middle of the town; the “Rondilla of Granada” was probably in the Albayein quarter; the “Strand of San Lúcar” and the “Taverns of Toledo” explain themselves sufficiently; and the “Colt of Cordova” was a district on the south side of the city, which took its name from a horse in stone standing over a fountain in its centre. As Fermín Caballero says in a queer little book called the Geographical Knowledge of Cervantes, it is clear that Cervantes knew by heart the “Mapa picaresco de España.” ↩

56. In the original, blanca, a coin worth about one-seventh of a farthing. ↩

57. The passage as it stands is sheer nonsense. Clemencín tries to make sense of it by substituting “less” for “more”; but even with that emendation it remains incoherent. Probably what Cervantes meant to write and possibly did write was⁠—“for that was another still more important matter, because,” etc. ↩

58. That is, inflicting two cuts that formed a cross. ↩

59. An old plaza in Toledo, so called probably from a family of the name of Ben Haya; or, as Pellicer suggests, from a corruption of Minaya. ↩

60. I.e. “the Milleress.” ↩

61. Labrador, the word used here to describe the status of Sancho, means, generally, a tiller of the soil, and includes farmers employing laborers, like Juan Haldudo the Rich, who is so described lower down, as well as those who tilled their land themselves or worked for others. Sancho was one of the latter class, as appears from a remark of his own in the Second Part. ↩

62. Cervantes now and then in dialogue does not specify the speaker, but the omissions are so rare that they are probably oversights, and I have generally supplied them. ↩

63. Haldudos⁠—wearers of long skirts. ↩

64. Proverb 112. ↩

65. “Perfumed”⁠—a way of expressing completeness or perfection of condition. ↩

66. An obscure oath, of which there is no satisfactory explanation as to who or what Roque was, whether the San Roque who gave the name to the town near Gibraltar, or some Manchegan celebrity. ↩

67. Not passages of the book, but passages of arms like that of Suero de Quiñones on the bridge of Orbigo in the reign of John II. ↩

68. It is strange that this passage should have escaped the notice of those ingenious critics whose mania it is to hunt for hidden meanings in Don Quixote. With a moderate amount of acumen it ought to be easy to extract from these words a manifest “covert attack” on Church, Faith, and Dogma. ↩

69. The Alcarria is a bare, thinly populated district, in the upper valley of the Tagus, stretching from Guadalajara to the confines of Aragón. Estremadura is the most backward of all the provinces of Spain. In elevating these two regions into the rank of empires, the waggish trader falls in with the craze of Don Quixote. ↩

70. Proverb 114. The ball, i.e., that on which it is wound. ↩

71. Civet was the perfume most in request at the time, and was imported packed in cotton. ↩

72. Mas derecho que un huso⁠—“straighter than a spindle”⁠—is a popular phrase in use to this day. The addition of “Guadarrama” Clemencín explains by saying that spindles were made in great quantities of the beech wood that grew on the Guadarrama Sierra. Fermín Caballero (Pericia Geográfica de Cervantes) holds that the reference is to the pine trees on the Guadarrama Pass. ↩

73. The subject of the old ballad⁠—De Mantua Salió el Marques (Duran’s Romancero General, No. 355); a chanson de geste, indeed, rather than a ballad, as it runs to something over 800 lines. Pellicer wrongly assigns it to Geronimo Trevifio, a sixteenth century author. It is in the Antwerp Cancionero of 1550 and the Saragossa Silva of the same date. ↩

74. From the words used by Cervantes he seems to have known or suspected that Montemayor was not the author of the romantic story of Abindarráez and Xarifa. It was inserted in the second edition of the Diana, the year of the author’s death, and it had previously appeared as a separate novel at Toledo. ↩

75. In the original the passage runs: “Who was even still sleeping. He asked the niece for the keys,” etc. It is a minor instance of Cervantes’ disregard of the ordinary laws of composition, and also a proof that at this stage of the work he had not originally contemplated a division into chapters. ↩

76. The romances of chivalry were, with not more than two or three exceptions, produced in the folio form, while the hooks of poetry, the pastorals, the cancioneros, and romanceros, were either in small quarto or much more commonly in small octavo corresponding in size with our duodecimo. ↩

77. The court the niece speaks of, was the patio or open space in the middle of the house; the corral or yard was on the outside. ↩

78. The curate was quite correct in his idea that Amadís of Gaul was the parent of the chivalry literature, but not in his statement that it was the first book of the kind printed in Spain, for it is not likely it was printed before Tirant lo Blanch, Oliveros de Castilla, or the Carcel de Amor. The earliest known edition was printed in Rome in 1519, but there can be no doubt that this is a reprint of a Spanish edition, of perhaps even an earlier date than 1510, which has been given as that of the first edition. ↩

79. Las Sergas (i.e. ιας ἔργα⁠—the achievements) De Esplandián (1521) forms the fifth book of the Amadís Series, and is the composition of Montalvo himself, as is also, apparently, the fourth book of Amadís of Gaul. He only claims to have edited the first three. ↩

80. Amadís of Greece, by Feliciano de Silva (1535), forms the ninth book of the Amadís Series. Pintiquiniestra was Queen of Sobradisa, and Darinel was a shepherd and wrestler of Alexandria. The Spanish romances of “the lineage of Amadís” are twelve in number, and there are besides doubtful members of the family in Italian and French. ↩

81. Olivante de Laura, by Antonio de Torquemada, appeared first at Barcelona in 1564. Gayangos suggests that Cervantes must have been thinking of a later quarto or octavo edition, for the original folio is not so exceptionally stout as the description in the text implies. The Garden of Flowers (1575), a treatise of wonders natural and supernatural, was translated into English in 1600 as The Spanish Mandeville, a title which may seem to justify the curate’s criticism; but it does not come with a good grace from Cervantes, who made free use of the book in the First Part of Persiles and Sigismunda, and in the Second Part of Don Quixote. The book is really an entertaining one. ↩

82. The correct title is Historia del muy Animoso y Esforzado Principe Felixmarte de Hircania, but the hero is also called Florismarte. It was by Melchor Ortega de Úbeda, and appeared in 1556. ↩

83. Platir is the fourth book of the Palmerín Series. The hero is the son of Primaleon, and grandson of Palmerín de Oliva. Its author is unknown. It appeared first in 1533. ↩

84. The Knight of the Cross appeared in two parts: the first, under the title of Lepolemo, by an unknown author, in 1543; the second, with the achievements of Leandro el Bel, the son of Lepolemo, by Pedro de Luxan, in 1563. “Behind the Cross,” etc., Proverb 75, was evidently a favorite proverb with Cervantes. ↩

85. The Mirror of Chivalry⁠—Espejo de Caballerias⁠—was published at Seville in four parts, 1533⁠–⁠50. Next to the history of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers, it was the most popular of the Carlovingian series of romances. It is creditable to Cervantes as a critic that he should have mentioned Boiardo as he does, at a time when it was the fashion to regard the Orlando Innamorato as a rude and semi barbarous production, only endurable in the rifacimento of Ludovico Domenichi. ↩

86. An Oriental mode of showing respect for a document. ↩

87. Geronimo Jiménez de Urrea, whose translation of Ariosto into Spanish was first printed at Antwerp in 1549. This is not the only passage in which Cervantes declares against translation. In Chapter LXII of the Second Part he puts his objection still more strongly, and there extends it to translation of prose. And yet of all great writers there is not one who is under such obligations to translation as Cervantes. The influence of Homer and Virgil would be scarcely less than it is if they had never been translated; Shakespeare and Milton wrote in a language destined to become the most widely read on the face of the globe, and no reader of any culture needs an interpreter for Molière or Le Sage. But how would Cervantes have fared in the world if, according to his own principles, he had been confined to his native Castilian? ↩

88. The condemned books are the History of the Deeds of Bernardo del Carpio, by Augustin Alonso of Sahimanca (Toledo, 1585); and the Famous Battle of Roncesvalles by Francisco Garrido de Villena (Valencia, 1555). ↩

89. Palmerín de Oliva, the founder of the Palmerín Series of Romances, was first printed at Salamanca in 1511. It is said to have been written by a lady of Augustobriga (i.e. Burgos, according to some, but more probably Ciudad Rodrigo), but nothing certain is known of the author. Palmerín de Inglaterra, like Amadís, was until lately supposed to be, as Cervantes supposed it, of Portuguese origin; but the question was settled a few years ago by Vincente Salvá, who discovered a Toledo edition of 1547, twenty years earlier than the Portuguese edition on which the claims of Francisco de Moraes, or of John II, rested. An acrostic gives the name of the author, Luis Hurtado. ↩

90. Miraguarda is not the name of the Castle, but of the lady who lived in it, and whose charms were the cause of the adventures. ↩

91. Belianis de Grecia, already mentioned in the first chapter as one of Don Quixote’s special studies. ↩

92. The “overseas term” was the allowance of time granted in the case of persons beyond the seas, when sued or indicted, to enable them to appear and show cause why judgment should not be given against them. ↩

93. Tirante el Blanco is the title of the translation into Castilian of the romance of Tirant lo Blanch, first published in Valencian at Valencia in 1490. Joanot Martorell, who is said to have translated it from English into Portuguese and thence into Valencian, was no doubt the author. Only three copies are known to exist, one in the University at Valencia, another in the College of the Sapienza in Rome, and the third in the British Museum. The Castilian version appeared at Valladolid in 1511. Don Pascual de Gayangos is in doubt whether the curate’s eulugy is to be taken as ironical or serious, but rather inclines to the belief that Cervantes meant to praise the book. It would be rash to differ with such an authority, otherwise I should say that the laudation is rather too boisterously expressed and too like the extravagant eulogy of Lo Frasso farther on, to be sincerely meant. ↩

94. Los Siete Libros de la Diana de Jorge de Montemayor. Impreso en Valencia, 4to. The first edition is undated, and from the dedication appears to have been printed in the author’s lifetime. He died in 1561, in which year the second edition, with additions, appeared. (See this note.) The Diana was the first and best of the Spanish pastoral romances, the taste for which was created by Sannazaro’s Arcadia. The Salamancan was Alonso Pérez, who published a continuation of the Diana at Alcalá de Henares in 1564, but Gil Polo’s, printed the same year at Valencia, has been generally preferred. The pun on Polo and Apolo is not so obvious in English. An excellent English translation of all three by Bartholomew Yong was published in 1598. ↩

95. The Fortuna d’Amor, por Antonio de lo Frasso, Militar, Sardo, appeared at Barcelona in 1573. In the Viage del Parnaso Cervantes treats the book in the same bantering strain, which misled Pedro de Pineda, one of the editors of Lord Carteret’s Quixote, and induced him to bring out a new edition in 1740. The book is an utterly worthless one, and highly prized by collectors. ↩

96. The books here referred to are the Pastor de Iberia, by Bernardo de la Vega (Seville, 1591); the Nimphas y Pastores de Henares, by Bernardo González de Bovadilla (Alcalá de Henares, 1587); and the Desengaño de Zelos, by Bartolme Lopes de Enciso (Madrid, 1586). ↩

97. The Pastor de Filida (Madrid, 1582), one of the best of the pastorals, was by Luis Galvez de Montalvo of Guadalajara, a retainer of the great Mendoza family, and apparently an intimate personal friend of Cervantes, who, under the name of Tirsi, is referred to in the pastoral as a clarissimo ingennio worthy of being mentioned with Ercilla. Montalvo, in return, is introduced under the name of Siralvo into the Galatea of Cervantes, to which he contributed a complimentary sonnet. ↩

98. Tesoro de varias Poesias, compuesto por Pedro de Padilla (Madrid, 1580). The author is one of those praised by Cervantes in the “Canto de Caliope” in the Galatea. ↩

99. López de Maldonado, whose Cancionero appeared at Madrid in 1586, is another of the poets praised in the Galatea. ↩

100. Proverb 26. ↩

101. The play upon words in the original is “more versed in misfortunes than in verses.” This introduction of himself and his forgotten pastoral is Cervantes all over in its tone of playful stoicism with a certain quiet self-assertion. It shows, moreover, pretty clearly, that until Don Quixote had made the author’s name known, the Galatea had remained unnoticed. ↩

102. These three are examples of Spanish epic poetry. The Araucana of Ercilla (Madrid, 1569, 1578, 1590) is, next to the Poem of the Cid, the best effort in that direction in the language. The Austriada, which appeared first at Madrid in 1584, deals with the life and achievements of Don John of Austria, but it was probably the memory of Lepanto rather than the merits of the poem that made Cervantes give it a place here. The Montserrate of the dramatist Virues (Madrid, 1588) had for its subject the repulsive Oriental legend which became popular in Spain with Garin the liermit of Monserrat for its hero, and which M. G. Lewis made the foundation of his famous romance, The Monk. ↩

103. The anticlimax here almost equals that famous one of Waller’s:

     “Under the tropic is our language spoke,
     And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.”

     The book referred to was entitled simply the Angelica by Luis Barahona de Soto (Madrid, 1586). In his praise of this poem we have one more instance of Cervantes’ loyalty to a friend getting the better of his critical judgment. ↩

104. The books referred to are the Carolea of Geronimo Sempere (1560), which deals with the victories of Charles V; the León de España, by Pedro de la Vezilla, a poem on the history of the city of León; and, probably, the Carlo Famoso of Louis Zapata, for there is no book known with the title of The Deeds of the Emperor and the work of Avila is simply a prose commentary on the wars against the Protestants of Germany. ↩

105. Turpin (or Tilpin), Charlemagne’s chaplain, and Archbishop of Rheims: according to the Chanson de Roland, one of those slain at Roncesvalles; but also claimed as author of the Chronicle of Charlemagne, which, however, was probably not composed before the end of the eleventh or beginning of the twelfth century. He died in the year of the Roncesvalles rout, 778. ↩

106. Proverb 188. ↩

107. Proverb 165. ↩

108. Fristón, a magician, the reputed author of Belianis de Grecia. ↩

109. Proverb 171. Buscar pan de trastrigo: there is some difference of opinion as to the meaning of trastrigo, but it seems on the whole more probable that it means wheat of such superlative quality as to be unattainable; at any rate, the proverb is used in reference to seeking things that are out of reach. ↩

110. Proverb 124. A very old proverb, as old at least as the poem of Fernán González. ↩

111. Alforjas⁠—a sort of double wallet serving for saddlebags, but more frequently carried slung across the shoulder. ↩

112. The bota is the leathern wine-bag which is as much a part of the Spanish wayfarer’s paraphernalia as the alforjas. It cannot, of course, be properly translated “bottle.” ↩

113. Amadís, for instance, made his squire Gandalin governor of the Insula Firme. ↩

114. Mi oislo, a sort of pet-name for a wife in old Spanish among the lower orders:

     “Acuerda de su oislo
     Mirando en pobre casa.”

     ↩

115. These famous windmills had not been very long set up, and owed their existence to the failure of water-power in the Zancara, an affluent of the Guadiana, about thirty years before Don Quixote was written. They are scattered over the plain between Alcázar de S. Juan and Villaharta. ↩

116. Being a stage on the great high road from Madrid to Seville. ↩

117. From machucar or machacar, “to pound.” The feat referred to by Don Quixote was performed at the siege of Jerez under Alfonso X in 1264, and is the subject of a spirited ballad which Lockhart has treated with even more than his usual freedom. ↩

118. In the ballad it is an olive tree, but the olive does not flourish in La Mancha, so Don Quixote substitutes oak, encina, or roble, the former, the evergreen, being rather the more common in Spain. ↩

119. In the humurous tract The Book of All Things, and Many More, Quevedo mentions as the chief characteristic of the Biscayan dialect that it changes the first person of the verb into the second. This may be observed in the specimen given here: another example of Biscayan will be found in Cervantes’ interlude of the Viscaino Fingido. ↩

120. Caballero means “gentleman” as well as knight, and the peppery Biscayan assumes that Don Quixote has used the word in the former sense. ↩

121. Quien ha de llevar el gato al agua? (Proverb 102.) “Who will carry the cat to the water?” is a proverbial way of indicating an apparently insuperable difficulty. Between rage and ignorance the Biscayan, it will be seen, inverts the phrase. ↩

122. Agrajes was the cousin and companion of Amadís of Gaul. The phrase quoted above (Proverb 4) became a popular one, and is introduced as such among others of the same sort by Quevedo in the vision of the “Visita de los Chistes.” It is hard to say why it should have been fixed on Agrajes, who does not seem to use it as often as others, Amadís himself for instance. ↩

123. The abrupt suspension of the narrative and the reason assigned are in imitation of devices of the chivalry-romance writers. Montalvo, for instance, breaks off in the ninety-eighth chapter of Esplandián, and in the next gives an account of the discovery of the sequel, very much as Cervantes has done here and in the next chapter. ↩

124. Cervantes divided his first volume of Don Quixote into four parts, possibly in imitation of the four books of the Amadís of Montalvo; but the chapters were numbered without regard to this division, which he also ignored in 1615, when he called his new volume “Second” instead of “Fifth” Part. ↩

125. Instead of azotes (whips) Clemencín suggests azores (hawks), and refers to Chapter XXX Part II, where a hawk in hand is especially mentioned as the usual accompaniment of a noble lady on horseback. ↩

126. Alcaná, a marketplace in Toledo in the neighborhood of the cathedral. ↩

127. I.e. Hebrew. ↩

128. J. A. Condé suggested that Ben Engeli⁠—“son of the stag”⁠—is the Arabic equivalent of the name “Cervantes,” the root of which he assumed to be ciervo. Cervantes may, of course, have intended what Conde attributes to him, but the name in reality has nothing to do with ciervo, and comes from Servando. (See here.) ↩

129. Panza = “paunch:” Zancas = “shanks;” but in spite of what Cervantes says, we hear no more of Sancho’s long shanks, for which the reader will be grateful. It would have been difficult to realize a long-legged Sancho. ↩

130. A curious instance of the carelessness with which Cervantes wrote and corrected, if, indeed, he corrected at all: of course he meant the opposite of what he said⁠—that truth was the mother of history. ↩

131. The Santa Hermandad, a tribunal established in the thirteenth century, but revived in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, with summary jurisdiction over offenders against life and property on the highways and outside of the municipal boundaries. ↩

132. Omecillo or hornecillo was an old form of the word homecidio, but in popular parlance it meant the fine imposed in default of appearance to answer a charge of assault and battery. ↩

133. Fierabras, i.e. Fier à Bras = “Arm-strong,” a giant in Nicolás de Piamonte’s history of Charlemagne and the Peers. ↩

134. In the original, tres azumbres. ↩

135. Mambrino, a Moorish king in the Orlando of Boiardo, whose enchanted helmet was won by Rinaldo. It was Dardinel, however, not Sacripante, to whom it cost so dear. (V. Ariosto, c. xviii, st. 151.) ↩

136. Albraca, a stronghold of Galafron, King of Cathay and father of Angelica. The siege is one of the incidents in the Orlando of Boiardo. ↩

137. Literally, take knight-errantry off its hinges. ↩

138. “Waterwheel”⁠—noria⁠—a machine used for irrigation in Spain, by which the water is raised in pots or buckets attached to the circumference of a large wheel. ↩

139. The eulogy of the golden age is one of the loci classici of Don Quixote quoted in every Spanish anthology; the reader, however, must not judge of it by translation, which can not give the stately roll and flow of the original Castilian. ↩

140. Water is almost worshipped in thirsty Spain, and many a complimentary epithet bestowed upon it that sounds odd under moister skies: agua muy rica⁠—“very rich water”⁠—is a common encomium from a Spaniard after a hearty pull at the alcarraza. ↩

141. Clemencín and Hartzenbusch, why I know not, object to se decoraban the reading of the original editions, and the latter substitutes se declaraban. I venture to think the original reading admits of the interpretation I have given. ↩

142. In the Spanish, rabel, a small three-stringed lute of Moorish origin. ↩

143. Antonio’s ballad is in imitation of a species of popular poetry that occupies nearly as large a space as the romantic and historical ballads in the old romanceros. These gay, naive, simple lays of peasant life and love are as thoroughly national and peculiar to Spain as the historical ballads themselves, and in every way present a striking contrast to the artificial pastoral sonnets and canciones of Italian importation. The imitation of this kind of poetry was a favorite pastime with the poets of the Spanish Augustan age, and strange to say the poet who showed the lightest touch and brightest fancy in these compositions, and caught most happily the simplicity and freshness of the originals, was Góngora, whose name is generally associated with poetry the exact opposite of this in every particular. Cervantes apparently valued himself more upon his sonnets and artificial verses; a preference regretted, I imagine, by most of his readers. This ballad has been hardly treated by the translators. The language and measures used by Shelton and Jervas are about as well adapted to represent a Spanish popular lyric as a dray-horse to draw a pony-chaise. The measure of the original is the ordinary ballad measure, an eight-syllable trochaic, with the assonant rhyme in the second and fourth lines. The latter peculiarity I have made no attempt to imitate here, but examples of it will be found farther on. ↩

144. Coyundas, the cords or thongs by which the horns of the draught oxen are bound to the yoke. ↩

145. “Pulse”⁠—garbanzos, or chickpeas, one of the invariable constituents of the olla or puchero, and therefore an important crop in Spain. ↩

146. “Plays”⁠—autos, religious allegorical dramas. ↩

147. Mas viejo que sarna⁠—(Proverb 250) “older than itch”⁠—is a very old popular phrase. Don Quixote, either not knowing it or else not recognizing it in the form in which Pedro puts it, supposes him to mean Sarah the wife of Abraham. Though Cervantes tries to observe dramatic propriety by making Pedro blunder, in the end he puts into his mouth language as fine and words as long as Don Quixote’s. ↩

148. “Frankness”⁠—desengaño⁠—more properly “undeceiving,” but there is no equivalent word in English. ↩

149. Perhaps the reader will think Sancho had some justification; an epidemic of verbosity, indeed, rages round the corpse of the unhappy Chrysostom; but it must be remembered verbosity was then rampant in literature and especially in Spanish literature, as all who know Guzman de Alfarache, The Picara Justina, Marcos de Obregon, and books of the same sort, will own; and if Cervantes did not wholly escape it, his fits of it were only occasional. ↩

150. The ballad (Cancionero de Romances, Antwerp, S.A., and Duran, No. 352) is that parodied by Don Quixote in Chapter II. “Britain” is, of course, Brittany; Lancelot’s father, King Ban, was a Breton. The idea of the “go-between” is derived from an Italian source, but the name Quintañona is Spanish; it means simply an old woman, one who has a quintal, or hundredweight of years on her back. The transformation of Arthur into a raven is also a Southern addition to the Arthurian legend. Cervantes ridicules the story in Persiles and Sigismunda. ↩

151. Proverb 106. ↩

152. “Nessum la mova
     Che star non possa con Orlando prova.”

     —⁠Orlando Furioso, xxiv, 57

     But Zerbino’s inscription was simply “Armatura d’Orlando Paladino,” and the quotation is merely the poet’s gloss upon it. ↩

153. Cachopín, or Gachupín, a word of Indian origin, and applied to Spaniards living in or returned from the Indies. Laredo is a seaport close to Santander, where also the Cachopins were numerous, as appears from a quaint inscription on one of the houses quoted by Bowle. ↩

154. Hartzenbusch in his anxiety for precision alters this, as he considers that El Toboso, being about seven leagues from Argamasilla, cannot be properly described as “near” it. ↩

155. It is hardly necessary to observe that these high mountains in the neighborhood of Argamasilla are purely imaginary. The nearest that could by any stretch of courtesy be called high would be those of the Toledo Sierra some sixty or seventy miles distant. ↩

156. This is one of the passages selected by Biedermann as specimens of blunders made by Cervantes, but by en memoria Cervantes does not mean to “commemorate,” but rather to “mark” or “signalize.” ↩

157. There is here a play upon the words desesperados, “despairing,” and no esperados, “not looked for:” many of the headings to the chapters contain some verbal conceit of this kind. ↩

158. The “Lay of Chrysostom” must not be judged of by a translation. The original is not so much a piece of poetry, as a fantasia in rhyme and an experiment in versification. Whether Italian or Spanish, the canzone or canción is from its style hard to translate into our matter-of-fact English, but the difficulty here is increased by the peculiarly complex stanza and intricate system of interlaced rhymes which Cervantes adopted, as well as by the inimitable rhythm and harmony of the lines. One peculiarity, borrowed, it may be, from Garcilaso, is that of a line with a medial rhyme to the termination of the preceding line, which produces a cadence that falls upon the ear like that of waves upon a distant shore. It might be possible to imitate the arrangement of rhymes, but to imitate the effect or reproduce the melody in our consonantal language would be an utter impossibility. ↩

159. “And the hoarse sobbing of the widowed dove.”

     —⁠Drummond of Hawthornden

     ↩

160. The owl was the only bird that witnessed the Crucifixion, and it became for that reason an object of envy to the other birds, so much so that it can not appear in the daytime without being persecuted. ↩

161. Betis⁠—i.e. the Guadalquivir. ↩

162. It was the corpse of Servius Tullius that was so treated by his daughter Tullia, the wife of Tarquin, but Cervantes followed an old ballad in the Flor de Enamorados, which has, Tullia hija de Tarquino. ↩

163. I.e. of Yanguas, a district in the north of Old Castile, near Logroño. ↩

164. Used by the carriers in loading their beasts to prop up the pack on one side while they are adjusting the balance on the other. ↩

165. An allusion probably to the story of Diego Pérez de Vargas, “the pounder.” (See Chapter VIII) ↩

166. Sancho’s blunder in the name of Fierabras is droller in the original, as he says, del feo Blas, “of the ugly Blas.” ↩

167. There is no account of any such flogging in the Amadís. ↩

168. Tizon was the name of one of the Cid’s two famous swords; the word was altered into Tizona to suit the trochaic rhythm of the ballads. It means simply “brand.” ↩

169. In this characteristic comment of Sancho’s, Hartzenbusch corrects caballero andante⁠—“knight-errant”⁠—into caballeria andante⁠—“horse-errant” (entirely overlooking the también⁠—“too”), and with profound gravity reminds us that Rocinante is a horse. Mr. J. P. Collier’s “old corrector” in the 1632 folio Shakespeare could hardly do worse than this. The play upon the words sin costas and sin costillas cannot be rendered literally; sin costillas⁠—“without ribs”⁠—means also in popular parlance bankrupt, “cleaned out.” ↩

170. Thebes; but that of the hundred gates was the Egyptian, not the Boeotian Thebes, which is the one here referred to. ↩

171. The grave drollery of Sancho’s matter-of-fact reply is lost in translation, inasmuch as in Spanish “to go mounted”⁠—ir caballero⁠—implies also “to go like a gentleman.” ↩

172. This is another example of the loose construction and confusion into which Cervantes fell at times. Of course he meant to say that Rocinante would not have been behind them in complaining. ↩

173. The entrance of a Spanish venta or posada is almost always a wide gateway through which both man and beast enter to their respective quarters. The high road⁠—camino real⁠—was the Madrid and Seville road, and on it, or some little distance one side or the other of it, all the adventures of the First Part are supposed to take place. From its distance from the Sierra Morena this venta would be somewhere near Valdepeñas, in the great wine-growing district. The scene of the release of the galley slaves in Chapter XXII would be near Almuradiel. ↩

174. Proverb 6. ↩

175. Estrellado seems to have puzzled most of the translators. Shelton omits it, and Jervas renders it “illustrious.” ↩

176. The carrier business, Pellicer points out, was extensively followed by the Moriscoes, as it afforded them an excuse for absenting themselves from Mass. ↩

177. Crónica de Tablante de Ricamonte, a romance of uncertain date and origin, based upon the Arthurian legend. The Conde Tomillas was a personage at the Court of Charlemagne mentioned in the Montesinos ballads, but no book of his deeds is known. ↩

178. We were told just before that Sancho was unable to sleep. ↩

179. The words quoted are the beginning of one of the Cid ballads, “Por el val de las estacas.” ↩

180. Nevertheless Orlando in the Morgante Maggiore is called upon to leave his horse in pledge for his reckoning. Morg. Magg. Chapter XXI st. 129. ↩

181. Cornado, a coin of infinitesimal value, about one-sixth of a maravedi. ↩

182. The “Fair” was a low quarter in Seville. ↩

183. “The roome was high-roofed and fitted for their purpose.⁠ ⁠… They began to blanket me and to toss me up in the air as they used to doe to dogges at Shrovetide.” —⁠Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, Part I Book III Chapter I (James Mabbe’s translation). As the First Part of Guzman was published in 1599, it may have suggested the scene to Cervantes. ↩

184. Proverbial expression (47)⁠—“Andar de Ceca en Meca y de zoca en colodra”⁠—somewhat like our phrase, “from post to pillar.” The Ceca (properly a mint or a shrine) was the name given to part of the Great Mosque of Cordova, once second to Mecca only as a resort of pilgrims. Zoca properly means a wooden shoe, but here a vessel hollowed out of wood. ↩

185. Amadís of Greece, not Amadís of Gaul. ↩

186. The word in the original is cuajada⁠—“curdled”⁠—which Clemencín objects to as obscure, and would replace by causada⁠—“caused.” ↩

187. Suero de Quiñones, the hero of the “Paso Honroso” at the bridge of Orbigo in 1434, used to fight against the Moors with his right arm bare. ↩

188. Rastrear means properly to track by following the footprints, and hence to keep close to the ground; the motto, therefore, is probably meant to have a double signification, either “in Fortune’s footsteps” or “my fortune creeps on the ground,” in allusion to the asparagus, which is a low-growing plant. ↩

189. From Tartessus, a city of Betica, supposed to have been situated somewhere in the neighborhood of Tarifa. ↩

190. In part of its course through La Mancha the Guadiana flows underground. ↩

191. See Chapter VII. ↩

192. Dr. Andreas Laguna, who translated Dioscorides into Spanish with copious notes in 1570. ↩

193. Proverb 125. ↩

194. Camino real⁠—one of the main roads connecting the provinces or chief cities with the capital. ↩

195. Maskers wearing shirts (camisas) over their clothes, who marched in procession carrying torches on festival nights. As there is no English translation of the word, it is better to give the Spanish instead of some roundabout descriptive phrase. ↩

196. A quibble on the words derecho and tuerto which mean “straight” and “crooked,” as well as “right” and “wrong.” ↩

197. The original has “for such I always believed,” etc., which is an obvious slip, either of the pen or of the press. It can not be that Cervantes intended a side blow at ecclesiastics, for he expressly disclaims any such intention, and the “you” clearly refers to these particular processionists alone. ↩

198. It has been frequently objected that figura does not mean the face or countenance, but the whole figure; but no matter what dictionaries may say, it is plain from what follows that Sancho applies the word here to his master’s face, made haggard by short commons and loss of teeth, and uses it as synonymous with cara; and that Don Quixote himself never could have contemplated painting a full-length on his shield, but merely a face. As a matter of fact, however, the dictionaries do not support the objection. The two best, that of the Academy and of Vicente Salvá, explain figura as the “external form of a body,” and add that it is commonly used for the face alone, por solo el rostro. ↩

199. Referring to the apochryphal legend which forms the subject of the ballad, “A concilio dentro en Roma.” Among Lockhart’s ballads there is a lively version of it. ↩

200. Proverb 147. ↩

201. Literally, “watered the satisfaction.” ↩

202. Proverb 179. ↩

203. Proverb 50. ↩

204. The Horn Sancho refers to is the constellation of Ursa Minor, which has somewhat the shape of a curved hunting horn, and the hour was calculated by extending the arms horizontally so as to represent a cross, the time being indicated by the relative position of the horn to the arms. ↩

205. Proverb 96. ↩

206. I.e. Caton Censorino⁠—Cato the Censor; but Sancho’s impression was that the name was derived from zonzo, “stupid,” or zonzorrion, “a blockhead.” ↩

207. Proverb 198. ↩

208. The story of the passage of the goats is a very old one. It is the 30th of the Cento Norelle Antiche, into which it was imported, no doubt, from the Latin of the Aragonese Jew, Pedro Alfonso. There is a Provençal tale to the same effect; but the original was probably Oriental. ↩

209. An “old Christian” was one who had no trace of Moorish blood in his veins. The remark is somewhat inconsistent in the mouth of Cid Hamete Benengeli. ↩

210. Proverb 53. ↩

211. Proverb 130. ↩

212. The “Insula Firme” was apparently part of Brittany. ↩

213. The Rev. John Bowie, the learned editor and annotator of Don Quixote, was painstaking enough to verify this statement. It shows how closely Cervantes must have at one time read the Amadís. ↩

214. Proverb 34. In full it is, “Whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone the pitcher, it’s bad for the pitcher.” ↩

215. Proverb 194. ↩

216. Proverb 160. In full, “Plegue a Dios que orégano sea, y no se nos vuelva alcaravea.”⁠—“Pray God it may prove wild marjoram, and not turn out caraway on us.” Shelton and Jervas not knowing the proverb have mistranslated the passage; the latter shirks the difficulty, and the former translates orégano “a purchase of gold.” ↩

217. Mal-andante, meaning also “unlucky.” ↩

218. The eight-real piece = about 1s. 8d. ↩

219. Proverb 10. ↩

220. A blunder of Sancho’s for Mambrino. ↩

221. The mutatio capparum was the change of hoods authorized by the Roman ceremonial, when the cardinals exchanged the fur-lined hoods worn in winter for lighter ones of silk. There is a certain audacity of humor in the application of the phrase here. ↩

222. Cervantes gives here an admirable epitome, and without any extravagant caricature, of a typical romance of chivalry. For every incident there is ample authority in the romances. ↩

223. Hartzenbusch, considering “adventure” unintelligible, would substitute “enigma” or “prophecy” for it; and “explain” for “achieve;” but absolute consistency in a burlesque passage like this is scarcely worth insisting upon. ↩

224. An “hidalgo de devengar quinientos sueldos,” was one who by the ancient fueros of Castile had a right to recover 500 sueldos for an injury to person or property. This is the common explanation; Huarte, in the Examen de Ingenios, says it means the descendant of one who enjoyed a grant of 500 sueldos for distinguished services in the field. The sueldo was an old coin varying in value from a halfpenny to three-halfpence. ↩

225. Proverb 107. ↩

226. Proverb 212. “Mas vale salto de mata que ruego de hombres buenos.” Mata is here an old equivalent of matanza = “slaughter;” in modern Spanish the word means a bush or hedge, in consequence of which the proverb is generally misunderstood and mistranslated. ↩

227. Proverb 210. ↩

228. Proverb 61. See this note. ↩

229. Literally “at the Court”⁠—la Corte. ↩

230. No doubt Pedro Telloz Giron, third Duke of Osuna, afterwards Viceroy in Sicily and Naples; “a little man, but of great fame and fortunes,” as Howell, writing twenty years later, calls him. ↩

231. Gurapas a word from the “Germanía,” or rogue’s dialect, of which there are many specimens in this chapter and scattered through Don Quixote. Indeed, Juan Hidalgo’s Vocabulario of the Germanía tongue is absolutely necessary to anyone reading the book in the original. ↩

232. Proverb 32. ↩

233. Proverb 126. ↩

234. Malefactors were commonly whipped in this way, and the ceremony is frequently alluded to in the Picaresque novels. ↩

235. Proverb 186. ↩

236. Proverb 79. ↩

237. At the time Cervantes was writing the only book of the kind (i.e. picaresque fiction) that had appeared besides Lazarillo de Tormes was Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, at which, it has been suggested, this passage is aimed. ↩

238. Proverb. 53. Clemencín thinks that there is an allusion here to Aleman’s Guzman de Alfarache, the hero of which is sent to the galleys like Ginés de Pasamonte, and at an inn on the road ingratiates himself with the commissary by presenting him with a pig he had stolen. But Clemencín forgot that this incident occurs in the Second Part of Guzman, which was not published till after Don Quixote. ↩

239. Proverb. 103. Of course it should be “five;” and the proverb is so given by Blasco de Garay. ↩

240. At the beginning of the chapter we were told there were only two on horseback, and that both of them had muskets. ↩

241. To pray for “the intention” of another is a proof of devotional sympathy. ↩

242. Proverb. 180. ↩

243. Proverb. 246. ↩

244. These are towns of La Mancha, though from the wording of the passage it might be supposed that they lay on the other, the Andalusian, side of the Sierra Morena. It is significant that Cervantes always speaks of “entering” and “coming out of” the Sierra Morena, never of ascending or descending it; and, in fact, on the north side the Sierra rises but little above the level of the great Castilian plateau and the road enters the gorge of Despeñaperros, and reaches the Andalusian slope with comparatively little ascent. ↩

245. “Dapple,” as I have said elsewhere, is not a correct translation of rucio, but it has by long usage acquired a prescriptive right to remain the name of Sancho’s ass. Rucio is properly a light or silvery gray, as pardo is a dark or iron gray.

     The passage⁠—beginning at “That night they reached the very heart,” etc., and ending with “returned thanks for the kindness shown him by Don Quixote”⁠—does not appear in the first edition, in which there is no allusion to the loss of the ass until the middle of Chapter XXV, where, without any explanation of how it happened, Cervantes speaks of Dapple as having been lost. When the second edition was in the press, an attempt was made to remedy the oversight, and the printer, apparently proprio motu, supplied this passage. Chapter XXX, where Don Quixote laments the loss of his “good sword,” suggested Ginés de Pasamonte as the thief, and Chapter XXV the promise of the ass-colts; but in such a bungling manner was the correction made that the references to the ass as if still in Sancho’s possession (nine or ten in number) were left unaltered, though the first of them occurs only four or five lines after the inserted passage. In the third edition of 1608 some of these inconsistencies were removed, and in the Second Part Cervantes refers to the matter, and charges the printer with the blunder. What he originally intended, no doubt, was to supplement the burlesque of the penance of Amadís by a burlesque of Brunello’s theft of Sacripante’s horse and Marfisa’s sword at the siege of Albracca, as described by Boiardo and Ariosto; and it was very possibly an afterthought written on a loose leaf and so mislaid or lost in transitu. The inserted passage is clearly not his, as it is completely ignored by him in chapters III, IV, and XXVII of Part II, and is inconsistent with the account of the affair which he gives there. Hartzenbusch removes the passage to what he conceives to be its proper place in Chapter Chapter XXV, but it is hardly worth while, perhaps, to alter the familiar arrangement of the next. See notes on Chapter XXC; and III, IV, and XXVII of Part II. ↩

246. Poltinos, “ass-colts,” has evidently been omitted here in the original, and I have therefore supplied it. ↩

247. This sonnet Cervantes afterwards inserted in his comedy of the Casa de los Zelos, a proof that he himself had as good an opinion of it as Don Quixote; though Clemencín says, and not without some reason, that “it is no great things”⁠—“no vale gran cosa.” ↩

248. A reference to the proverb, Por el hilo se saca el ovillo⁠—“by the thread (or clew) the ball is drawn out.” In the sonnet the lady’s name is Fili, which Sancho mistakes for hilo or filo. The substitution of “Chloe” by which the play on the words may be imitated is a happy idea of Jervas’s which has been generally adopted by subsequent translators without any acknowledgment. ↩

249. Proverb 182⁠—meaning, I don’t want a thing that has any inconvenience attached to it. ↩

250. This is the explanation commonly given of the phrase de ambar, and it is true that scented doublets were in fashion in the sixteenth century; but it seems somewhat improbable that a tattered doublet which had been for six months exposed to all weathers would have retained sufficient perfume to be detected. ↩

251. This indicates that the spot Cervantes had in his eye was somewhere above the head of the Despeñaperros gorge and commanding a view of the valley of the Guadalquivir; and the scenery there agrees with his description. He was, no doubt, familiar with it from having passed through it on his journeys between Madrid and Seville in the years between 1587 and 1598. The broom, mentioned farther on, is very abundant in this part of the Sierra Morena. The name of Cardenio, too, was probably suggested by Venta de Cardenas, a halting place at the mouth of the gorge. ↩

252. Grande de España⁠—one enjoying the privilege of remaining covered in the presence of the sovereign. ↩

253. Cordova was famed for its horses. ↩

254. This is an example of the clumsy manner in which Cervantes often constructed his sentences, beginning them in one way and ending them in another. ↩

255. I.e. Aesop. ↩

256. Sancho in his aptitude for blunders takes “Elisabad” to be the name of some abad or abbot. There are three Madasimas mentioned in the Amadís but not one of them is a queen, nor has Master Elisabad anything to do with any of them. He was in the service of the lady Grasinda, and by her orders attended Amadís when wounded. Scott, in the article on the Amadís in the Edinburgh Review, suggests that Cervantes must have meant Queen Briolania, apparently confounding her also with Grasinda. ↩

257. Proverb 170. This is the first of Sancho’s frequent volleys of random proverbs. ↩

258. Proverb 247. ↩

259. Proverb 55. ↩

260. Proverb 73. ↩

261. Proverb 226: estacas⁠—literally, stakes or pegs on which to hang them; expressive of unreasonable expectations. ↩

262. Proverb 195. ↩

263. Beltenebros, i.e. “fair-obscure.” Clemencín suggests that the Peña Pobre (so called because those who sojourned there had to live in extreme poverty) was Mont St. Michel, but Jersey would suit the description better, as it is said to be seven leagues from the coast of the Insula Firme, which was clearly the mainland of Brittany or Normandy. ↩

264. Probably an allusion to the “green tree” and the “dry.” ↩

265. In the original it is “for more than four days,” to which some commentators, Hartzenbusch among them, object, as not more than one day had passed since the encounter with the barber. But “more than four” is a very common phrase to express indefinitely a considerable number, and it is more probably used here vaguely by Sancho in the sense in which I have rendered it. ↩

266. For the character of Orlando’s insanity, see the Orlando Furioso, canto xxiii st. 130 et seq. ↩

267. The hippogriff was the winged horse on which Astolfo went in quest of information about Orlando. Frontino was the name of the destroyer of Ruggiero, Bradamante’s lover. ↩

268. Corn in Spain is not threshed, as we understand the word, but separated from the ear by means of the trilla, a sort of toothless harrow, which is dragged over it as it lies on the era or threshing floor. ↩

269. The introduction here of the name of his own heroine, Galatea, may be taken for what it is worth as a contradiction of the story that by Galatea he meant the mother of his daughter Isabel. An ingenious speculator might suggest that his object was to soothe the susceptibilities of his wife Doña Catalina, but it is clear that there were no heartburnings on that score in the household of Cervantes. ↩

270. Proof of hidalguia was necessary before some orders, that of Santiago for instance, could be conferred. ↩

271. Proverb 219. ↩

272. The rubrica, or flourish, which is always a part of a Spanish signature. ↩

273. Zapatetas, capers in which the sole of the shoe is struck with the hand. ↩

274. Properly a “blanca pin,” i.e., of the size sold for a blanca, or half a inaravedi, as we say a “tenpenny nail.” Viardot, strangely misinterpreting the very common idiom de á, indicating the price of an article, and fancying the á to have a negative power as in Greek, explains it as “a pin made of some substance not white.” ↩

275. “Occhi avea neri, e chioma crespa d’oro:
     Angel parea di quei del sommo coro.”

     Orlando Furioso c. xviii st. 166

     But Medoro was not in the service of Agramante, but in that of Dardinel; and a little higher up Cervantes has made another slip of memory, for it was not Orlando, but Ferrau who wore the

     “sette piastre fatte a buone tempre.”

     Orlando Furioso c. xii st. 48

     ↩

276. It is thus the passage stands in the first edition. In the second Don Quixote makes his rosary with oak galls off a cork tree. The alteration was made, no doubt, at the suggestion of some critics who thought the passage indecorous, but Cervantes had nothing to do with it. ↩

277. In its ingenuity of rhyme and versification and its transcendent absurdity this is the best piece of humorous verse in Don Quixote. Even Clemencín, who generally grumbles at the verses of Cervantes, cannot help giving it a word of praise. It is, of course, impossible in English translation to do more than suggest the character of the original, for anything like close imitation is unattainable. ↩

278. The Spanish phrase is stronger⁠—hasta los higados⁠—“down to the liver.” ↩

279. Wamba, a king of the Gothic line who reigned from 672 to 680. ↩

280. A curious reason for giving a verbal answer; but if she did not know how to read, a fortiori she could not write. ↩

281. Cortesanos: not courtiers, but persons who have caught the tone, tastes, and culture of La Corte, “the Court,” as the capital was always called. ↩

282. These are intended to be echo verses; but, as Clemencín has pointed out, the echoes are nothing but rhymes. In the novel of the Ilustre Fregona, Cervantes introduced similar verses, which Lope de Vega turned into ridicule in a parody. ↩

283. Notwithstanding Clemencín’s disparaging remark that this is “of the same stuff” as Cervantes’ sonnets are commonly composed of, it will be seen, even in translation, that there is at least a backbone here, while the serious sonnets of Cervantes are only too often little better than invertebrate twaddle. Translation, however, can not reproduce the exquisite melody of the original, and, had it no other merit, this alone would, pace Clemencín, entitle the sonnet to a place among the best in the Spanish language. ↩

284. Ganelon or Galalon, who betrayed Roland and the Peers at Roncesvalles; Vellido Dolfos, who treacherously slew Sancho II at the siege of Zamora in 1072; and Count Julian, who admitted the Arabs into Spain to revenge himself upon Roderic. ↩

285. See this note on the original division into parts. ↩

286. This looks as if some doubt had crossed the mind of Cervantes as to the propriety of introducing these tales and episodes. ↩

287. A cloth cap, something like a travelling cap in make, worn by the peasants of Central Spain. ↩

288. See this note. ↩

289. Cristianos viejos rancios: rancio is applied to anything, like bacon or wine, that has acquired a peculiar flavor from long keeping. ↩

290. Literally, “hidalgos and even caballeros:” “hidalgo” being a gentleman by birth, “caballero” one by social position or standing. ↩

291. Proverb 133. ↩

292. Proverb 222. ↩

293. Literally, “I am sucking my fingers.” Shelton and Jervas translate literally, and so miss the meaning. ↩

294. In the immediate neighborhood of Alcalá de Henares. ↩

295. I have followed here the suggestion of Fernández Cuesta, for the reading in the original edition is obviously corrupt. ↩

296. The original says “two leagues,” but the context shows it must have been at least thrice as far. ↩

297. Clemencín and Hartzenbusch point out that to let the fly loose “among the honey” would be worse for him than for it, and the latter, giving a quotation in point from Francisco de Rojas, substitutes “the bear.” ↩

298. This was the mark from which the ancestor of the Dukes of Medinaceli, Fernando de la Cerda, took his name. ↩

299. This is a sly hit of Cervantes at Mariana the historian, who makes the troops despatched against Viriatus land at Orsuna, now Osuna. ↩

300. Cervantes seems to have intended that Ginés de Pasamonte should carry off Don Quixote’s sword, as Brunello did Marfisa’s at the siege of Albracca. ↩

301. Proverb 60. Pedir cotufas en el golfo⁠—a proverbial expression for seeking impossibilities. Cotufa, according to Salvá, is equivalent to golosina⁠—a dainty: Clemencín says it is the same as Chufa the tuber of the Cyparus esculentus, used as an ingredient in horchata, and in other ways. ↩

302. Proverb 33. In full it is, “the pitcher that goes often to the well leaves behind either the handle or the spout.” ↩

303. Proverb 177. ↩

304. A reference to the proverb “Por el hilo se saca el ovillo” (114). This passage down to “Sancho thanked him,” like that describing the theft of the ass, was first inserted in Juan de la Cuesta’s second edition. This, however, seems to be Cervantes’ own work, as it agrees with Part II Chapter IV. The printer, no doubt, did not see its relevancy, and therefore omitted it in the first edition. ↩

305. The division here is very awkwardly managed: Chapter XXXI ought to have commenced at “While they were holding this conversation,” in the preceding chapter. ↩

306. Proverb 176. ↩

307. A popular phrase like “Well, that’s settled.” ↩

308. Albricias, from the Arabic al bashara, a reward given to the bearer of good news. ↩

309. Proverb 135, i.e. a good thing may be acceptable even out of its proper season, as after Easter the weather may be still cold enough to make sleeves comfortable. Cf. the Scotch proverb, “A Yule feast may be done at Pasch.” ↩

310. Alluding to a common device of the gypsy dealers to improve the pace of a beast for sale. ↩

311. Proverb 167. ↩

312. Proverb 21. Sancho, as he almost always does when it is long, makes a muddle of the proverb: the correct form is, “Who has good and chooses evil, let him not complain of the evil that comes to him.” ↩

313. See this note. ↩

314. Literally, “Rids us of a thousand gray hairs.” ↩

315. Don Cirongilio de Tracia was by Bernado de Vargas and appeared at Seville in 1545: for Felixmarte de Hircania see this note. The title of the third is Crónica del Gran Capitan Gonzalo Hernández de Cordoba y Aguilar, to which is added the life of Diego García de Paredes, written by himself. It appeared at Saragossa in 1559. Gonzalo, the reader need hardly be reminded, was the brilliant general whose services against the Moors at Granada and the French in Naples were so ungratefully repaid by Ferdinand. García de Paredes was Gonzalo’s companion-in-arms in both campaigns. His battered corselet in the Armería at Madrid is as good as a ballad. ↩

316. I.e. the montante marvellous specimens of which may be seen in the Armería at Madrid. ↩

317. Neither of these feats is mentioned in the memoir of García Paredes appended to the life of the Great Captain. ↩

318. Made by cutting away part of the pod so as to expose the upper bean which looks something like a friar’s head in the recess of his cowl. ↩

319. Proverb 181. ↩

320. Proverb 252. ↩

321. Curious Impertinent, Shelton’s barbarous translation of Curioso Impertinente, is something worse than nonsense, for Curioso is here a substantive. There is, of course, no concise English translation for the title; the nearest approach to one would be, perhaps, The Inquisitive Man Who Had No Business to Be So. ↩

322. Estaciones⁠—attendances at church for private devotion at other hours than those of the celebration of the Mass. Among the scenes of the Italian and Spanish tales of intrigue the church plays a leading part. ↩

323. “Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.” —⁠Proverbs 31:10 ↩

324. I.e. Pericles, in Plutarch on “False Shame.” ↩

325. “Our poet” was, of course, Ariosto; but Cervantes has confounded two different stories in Canto 43. It was not the doctor but a cavalier, Rinaldo’s host, who tried the test of the cup. The magic cup, of which no husband of a faithless wife could drink without spilling, figures frequently in old romance. It appears in the ballad of “The Boy and the Mantle,” and also in another of the King Arthur ballads. ↩

326. This sonnet, like that in Chapter XXIII, was repeated by Cervantes in the play of the Casa de los Zelos⁠—Jornada 2. ↩

327. Proverb 67. ↩

328. Proverb 190. ↩

329. The four S’s that should qualify a lover were sabio, solo, solicito, secreto. It is needless to say that Leonela’s alphabet cannot be literally translated. ↩

330. Proverb 228⁠—expressive probably of popular anxiety on the eve of a bullfight. ↩

331. Quartillo⁠—the fourth of a real. ↩

332. Lautrec and the Great Captain were not engaged in the same campaigns. The former commanded in Italy in the time of Francis I and Charles V, several years after the death of the Great Captain. ↩

333. I.e. on high saddles with short stirrups. ↩

334. Only a few lines back we are told Dorothea had fainted, and a little farther on how she came to herself. ↩

335. The first edition has firma que hiciste; but Don Fernando did not sign any paper, but gave Dorothea a ring. ↩

336. No saber de la misa la media a familiar mode of describing ignorance. ↩

337. Proverb 120. The time at which the truth of any statement will be seen. ↩

338. Cervantes forgets that he has not as yet said anything about his captivity. ↩

339. Properly ma-kan-shy⁠—the common emphatic negative in popular Arabic, at least in the Barbary States. ↩

340. “Man of letters”⁠—letrado, as will be seen, means here specially one devoted to jurisprudence. ↩

341. Andar a la sopa⁠—to attend at the convents where soup is given out to the poor. The convent soup, as Quevedo says in the Gran Tacaño, was also a great resource of the picaro class. ↩

342. I.e. fall short of 1,000. ↩

343. Clemencín explains this as “in one way or another.” Another explanation is that by skirts (faldas) regular salary is meant, and by sleeves (mangas) douceurs, perquisites, and the like. ↩

344. We have here, no doubt, a personal reminiscence of Lepanto. It was in an affair somewhat of this sort that Cervantes himself received his wounds. ↩

345. “Montañas de Burgos” and “Montañas de León” were the names given to the southern slopes of the western continuation of the Pyrenees, the cradle of most of the old Gothic families of Spain, that of Cervantes himself among the number. ↩

346. Proverb 121. ↩

347. Proverb 202. ↩

348. Alva went to Flanders in 1567, so that the present scene would be laid in 1589; but Cervantes paid no attention to chronology. ↩

349. This was the captain of the company in Diego de Moncada’s regiment in which Cervantes first served. ↩

350. Properly⁠—Aluch Ali. ↩

351. John Andrea Doria, nephew of the great Andrea Doria. ↩

352. The distinguishing mark of the admiral’s galley. ↩

353. The fort commanding the entrance, the “gullet,” to the lagoon of Tunis. ↩

354. Or Serbelloni. ↩

355. Proverb 230. ↩

356. The memories of this Don Pedro de Aguilar were printed in 1755 by the Sociedad de Bibliofilos Españoles. ↩

357. Clemencín says the merits of this sonnet are slender, and that the next is no better. He particularly objects to the idea of souls dyeing the sea with their blood. But Clemencín has no bowels of compassion for the straits of a sonneteer. ↩

358. Fratin, “the little friar,” the name by which Jacome Palearo went. ↩

359. This should be Hassan Pacha: Hassan Aga died in 1543. ↩

360. The story of the captive, it is needless to say, is not the story of Cervantes himself; but it is colored throughout by his own experiences, and he himself speaks in the person of the captive. In the above passage, for example, we have an expression of the indomitable spirit that supported him, not only in captivity, but in the struggles of his later life. ↩

361. The barrack or building in which slaves were kept. Littré explains it by saying that a “bath”⁠—bagne, baño⁠—was on one occasion used as a place of confinement for Christian slaves at Constantinople. Condé, on the other hand, says the word has nothing to do with baño⁠—bath, but is pure Arabic, and means a building coated with plaster or stucco. ↩

362. This “tal de Saavedra” was of course Cervantes himself. The story of his captivity and adventures had been already written by Haedo, but did not appear in print till 1612. Rodrigo Mendez Silva was so much struck by it that he mentions Cervantes as the most remarkable of the descendants of Nuño Alfonso; but, strange to say, though he wrote in 1648, he does not seem to be aware that he is speaking of the author of Don Quixote. Perhaps the good Dryasdust had never heard of such a book. ↩

363. La Pata, a fort near Oran. ↩

364. Babazoun, “the gate of the sheep,” the south gate of Algiers. ↩

365. The Arnaut Mami was the captor of the Sol galley on board of which Cervantes and his brother Rodrigo were returning to Spain. He was noted for his cruelty, and was said to have his house full of noseless and earless Christians. ↩

366. An Algerine coin equal to about thirty-six reals. ↩

367. A wind from the north, so called from coming across the Alps. ↩

368. Cervantes gives the popular name by which the spot is known. Properly it is “Kubba Rumia,” “the Christian’s tomb;” that being the name given to the curious circular structure about which there has been so much discussion among French archaeologists. ↩

369. The Sierra Tejeda, to the south of Alhama, is apparently that which Cervantes means. ↩

370. About eighteen miles to the east of Málaga, at a little distance from the coast. ↩

371. Cervantes apparently forgets that they had supped already. ↩

372. If so, the judge’s views of the value of evidence were peculiar. How could the curate, for instance, have known that the Frenchmen robbed his friend, if he had never been able to learn whether he reached Spain or had been carried off to France? ↩

373. In this translation an attempt has been made to imitate the prevailing rhyme of the Spanish ballad, the double assonant in the second and fourth lines. ↩

374. Surgit Palinurus, et⁠ ⁠…
     Sidora cuncta notat tacito labentia coelo.

     —⁠Aeneid iii

     ↩

375. “Clara estrella.” ↩

376. Proverb 190. ↩

377. “Tria virginis ora Dianae.” —⁠Aeneid iv 511 ↩

378. I.e. Daphne. ↩

379. Cecear⁠—to call attention by making a hissing sound such as the Andalusians produce when they have to pronounce ce. ↩

380. Magicians that figure in The Knight of Phoebus. ↩

381. There is some inconsistency here. How could Don Quixote fall almost to the ground, if when standing on Rocinante he was tied up so tightly as we are told? Hartzenbusch, more suo, has an ingenious explanation, by which he avoids the simpler one, that Cervantes never gave a thought to the matter. The strappado was inflicted by tying the hands of the victim behind his back and then hanging him by the wrists from a crossbeam or bough of a tree. Examples of it may be seen among Callot’s sketches. There is something almost ghastly in its introduction here as an illustration which must as a matter of course be familiar to every reader. ↩

382. Proverb 204. “Laws go as kings like:” a very old proverb, said to owe its origin to the summary manner in which Alfonso VI at Toledo settled the question as to which of the rival rituals, the French or the Musarabic, was to be adopted. It was agreed to try them by the test of fire, and the latter came out victorious, on which the king, who favored the other, flung it back into the flames. ↩

383. V Orlando Furioso, canto xxvii. Agramante was the leader of the Mohammedan kings and princes assembled at the siege of Paris, of whom Sobrino was one. ↩

384. Escote; old French escot. ↩

385. I.e. Augustus. ↩

386. Proverb 77. ↩

387. Proverb 222. ↩

388. Proverb 9. Generally mistranslated “than is dreamt of,” as if it was sueña instead of suena. ↩

389. Proverb 196. ↩

390. This resembles the scene in the Morgante Maggiore (xii 88), where Orlando is seized and bound by the pagans. ↩

391. A name formed from mentir, to tell lies. ↩

392. Here, for once, Hartzenbusch has overlooked an inconsistency. In Chapter XLV we were told the officers were three in number. Farther on it will be seen that they carried crossbows, not muskets. ↩

393. Rinconete y Cortadillo is the third of the Novelas Ejemplares published by Cervantes in 1613. From this we may assume that the Curioso Impertinente was written about the same time, i.e. during his residence in Seville. ↩

394. Suma de las Súmulas, Alcalá 1557, by Gaspar Carillo de Villalpando, a theologian who distinguished himself for learning and eloquence at the Council of Trent. ↩

395. Proverb 209. ↩

396. A title sometimes given to ecclesiastics in lieu of “Reverence.” ↩

397. Proverbial phrase⁠—“Adobadme esos candiles.” ↩

398. Proverbs 112 and 117. ↩

399. Proverb 178. ↩

400. Proverb 69. ↩

401. Alluding to Belianis of Greece, who when only sixteen cut a knight in two at Persepolis. ↩

402. Literally, “the more of the doubtful,” meaning the more of that which is not manifestly impossible. ↩

403. In the original it is burlado, “scoffed at,” which makes no sense. Hartzenbusch suggests vitoreado, but I think alabado is the more likely word and suits the context better. ↩

404. Alluding to the proverb (216) El sastre del Campillo, que cosia de balde y ponia el hilo⁠—“The tailor of El Campillo, who stitched for nothing and found the thread.” In the original it is “del cantillo” and the Marquis of Santillana gives the proverb in this form; but in the Picara Justina, in Quevedo, and most other authorities it is given as above. “Cantillo” is unmeaning, while “Campillo,” or “El Campillo” is the name of nearly a score of places in Spain. Anyone versed in proverbial literature will see that this is one of the class of quasi-local proverbs to which so many of the Spanish belong, e.g. “the squire of Guadalajara,” “the abbot of Zarzuela,” “the smith of Arganda,” “the doctors of Valencia,” and that peculiarly humorous one, which ought by right to be Scottish, “The piper of Bujalance, (who got) one maravedi to strike up and ten to leave off.” ↩

405. By Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola. ↩

406. La Ingratitud Vengada, a comedy by Lope de Vega; La Numancia, a tragedy by Cervantes himself, first printed in 1784; El Mercader Amante, a comedy by Gaspar de Aguilar; and La Enemiga Favorable, by the licentiate Francisco Tarraga. ↩

407. The foreigners Cervantes alludes to here could only have been the Italians, who had made some efforts in the direction of dramatic propriety. There was no French stage at the time; and the English certainly did not “scrupulously observe” the laws he alludes to. ↩

408. The fertile wit was, of course, Lope de Vega, at whom, in particular, this criticism is aimed; and Cervantes shows great adroitness in the mode in which he has conducted his attack. There is hardly anything, however, which he says that Lope does not admit with cynical candor in the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias, where he insists upon the right of the public to have nonsense if it prefers it, inasmuch as it pays. This chapter has a peculiar interest, not only as showing the views of Cervantes, but as furnishing an explanation of the bitter feeling with which he was unquestionably regarded by Lope and Lope’s school; a feeling that found expression a few years later in the attack made upon him by Avellaneda. Cervantes himself shortly afterwards in his comedies violated nearly all the principles he lays down here, and in the second act of the Rufian Dichoso solemnly reads his recantation. Much of what he says here is almost identical with what Sir Philip Sidney had said in the Apologie for Poetrie. ↩

409. E.g. Bradamante, Marfisa, and Antea, in the Orlando and Morgante Maggiore. ↩

410. Count Fernán González of Castile, the hero of many ballads, flourished in the tenth century; for Gonzalo Fernández, or Hernández, and Diego García de Paredes see notes to Chapter XXXII: García Pérez de Vargas is the hero of more than one ballad, but from the mention of Jerez it may be that Cervantes meant Diego Pérez de Vargas, who, at the siege of Jerez, performed the feat that got him the name of the Pounder. (See Chapter VIII.) Garcilaso is not the poet but an ancestor of his, known as “el del Ave Maria,” from having slain at the battle of the Salado a Moor who appeared with a label bearing the words “Ave Maria” tied to his horse’s tail; an exploit generally said to have been performed at Granada. Don Manuel Ponce de León was a knight of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, who figures in the ballads of the Siege of Granada; for him see note to Chapter XVII Part II. ↩

411. The Princess Florides was the sister of Fierabras, and wife of Guy of Burgundy, a nephew of Charlemagne. The bridge of Mantible, referred to in the History of Charlemagne, was defended by the giant Galafre supported by the Turks, but carried by Charlemagne with the help of Fierabras. The Estremaduran peasants have given the name to the ruins of the old Roman bridge over the Tagus at Alconétar, north of Caceres. ↩

412. A romance of the Charlemagne series, originally written in Italian, but translated into Spanish in 1527. ↩

413. The history of Pierres and Magalona is a Provençal romance written in the twelfth century by Bernardo Treviez, and translated into Spanish apparently as early as 1519. ↩

414. The “dread horn of Roland,” Olifant, was, in fact, an elephant’s tusk. ↩

415. Juan de Merlo was a Portuguese knight in the reign of John II of Castile, whose deeds are celebrated by Juan de Menain the Laberinto (198, 199). ↩

416. Fernando de Guevara was another knight of the time of John II. ↩

417. The “Paso Honroso” was one of the most famous feats of chivalry of the Middle Ages. Suero de Quiñones, a knight of León, with nine others, undertook in 1434 to hold the bridge of Orbigo, near Astorga, against all comers for thirty days. Each was to break three lances with every gentleman who presented himself. There were 727 encounters and 166 lances broken. An account of it was written by a contemporary, Pero Rodriguez de Lena, secretary of John II, which was afterwards re-edited by Juan de Pineda, and printed at Salamanca in 1588 under the title of Libro del Paso Honroso. It is appended to the Crónica de Álvaro de Luna, Madrid, 1784. ↩

418. A knight of Navarre mentioned in the Crónica of John II and in Zurita’s Annals of Aragón. ↩

419. See note on Turpin, Chapter VII. ↩

420. No such title as Knight of the Twelve Peers ever existed. ↩

421. With regard to the Cid the canon is quite right: there is no historical foundation for three-fourths of the achievements attributed to him by the ballads and crónicas. As to Bernardo del Carpio, there may be, of course, some nucleus of fact round which the legends have clustered, but that is all that can be said for his existence. The saddle of the Cid is not now among the treasures of the Armería at Madrid, if indeed it ever was. ↩

422. In la Cuesta’s third edition of 1608 a passage is inserted here for which there is neither authority nor necessity. ↩

423. The phrase used only by a player who wishes to withdraw from a game. ↩

424. The original editions have “Gante y Luna,” which are not names of persons known in connection with any feats of the kind described. Garcilaso (see here) is much more likely to be the name mentioned with Deigo García de Paredes. ↩

425. Hartzenbusch, who will never admit an error in taste or judgment in Cervantes, explains the conduct of the canon and curate on this occasion by pointing out that it was after dinner. ↩

426. It is commonly said that Sancho, though he would have understood what isla meant, had no conception of the meaning of insula, the antiquated word for island Don Quixote always uses; but it appears from this that he understood perfectly what an insula is. ↩

427. Proverb 138. ↩

428. One of his grievances against the books of chivalry being that they led astray not merely the silly, thoughtless, and uncritical, but vast numbers of people who ought to know better. ↩

429. Whether or not this is to be held an indication of some grudge on the part of Cervantes against the authorities of the town, it is, at any rate, conclusive that Don Quixote’s village, “the name of which he did not care to call to mind,” was Argamasilla. Monicongo may be translated “mannikin”; Paniaguado is a sort of parasite hanging about the house of a patron for such scraps as he can pick up; Burlador means a joker, and cachidiablo a hobgoblin. Except, perhaps, in the sonnet on Sancho Panza, there is not much drollery or humor in these verses, but it would not be fair to criticise them severely, as they are obviously nothing more than a mere outburst of reckless nonsense to finish off with; a sort of flourish or rubrica like that commonly appended to a Spanish signature. ↩

430. In the second and third editions trono⁠—“throne”⁠—was changed into tronco, which Hartzenbusch considers a blundering alteration. I am inclined to think, however, that he is wrong, and that what Cervantes meant was not a diamond-studded throne, but an adamant pillar, a trophy in fact. But it is no great matter; the sonnet was meant for nonsense, and is successful either way. ↩

431. Brillador was Orlando’s horse; Bayard, Rinaldo’s:

     “Ouel Brigliador si bello e si gagliardo
     Che non ha paragon, fuorche Baiardo.”

     Orlando Furtoso, IX 60

     ↩

432. Misquoted from Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, XXX 16:

     “Forse altri canterà con miglior plettro.”

     Cervantes, it will be seen, leaves it very uncertain whether he means to give a continuation of the adventures of Don Quixote or not, and here almost seems to invite some other historian to undertake the task. ↩

433. The spurious “Second Part,” which came out in the autumn of 1614, was described on the title-page as the work of Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, of Tordesillas, and was licensed and printed at Tarragona. ↩

434. Proverbial phrase. See this note. ↩

435. Avellaneda, in his coarse and scarrilous preface, charged Cervantes with attacking Lope de Vega, obviously alluding to the passages on the drama in Part I Chapter XLVIII, and attributed the attack to envy. Lope was not, however, a familiar of the Inquisition at the time Cervantes was writing the First Part of Don Quixote, as the words used here would imply. ↩

436. Podenco, a kind of small greyhound, hunting by nose as well as by sight, and generally used for rabbits. ↩

437. The municipal authorities of Seville, Cordova, and Granada were called Veintiquatros, from being twenty-four in number. The passage is, of course, a quotation from some popular interlude of the day. ↩

438. Bernardo de Sandoval y Rojas was Cardinal-Archbishop of Toledo, Primate of Spain, and brother of the Duke of Lerma, the Prime Minister. ↩

439. Las Coplas de Mingo Revulgo is the title given to an old versified satire on the reign of Henry IV absurdly attributed by some to Juan de Mena, by others to Rodrigo Cota, or Fernando del Pulgar. ↩

440. Ni Rey ni Roque⁠—“neither king nor rook”⁠—a popular phrase somewhat like “gentle or simple,” or “high or low.” According to Clemencín probably derived from the game of chess, rook or rock (Pers. rokh) being the same thing as the castle. ↩

441. The ballad referred to has not been identified so far as I am aware. ↩

442. Cuerpo de tal⁠—like the English⁠—a less irreverent form of “God’s body!” ↩

443. Andar estaciones properly means to visit certain churches, for the purpose of offering up the prayers required to obtain indulgences. ↩

444. Proverb 49. ↩

445. The first nine are heroes of Spanish chivalry romance; the others are from Boiardo and Ariosto. There never was any such book as Turpin’s Cosmography; it was Ariosto himself who traced the descent of the dukes of Ferrara from Ruggiero. ↩

446. In the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci. The account of the bones found in Sicily is in the Jardín de Flores Curiosos of Antonio de Torquemada, “the Spanish Mandeville,” as his English translator calls him. ↩

447. The friend was his master, Dardinel, beside whose body he received the wound of which he was cured by Angelica. ↩

448. Cervantes misquotes Ariosto’s lines, which are:

     “E dell’ India a Medor desse lo scettro,
     Forse altri canterà con miglior plettro.”

     —⁠Orlando Furioso XXX 16

     ↩

449. The Andalusian was Barahona de Soto, who wrote the Primera Parte de la Angelica (not Lagrimas de Angelica, as Cervantes calls it in Part I Chapter VI). It appeared at Granada in 1586. The Castilian was Lope de Vega, whose Hermosura de Angelica formed the first part of his Rimas, printed at Madrid in 1602. ↩

450. In the original insulas ni insulos. Insula, the word always used in the Amadís, and by Don Quixote, instead of isla, is a puzzle to the niece and housekeeper. ↩

451. I.e., the gentry by birth and the gentry by position. ↩

452. In the time of Cervantes the title of Don was much more restricted than nowadays, when it is by courtesy given to everyone. ↩

453. Literally, “with a rag behind and another in front.” ↩

454. Alluding to the proverb (111) Hidalgo honrado antes roto que remendado⁠—“The gentleman of honour, ragged sooner than patched.” ↩

455. Proverb 52, meaning “don’t fancy you have done with it.” ↩

456. Proverbial phrase 229. ↩

457. Berengena⁠—the aubergine or eggplant. ↩

458. The critics and commentators have been much troubled by the inconsistency involved in making only a month elapse between the termination of the First Part and the resumption of the story, in which short space of time the first volume is supposed to have been written, translated, printed, and circulated, as we are afterwards told, to the extent of 12,000 copies. Cervantes, however, himself saw the blunder, as we perceive here, and makes a happy use of it as evidence of enchantment in the knight’s eyes. Cervantes never troubled his head about such inconsistencies. The action of the whole story of Don Quixote is supposed to extend over three or four months only, but according to dates it extends over twenty-five years, from 1589 to 1614. ↩

459. No edition appeared at Barcelona in the lifetime of Cervantes, and no edition of the First Part by itself was ever printed at Antwerp. On the other hand, there were two editions at Brussels and one at Milan, of which Cervantes does not seem to have been aware when he wrote this. ↩

460. Si se anda á decir verdades. ↩

461. Proverb 220⁠—Aun hay sol en las barbas, i.e. “the day is not yet over. Las bardas are properly not the wall itself, but a kind of coping of straw or faggots laid along the top of it. ↩

462. In the original, Grama-tica⁠—grama being an instrument for dressing flax, and therefore quite within Sancho’s comprehension. ↩

463. Revolver berzas con capachos is, according to Covarrubias, a familiar phrase to express jumbling together things of different sorts. ↩

464. In the original, trillada, “thrashed,” as wheat is in Spain, by having the trilla, a sort of harrow, dragged over it. ↩

465. Proverb 166. In full it runs, “with straw or with hay the mattress is filled.” ↩

466. El Tostado was Alonso de Madrigal, Bishop of Avila, a prolific author of devotional works in the reign of John II. ↩

467. Proverb 128. ↩

468. This passage has somewhat puzzled those who were unaware of the difference in text between the first and the subsequent editions. Cervantes is here speaking of the first edition, in which (as has been already pointed out, Part I Chapter XXIII) no account of the theft of the ass is given. From this we gather that Cervantes himself had nothing to do with the attempt made in the second edition to rectify the blunder, for had it been his own work he certainly would not have ignored it as he does here. ↩

469. He is here ridiculing what he considers the hypercriticism of those readers who make a fuss about such trifling slips. ↩

470. A slang phrase for being weak for want of food. ↩

471. Equivalent to our phrase, “stay and take potluck.” ↩

472. “La sella su qnattro aste gli suffolse,
     E di sotto il destrier nudo gli tolse.”

     Orlando Furioso, XXVII 84

     But the idea was Boiardo’s:

     “E la cingia disciolse presto presto,
     E pose il legno sotto de lo arcione.”

     Orlando Innamorato, II v. 40

     It seems plain from this that Cervantes meant to introduce into the First Part a burlesque of the theft of Sacripante’s horse, with Ginés de Pasamonte playing the part of Brunello. It would have been an incident exactly in the spirit of the book. ↩

473. Proverb 80. ↩

474. Ripio, small stones and mortar used in building to fill the interstices between the large stones. ↩

475. In commemoration of the battle of Alcoraz, where in 1096 Pedro I of Aragón, with the help of St. George, defeated the Moors. ↩

476. The old Spanish war-cry, Santiago y cierra España! ↩

477. Demasia⁠—literally “excess.” Hartzenbusch would add “of the risk,” or substitute “occasion,” but I venture to think the word by itself may be taken in the sense I have given. ↩

478. Proverbs 236 and 22. ↩

479. Proverb 158. ↩

480. Literally, “among the mallows.” ↩

481. There is some difference of opinion as to who were the three poets and a half allowed to be famous by Samson Carrasco; but probably Cervantes only intended a malicious little joke at the expense of the whole swarm of poets of his day, and their mutual admiration cliques. ↩

482. The decima is properly a stanza of ten eight-syllable lines; in the redondilla, which is more commonly a four-line stanza, the last line rhymes with the first. The acrostic was one of the poetical frivolities of the day. ↩

483. Proverb 101. ↩

484. Proverb 109. ↩

485. Proverb 113. ↩

486. Teresa inverts the proverb after Sancho’s fashion; see this note. ↩

487. Proverbs 148 and 91. ↩

488. The Infanta Urraca was the daughter of Ferdinand I of Castile and León, who, finding herself omitted in her father’s will, threatened to disgrace him by taking to a disreputable life. He in consequence altered his will and left her the city of Zamora, adding his curse upon him who should attempt to take it from her; a curse which shortly afterwards took effect when her brother Sancho, besieging the city, was treacherously slain by Vellido Dolfos. The story is the subject of two ballads⁠—Morir vos Queredes, Padre, and Acababa el Rey Fernando. ↩

489. Almohada is a cushion, which Sancho supposes to have had something to do with the origin of the sect of the Almohades. ↩

490. Proverb 62. ↩

491. There can be very little doubt, as Pellicer points out, that Molière took the scene between Monsieur Jourdain and his wife in act III of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme from this dialogue between Sancho and Teresa. ↩

492. One of the most important of the preliminaries in a formal combat was placing the men, so that neither should be at a disadvantage by having the sun in his eyes. So in the Poem of the Cid, the marshals portion out the sun to the Cid’s champions and the Infantes of Carrion. ↩

493. The garment worn by penitents, who have been tried by the Inquisition and have confessed. ↩

494. The reader should bear in mind that caballero⁠—“knight”⁠—means also “gentleman.” It is in the latter sense that Cervantes uses the word in the following passage, as the context will show. ↩

495. Hidalgos. ↩

496. Garcilaso de la Vega, elegy on the death of Don Bernardino de Toledo, brother of the Duke of Alva. ↩

497. Venturas, which the honsekeeper mistakes for aventuras, would mean strokes of good fortune. ↩

498. According to an old popular rhyme, Santa Apollonia complained of a toothache to the Blessed Virgin, who thereupon forbad any tooth, double or single, ever to trouble her again. The spell is alluded to in the Celestina act IV. ↩

499. Proverb 40⁠—if you have a thing in writing, words are unnecessary. ↩

500. Proverb 74⁠—Quien destaja no baraja; always mistranslated “He who cuts does not shuffle,” which would be meaningless here. It has nothing to do with cards. Destajar means to lay down conditions, to stipulate; Barajar certainly means to shuffle, to jumble things together, but in old Spanish it meant also to wrangle or dispute. ↩

501. Proverb 227. ↩

502. Proverb 149. ↩

503. Proverb 59, i.e. to butcher. ↩

504. Proverbs 100, 141, and 11. ↩

505. The play upon the words here cannot be translated. Sancho, blundering as usual, changes the common phrase rata por cantidad⁠—“ratably,” or “in proportion”⁠—into gata (cat) por cantidad, and Don Quixote corrects him by saying, “a rat (rata) may be sometimes as good as a cat.” ↩

506. Proverb 169. ↩

507. Proverbs 97 and 197. In the second, Shelton and Jervas mistranslate queja “demand;” thereby weakening the force of a proverb, the truth of which has been always recognised by politicians, diplomatists, and agitators. ↩

508. Proverb 174. ↩

509. Garcilaso de la Vega. Égloga III. ↩

510. Cid Hamete Benengeli might have objected with more reason to this than to Sancho’s speeches in Chapter V. ↩

511. Proverb 73. ↩

512. The Pantheon: the ascent of the dome by Charles V in 1536 is historical, but none of the memoirs mention the story of the Roman gentleman. ↩

513. Julio is “July” as well as “Julius.” ↩

514. The obelisk that now stands in front of St. Peter’s. ↩

515. San Diego de Alcalá, canonized in 1588, and San Salvador de Orta, or San Pedro de Alcántara, in 1562. ↩

516. Media noche era por filo⁠—the beginning of the ancient ballad of Conde Claros. Ticknor, apropos of this ballad, makes a strange mistake, assuming that the words por filo refer to some early contrivance for measuring time, and therefore indicate a date before the invention of clocks. Filo here is the line marked on a balance, by which the deviation of the index to one side or the other is observed; and por filo means nothing more than “exactly,” or “on the very line of midnight.” ↩

517. As a matter of fact the church tower of El Toboso is an unusually massive and conspicuous one. ↩

518. Proverb 235. ↩

519. Proverb 218. ↩

520. “Mala la hubistes, Franceses,
     La caza de Roncesvalles”⁠—

     the beginning of one of the most popular of the ballads of the Carlovingian cycle. Lockhart has in his own fashion given the substance of it in The Admiral Guarinos. The correct form of the first line is “Mala la vistes, Franceses.” ↩

521. Another even more popular ballad of the same group, beginning, “Ya cabalga Calaínos.” Both are in the undated Cancionero of Antwerp, and in Duran’s Romancero, numbers 402 and 373. ↩

522. In the original editions this chapter begins with the words which will be found at the beginning of Chapter XVII. As Hartzenbusch points out, they are quite out of place here. ↩

523. Proverb 58. ↩

524. A muddle by Sancho of the proverb (226) so often quoted. ↩

525. Proverb 129. ↩

526. Two lines from one of the Bernardo del Carpio ballads, Con Cartas y Mensageros. (Cancionero de Romances, 1550.) ↩

527. Proverb 199; literally and in full the phrase runs, “Fall, thunderbolt, yonder on Tamayo’s house”⁠—meaning, it is all the same to me, provided it does not fall on mine. ↩

528. Proverb 103. ↩

529. Proverb 134. As bachelors swarm in Salamanca, to go there looking for the bachelor, with no other address, would be the height of hopelessness. ↩

530. Proverb 144. ↩

531. Proverbs 13, 153. ↩

532. I.e., the lists of bachelors qualified for degrees. ↩

533. Ordinary brocade had only a triple border. ↩

534. Sancho perverts the word hacaneas into cananeas, which, if it means anything, means “Canaanites.” Possibly Cervantes may have intended a joke on the supposed Oriental origin of the ass, like that in the English slang title “Jerusalem pony.” ↩

535. Jo! que te estrego, burra de mi suegro!⁠—In all the translations I have seen, this exclamation is either omitted or misunderstood. Shelton and Jervas suppose it to be addressed by the girl to the ass she is riding. It is in reality a popular phrase (as may be perceived by the rhyme), and commonly used when a person takes amiss something that is intended as a favour or a compliment. The girl uses it here ironically, fancying that Sancho’s complimentary language is, as we should say, “chaff,” and striving to pay him off in his own coin. ↩

536. A line from Garcilaso de la Vega, Égloga III. ↩

537. See this note. ↩

538. A saddle with a high pummel and cantle and short stirrups. ↩

539. A scrap, apparently, of some song. ↩

540. The sarzo, a framework of reeds or canes on which the tilt is stretched in the country carts in Central and South Spain. ↩

541. A theatrical manager and dramatist of Toledo who flourished about 1580. ↩

542. Sopa de arroyo⁠—a slang phrase for pebbles. ↩

543. Proverb 167. ↩

544. In place of comparación⁠—“similitude”⁠—some correctors would read comparición⁠—“appearance” in the legal sense, as in the phrase “to put in an appearance;” but I think the original reading makes better sense. ↩

545. Impotent pieces of the game he plays
     Upon this chequer-board of nights and days,
     Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
     And one by one back in the closet lays.

     Omar Khayyám

     Don Quixote, it will be seen, held Teufelsdröckh’s philosophy of clothes. ↩

546. The first quotation is from one of the ballads on the dissensions of the Zegris and Abencerrages in Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras Civiles de Granada. I do not know who “sang” the other, but it is a popular phrase, and in full is “from friend to friend (or ‘between friends’) the bug in the eye.” Tener chinche en el ojo, or Sangre en el ojo is “to keep a sharp lookout.” ↩

547. A reference to the often quoted proverb, por el hilo se saca el ovillo. ↩

548. The pieces of verse introduced in the Second Part are more or less burlesques, and sometimes, as here and in Chapter XVIII, imitations of the affected poetry of the day. The verses in the First Part (except, of course, the commendatory verses, and those at the end of the last chapter) are serious efforts, and evidently regarded by Cervantes with some complacency. The difference is significant. ↩

549. Proverb 173. ↩

550. Proverb 50. ↩

551. Proverb 64. ↩

552. Crudo⁠—“raw”⁠—means also cruel, but even with this explanation the squire’s humour is not very intelligible. ↩

553. Proverb 44. “I get more than my share of ill-luck.” ↩

554. Tener alma de cántaro⁠—to be simplicity itself. ↩

555. Either as big, or following one another as closely, as the knots on a tether. ↩

556. The bean of the carob tree; “St. John’s bread.” ↩

557. Anyone who has ever watched a Spanish peasant with a bota knows how graphic this is. ↩

558. The chief town of La Mancha, and also of the great wine-growing district of which the Valdepeñas is the best known product. ↩

559. The Cordovan leather, a legacy of the Moors, was somewhat like morocco. ↩

560. Cervantes has introduced the same story, with some slight modifications, in the interlude of the Elleción de los Alcaldes de Daganzo. ↩

561. Proverb 116. ↩

562. The colossal statue of Faith that acts as weathercock on the top of the great Moorish tower of the same name which serves as belfry to the Cathedral at Seville. ↩

563. Rude stone figures of animals resembling the hippopotamus rather than the bull, the origin of which is a disputed point among Spanish antiquarians. They are not, however, confined to Guisando; there are, for instance, four well-preserved specimens at Avila. ↩

564. A chasm in the Sierra de Cabra, south of Cordova, probably the shaft of an ancient mine. ↩

565. Lines quoted, but incorrectly, from the beginning of the Araucana of Ercilla, who apparently borrowed them from the old poet the Archpriest of Hita. ↩

566. Proverb 164. ↩

567. I.e., seconds. ↩

568. The fine imposed in some fraternities on absent members. ↩

569. Apetites. Hartzenbusch proposes arbitrios⁠—“expedients;” but it is hardly a case that calls for emendation, and there is a flavour of Sancho in the idea as it stands. ↩

570. Proverb 248. According to Covarrubias, a metaphor taken from rabbit-shooting with the crossbow, when each sportsman should confine his attention to looking for his own arrows, or, more properly, bolts, virotes. ↩

571. Proverb 124. ↩

572. Proverb 81. ↩

573. The formal commencement of the answer to a petition to the crown. ↩

574. The old form of spur was a spike with a knob or button near the point to keep it from penetrating too far. ↩

575. Proverb 94. ↩

576. A reference to the proverb (185), “The bay is of one mind, he who saddles him of another.” ↩

577. Proverb 155. ↩

578. Gabán, a loose overcoat with a hood, worn when hunting, hawking, or travelling; montera, a cap with falling flaps, a common head gear in Central Spain. ↩

579. Jineta, an easy saddle with short stirrups, already referred to in this note. ↩

580. All editions previous to Hartzenbusch’s read caballo⁠—“horse”⁠—instead of cabello, but we are told, and the whole context shows, that it was Don Quixote’s personal appearance that astonished Don Diego; it is true that Rocinante is described as “long” in Part I Chapter IX. ↩

581. In Chapter III, the reader may remember, the number is put at “more than twelve thousand.” Perhaps, between writing that chapter and this, Cervantes may have heard of other editions besides those he mentions there; but even counting all editions his estimate is excessive. ↩

582. Proverb 6. ↩

583. Clemencín seems to think that it should be, not perdigon⁠—“partridge”⁠—but perdiguero⁠—“pointer;” but Cervantes would never have applied the word manso⁠—“tame”⁠—to a dog. Clemencín apparently was not aware that tame partridges are extensively used by Andalusian sportsmen as decoys. ↩

584. This is an instance of the heedless way in which Cervantes so often wrote. He meant, of course, that having many and good children was one of those things (such as, for example, the gifts of fortune, etc.) wherein the philosophers placed the summum bonum. ↩

585. Justas literarias⁠—literary or poetical jousts or tournaments, in which the compositions of the competitors were recited in public, and prizes awarded by appointed judges, were still frequent in the time of Cervantes. ↩

586. I.e., Ovid. Fasti, Lib. VI and De Arte Amandi, Lib. III. ↩

587. Like Ovid, banished to Tomos in Pontus. ↩

588. I.e., the laurel. ↩

589. The opening sentences have been transferred to this place from Chapter X by Hartzenbusch. It would be absurd to call Don Quixote’s simplicity in the matter of Sancho’s mystification about the village girls, mad doings (locuras) that go beyond the maddest that can be conceived; while the lion adventure is all through treated as his very maddest freak; one compared with which, as Sancho says, all the rest were “cakes and fancy bread.” ↩

590. Proverb 240. May be drawn out fine like wire. ↩

591. Proverb 241. ↩

592. Proverb 14. ↩

593. Don Quixote, going to Saragossa, could not have met the cart with lions coming from Cartagena, where they would have been landed from Oran. ↩

594. Referring to Don Manuel Ponce de León, one of the most brilliant of the galaxy of gallant knights round Ferdinand and Isabella at the siege of Granada, and hero, according to Spanish tradition, of the story told by Schiller in Der Handschuh, by Leigh Hunt in the Glove and the Lions, but best of all by Robert Browning in The Glove. Although, with these, the hero’s name is De Lorge and the scene the Court of Francis I of France, the story is originally a Spanish one. It was transferred to France by Brantôme in Discours X of his Dames Illustres. He took it from No. 89 of Part III of Bandello’s novels, and Bandello had it from a Valencian or Catalan source. It appears in different forms in old Spanish literature. It is mentioned in the Nobiliario of Alonso López de Haro, who, however, says nothing about throwing the glove in the lady’s face. It is also mentioned by Urrea in his translation of Ariosto, 1549, and by Garci Sanchez de Badajoz; and it is the subject of a ballad, probably of the fifteenth century, in Timoneda’s Rosa de Romances, 1573. Viardot, in a note on this passage in his translation, says that the surname of “de León” was conferred by Isabella in commemoration of the feat. As a member of the Spanish Academy he ought to have known that in that case the title would have been “del León;” and, in the next place, that the noble family of the Ponces had borne the addition to their name since the end of the twelfth century, when Pedro Ponce de Minerva married Aldonza, natural daughter of Alfonso IX of León. Unfortunately, the reverse of Viardot’s theory is far the more probable one; that the story was invented to account for the name by some ballad-maker ignorant of the family history of the Ponces. ↩

595. The Perrillo⁠—i.e. the little dog⁠—was the trademark of Julian del Rei, a famous armourer and swordsmith of Toledo and Saragossa. ↩

596. E.g. Amadís, Esplandián, Belianis, the Caballero del Febo, and others. “The Knight of the Lions” was one of the titles adopted by Amadís. ↩

597. Proverb 39. ↩

598. Many houses in the old towns of Northern and Central Spain are so decorated to this day. ↩

599. The beginning of Garcilaso’s tenth sonnet, imitated from Virgil, Aeneid Lib. IV: “Dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebant.” ↩

600. A hit at the prolixity not only of the romances of chivalry, but of more modern works. ↩

601. Not that sea-wolf skin was a specific, but because, like many suffering from ailments in the region of the loins, he found a baldric passing over the shoulder easier than the ordinary sword-belt. ↩

602. Cervantes himself won a first prize at Saragossa in 1595. ↩

603. Alluding to Pesce-Cola, or Pece Colan, the famous swimmer of Catania, who lived towards the end of the fifteenth century. ↩

604. Entreverado, i.e. like bacon that is mixed fat and lean. ↩

605. “Nunquam inducant animum cantare rogati,
     Injussi nanquam desistant.”

     ↩

606. Glossed verses, versos glosados, of the sort imitated here, were among the literary frivolities indulged in by the sixteenth and seventeenth century poets in Spain. Lope claims them as a Spanish invention, but Ticknor traces them to the Provençal poets. The Provençal glosses, however, were not constructed on the same principle. In Saa de Miranda’s Obras (1595), a gloss on some lines of Jorge Manrique’s is described as “ao costume daquelles tempos,” which may imply that they came into fashion at the beginning of the sixteenth century. ↩

607. This sonnet is a caricature, and by no means an overcharged one, of the sonnet style of the Culto school, which at this time had nearly attained its highest influence. Indeed, it might easily pass muster as a fair specimen, not perhaps of Góngora, but of any of the minor cultoristas. ↩

608. Literally, “among the hosts of consumed poets.” Possibly Cervantes meant by the word “lean,” “starving,” but it also has the meaning I have given, which, perhaps⁠—“genus irritabile vatum”⁠—is the more likely one. ↩

609. See notes to Chapter XXII. ↩

610. Cervantes seems to have introduced the “discreet” Don Diego de Miranda as a sort of contrast to Don Quixote. Possibly it was from these chapters that Theodore Agrippa d’Aubigné took the idea of his Sieur Enay and Baron Foeneste. ↩

611. In the sword-dances the dancers carried swords with which they made cuts and passes at each other, the art of the performance consisting in going as near as possible without doing any injury. The bell-dancers wore a dress hung with little bells after the fashion of the morris-dancers in England. The peculiar agility of the shoe-dancers⁠—zapateadores⁠—was shown by striking the sole of the shoe with the palm of the hand. ↩

612. Proverb 162. ↩

613. Proverb 82. ↩

614. Sayago, a district between Zamora and the Portuguese frontier. From the time of Alfonso X the Castilian of Toledo was always regarded as the standard. ↩

615. The Zocodover, the chief plaza of Toledo, and the Sok, or marketplace, in the time of the Moors. The cathedral cloisters are to this day a favourite lounge in that sunbaked city. ↩

616. Majalahonda (properly Majadahonda), a small village a couple of leagues to the northwest of Madrid. ↩

617. Mandoble is described in the Academy Dictionary as a cut or stroke delivered with both hands, but Arrieta explains it as one given by a turn of the wrist. ↩

618. To fall off one’s donkey, caer de su borrico or burro, a popular phrase for owning that one has been in the wrong. ↩

619. Proverb 60. ↩

620. Count Dirlos was the brother of Durandarte and hero of one of the ballads of the Carlovingian cycle. His name seems to have come to be used somewhat in the same fashion as that of “The Marquis of Carabas.” V. Qaevedo’s Gran Tacaño, chapter XII. ↩

621. The tinajas or jars used for storing wine in La Mancha are sometimes seven or eight feet high, and nearly as much in diameter at the widest part. ↩

622. The sword-dance was exceedingly dangerous, so much so that it was prohibited in course of time. ↩

623. El Rey es mi gallo⁠—an exclamation borrowed from cockfighting. The winning cock was called el Rey. ↩

624. Proverb 221. ↩

625. Proverb 223. ↩

626. Properly, a vile kind of wine made from the refuse and washings of the winepress. ↩

627. Proverb 191. ↩

628. A metal ornament worn by peasant girls somewhat after the manner of a locket. ↩

629. The richest ordinary velvet being three pile. ↩

630. Fit for any enterprise; the shoals of the Flemish coast being regarded with great awe by the Spanish sailors. ↩

631. It is difficult to see why Cervantes should have gone out of his way to make such a cold-blooded monster of the fair Quiteria as this gratuitous admission of his makes her. ↩

632. Proverb 27. ↩

633. For the Giralda of Seville, and the bulls of Guisando, see notes 543, 544, and 545. The Angel of the Magdalena was a weathercock on a church of that name at Salamanca; the Vecinguerra was the sewer draining the Potro quarter at Cordova. The other names are those of fountains in or on the outskirts of Madrid, of which I think the Lavapiés is the only one now in existence. ↩

634. The hamlet referred to is clearly that of Ruidera, about five leagues southeast of Argamasilla, near the Laguna del Rey, the lowest of the chain of lakes from which the waters of the Guadiana flow into the plain of La Mancha. From thence across the hills it is about two leagues to the cave of Montesinos, which lies a little to the north of the ruins of the castle of Rocafria (v. map). There can be no doubt that Cervantes visited the spot, but he has somewhat exaggerated the dimensions of the cave. The mouth is not more than eight or ten feet wide, or the depth more than fifty or sixty; nor is the descent so steep as to make a rope requisite. It is, in all probability, an ancient mine of Roman or possibly Carthaginian origin. The map of the district given in Pellicer’s edition of Don Quixote misplaces the cave and several other points, and is entirely misleading. ↩

635. A line from the ballad in the Guerras Civiles de Granada, “Estando el Rey Don Fernando.” ↩

636. Proverb 175. ↩

637. The Peña de Francia is a mountain near Ciudad Rodrigo, and one of the holy places of Spain in consequence of the discovery of an image of the Virgin there in the fifteenth century. The Trinity of Gaeta is the chapel dedicated to the Trinity above the harbour of Gaeta. ↩

638. Montesinos is the hero of half a dozen ballads belonging to the Carlovingian cycle, but does not figure in any of the French romances. According to the ballads he was one of the Peers, and son of Count Grimaltos, or Grimaldos, by a daughter of Charlemagne. He owed his name to having been born in a forest (monte), where his father and mother were wandering, banished from court by the machinations of the traitor Tomillas. It appears to have been connected with the cave from a very early period, and according to one of the oldest of the ballads the adjacent Castle of Rocafria, or Rocafrida, mentioned in this note, was the residence of Rosaflorida, a lady who was enamoured of him de oídas⁠—from hearsay. Clemencín says they were married and lived there; but one of the ballads represents him as marrying Guiomar, a converted Saracen. It is odd that, with the castle close at hand here, Cervantes should not have referred to it. ↩

639. Merlin has been claimed by the Bretons as one of themselves, but of course he was a Welshman. In Mallory’s Arthur he is called “a devil’s son.” ↩

640. These are an adaptation of lines from the ballad⁠—

     “Oh Belerma! Oh Belerma!
     Por mi mal fuiste engendrada.”

     —⁠Cancionero S.A. Antwerp. Duran. Romancero, No. 387

     Durandarte and Belerma, like Montesinos, are only to be found in the Spanish ballads of the Carlovingian cycle; Mila y Fontanals, however, thinks that in the name of the former there may be a reminiscence of that of Roland’s sword Durandal, or Durendal. ↩

641. The number of the lakes of Ruidera is variously stated. In Chapter XVIII Cervantes himself speaks of seven; here he makes them ten, if Ruidera herself is to be included. Clemencín says there are fifteen. Pascual Madoz, in his Geographical Dictionary of Spain, says fifteen in one place, and fourteen in another. Ford, in the Handbook, says there are eleven, which was the number I counted in a ramble down the valley some years ago. Most of them are mere tarns, but two or three are of considerable extent, the largest, La Colgada, being about two miles long. In most instances there is no visible communication between them. It is strange that Cervantes, who so often bestows wood and water, hills and vales, on Don Quixote’s parched, flat, treeless country, should not have a word to say for this pretty winding valley, with its succession of Claude-like vistas that would charm the eye anywhere, but here, after the bare brown steppes of La Mancha, seem veritable landscapes of Arcadia. ↩

642. The boundaries of New Castile and the kingdom of Murcia meet in the upper portion of the valley, the head of which belongs entirely to the latter. ↩

643. The Guadiana, after issuing from the Ruidera valley near the picturesque old castle of Peñaroya, traverses the plain of La Mancha and disappears from sight a little to the north of Argamasilla, to reappear again seven or eight leagues off at the Ojos de la Guadiana, near Daimiel. Ruy González Clavijo availed himself of the phenomenon to boast to Tamerlane in 1403 that his master King Henry had a bridge so large that a hundred thousand sheep browsed upon it. ↩

644. Proverb 110. ↩

645. Proverb 163. ↩

646. Proverb 56. ↩

647. Proverb 13. ↩

648. The Spanish form of Fugger, the name of the great Augsburg capitalists of the sixteenth century. ↩

649. Referring to the ballad quoted in Part I Chapter V and elsewhere. ↩

650. The Travels of the Infante Don Pedro of Portugal Through the Four Quarters of the World, written by Juan Gomez de Sanestevan Saragossa, 1570, was a popular book and passed through several editions. ↩

651. A passing compliment to his patron, the Conde de Lemos. ↩

652. Literally, “some of the dear.” ↩

653. A fashion introduced by the Duke of Lerma, whose feet were disfigured by bunions. ↩

654. Verses of shorter lines than the ballad, and generally of a humorous or satirical cast. ↩

655. The war to which the youth was bound was probably that which had arisen in Italy in 1613, out of the conflicting claims of the Dukes of Savoy and Mantua to the Duchy of Montferrat. ↩

656. It is not easy to say what passage Cervantes could have been thinking of. ↩

657. A proverbial phrase, expressive of extreme impatience. ↩

658. Officers who have charge of the expenditure of the municipality. ↩

659. A polite way of saying “after you,” when pressed to drink. ↩

660. Proverb 1. ↩

661. The eastern part of La Mancha, adjoining the Cuenca Mountains, and now part of the province of Cuenca. It had nothing to do with the kingdom of Aragón, as Cervantes seems to have supposed; the name, so Fermín Caballero (Pericia Geográfica de Cervantes) says, being derived from a hill called Monte Aragón. ↩

662. Vota a Rus, an obscure oath, but probably a Manchegan form of Voto d Dios. Rus is the name of a stream and castle near San Clemente. ↩

663. A giantess in Amadís of Gaul. ↩

664. In the original, Sancho’s mistake is patio for pacto. ↩

665. I.e., belonging to judicial astrology. ↩

666. There is, however, no trace of the story of Gaiferos and Melisenda (which is the correct form of the name) in any French chronicle or romance. Master Pedro’s puppet-show follows closely the ballad⁠—

     “Asentado está Gaiferos
     En el palacio real,”

     which is in the three oldest Cancioneros de Romances, and in Duran’s Romancero General, No. 377. ↩

667. These lines are not a quotation from the old ballad, but from a more modern piece of verse in octaves, in the National Library at Madrid. “Tables” was a game something like tric-trac or backgammon; not chess, as Dunlop supposes. It was played with dice. ↩

668. In the Chanson de Roland, “Durendal.” ↩

669. Marsilio is, of course, the Marsiles of the Chanson de Roland, and, in spite of the company in which he appears, a historical personage, the name being a corruption of Omari filius, i.e., Abd el Malek Ibn Omar, Wali of Saragossa at the time of Charlemagne’s invasion. In the ballad, however, he is called Almanzor. ↩

670. Góngora has a droll ballad on this subject⁠—

     “Desde Sansueña á Paris”⁠—

     in which he expresses his sympathy with Melisendra’s sufferings during her ride. ↩

671. Proverb 3. ↩

672. From the ballad on the rout of King Boderick’s army at the battle of the Guadalete⁠—

     “Las huestes del Rey Bodrigo
     Desmayaban y huian.”

     —⁠Cancioneros de Romances, S.A. Antwerp. Duran, Romancero General, No. 599

     ↩

673. Proverb 104. ↩

674. The joke here is untranslatable. Don Quixote says, “not to catch the ape, but the she-ape;” pillar la mona being a slang phrase for “to get drunk.” ↩

675. Here we have an additional proof that Cervantes did not supply the correction in the second edition, Part I Chapter XXIII, and was not even aware that it had been made. ↩

676. From this it would seem that Cervantes was under the impression that La Mancha de Aragón belonged to the kingdom of Aragón. ↩

677. I.e., a Sardinian pony, just as we say “a Shetland.” ↩

678. V. the ballad⁠—

     “Ya cabalga Diego Ordoñez.
     Desmayaban y huian.”

     —⁠Cancioneros de Romances, Antwerp, 1550. Duran, Romancero General, No. 791

     ↩

679. The Cazoleros (or, more properly, Cazalleros) were the people of Valladolid, so called because of their townsman, Cazalla, burned as a Lutheran in 1559; the Berengeneros were the Toledana, berengenas, or eggplants, being grown in large quantities in the neighbourhood; the inhabitants of Madrid were nicknamed the Ballenatos, i.e. the whalemen, from a story that they took a mule’s packsaddle, floating down the Manzanares in a flood, for a whale. Who the people of the clock town, or the Jaboneros⁠—the soap-men⁠—were, is uncertain. ↩

680. Proverb 219. ↩

681. Proverb 132. ↩

682. Don Quixote forgets that Sancho was not with him the first time he left home. ↩

683. Proverb 138. ↩

684. Proverb 83. ↩

685. Cervantes allows them but five days in all for this journey. The nearest and most accessible point of the Ebro would be at the junction of the river Jalon, a few leagues above Saragossa, and this, in a straight line from the inn near the cave of Montesinos, would be something over two hundred miles distant. The most direct and best road would be by Belmonte and Cuenca, and thence across the Albarracín mountains to Calamocha, Daroca, and Calatayud, which would be, at least, one-third more; a distance that, making due allowance for the difficulties of the country, Don Quixote and Sancho, at their rate of travelling, could not have accomplished in thrice the time Cervantes allows. Having myself made the journey on foot, I can speak with some confidence on the point. But Cervantes clearly had no personal knowledge of the region between La Mancha and Saragossa. He would never have allowed Don Quixote to traverse the Cuenca mountains, and the pine woods of the Albarracín, without an adventure, had he been aware of the natural advantages of the country. ↩

686. Proverb 12. ↩

687. In the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius (Antwerp, 1600), this phenomenon is said to be observable immediately after passing the Azores. ↩

688. Hartzenbusch makes a mischievous “emendation” here. He changes “two yards” into “ten yards,” because, he says, if the boat was five yards from the bank, it must have been still farther from the spot where the animals were tied. But Sancho’s meaning is clear: that the boat had not moved five yards out into the stream, or dropped with the stream two yards below the spot they had embarked at; and this he shows by the use of the two words apartado and decantado, as well as by speaking of watching a point on the bank. ↩

689. Floating mills, moored in midstream, are common on the Ebro. ↩

690. Proverbs 164 and 41. ↩

691. According to Pellicer, Don Quixote’s hosts were the Duke and Duchess of Villahermosa, and the scene of the following adventures a country seat of theirs near Pedrola, a village at the foot of the Moncayo, in the angle between Jalon and the Ebro. ↩

692. Proverb 129. ↩

693. The reading suggested by Prof. Calderón, in his excellent little book Cervantes Vindicado, etc., Madrid, 1854. ↩

694. Escudero andado, a play upon the words caballero andante. ↩

695. “The fig of Spain.” —⁠Henry V, III 6. “And fig me, like the bragging Spaniard.” —⁠Henry IV, V 3 ↩

696. There are frequent references to the despotism of the confessors in noblemen’s houses, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. According to tradition, Cervantes has here drawn the portrait of a confessor in the house of the Duke of Béjar, who all but persuaded the duke to refuse the dedication of the First Part of Don Quixote. ↩

697. I.e., in the belfry out of danger. Proverb 200. ↩

698. A port to the east of Málaga, where, in 1562, twenty-two galleys under the command of Juan de Mendoza were wrecked in a storm, with a loss of over four thousand men. ↩

699. “Make haste back from Tembleque, brother”⁠—Vuelva presto de Tembleque, hermano⁠—has grown into a popular phrase, applied in the case of a prolix storyteller. ↩

700. This remark of Sancho is, of course, an aside to the duke. ↩

701. The first and all editions that I have seen, Hartzenbusch’s included, have el ancho campo, “the broad field” of ambition; but though a translator and a foreigner has no right to propose emendations of the text, I venture to suggest that camino, “road,” is the more likely word. The case is even stronger here than in Part I Chapter XVIII, where precisely the same substitution has been accepted by all critics. Don Quixote is speaking of ways of life and lines of conduct; it would be absurd to talk of the field of flattery or hypocrisy, and a narrow path is naturally the opposite of a broad road, not of a broad field. ↩

702. Proverbs 25, 153, and 15. ↩

703. Biedermann calls this discourse “modèle d’art de déraisonner.” ↩

704. Proverbs 249 and 243. ↩

705. I.e., of the Sayago district; see this note. ↩

706. Proverb 112. ↩

707. A nautical metaphor; keeping the lead going. ↩

708. The name given in the ballads to the daughter of Count Julian, seduced by Roderick, according to tradition. ↩

709. To govern like a gerfalcon is a similitude repeatedly used by Don Quixote and Sancho. The precise drift is not very obvious. In the slang of the Germanía gerifalte means a robber. ↩

710. Proverb 51. ↩

711. Water scented with rose, orange flower, thyme, and other perfumes. ↩

712. These being probably unsatisfactory to drink out of. ↩

713. The magnificent chair in which, according to the poem and the ballads, he took his seat at the Cortes of Toledo. ↩

714. Proverb 234. A somewhat obscure popular phrase, rather than proverb, used to describe that which has nothing whatever to do with the subject in hand. Úbeda is a small town in the upper valley of the Guadalquivir (v. map), and some explain the phrase by saying that the country round it being very hilly, travellers are liable to lose their way there. Others say the explanation is that there are no hills there at all. Neither statement is correct; the country is not particularly hilly or flat, nor is there any reason why anyone should lose his way there. Jervas’s suggestion is more probable, that the words are the beginning of some old song or story, and are equivalent to saying that the remark made has as much to do with the question as the old song, “Over the hills,” etc. ↩

715. Proverb 118. ↩

716. Proverbs 172, 105, 72, 98, 166, 20, 63, 192, 189. ↩

717. Proverbs 75 and 161. ↩

718. From a modernised version, apparently, of the ballad, Despues que el Rey don Rodrigo⁠—Cancionero de Romances Antwerp, S.A. Duran, Romancero, No. 606. ↩

719. The passage is apparently corrupt. Don Juan Calderón defends the text in his Cervantes Vindicado; but it cannot be said that his vindication is satisfactory. ↩

720. Proverb 115. ↩

721. Proverb 183. ↩

722. Proverb 252. ↩

723. Proverb 156. ↩

724. Catonian sentences, i.e. in the style of Dionysius Cato. Michael Verino was the author of a book entitled De Puerorum Moribus Disticha, somewhat in the style of Cato’s Disticha, and, like it, a well-known schoolbook at the time. The Latin quoted by the duchess is from the epitaph on him by Politian. ↩

725. Proverb 36. ↩

726. A popular way of describing drinking without getting drunk. ↩

727. Proverb 39. ↩

728. Don Quixote told them nothing about the cave of Montesinos: all they knew of it was through Sancho. Hartzenbusch inserts the correction. ↩

729. Favila was the son and successor of Pelayo. Don Quixote is hardly correct in describing him as a Gothic king, for the Gothic kings, properly so called, ended with Roderick. ↩

730. Vereis como os vale un pan por ciento; literally, “you’ll see it will be worth a loaf per cent to you.” There has been a good deal of discussion about this phrase. Critics, assuming that, as it stands, it must be wrong, have suggested various new readings, such as tan por ciento, pamporcino, and the like; forgetting, apparently, that Cervantes uses it again in precisely the same form and way in Chapter LXXI. There can be no doubt it is some old popular, perhaps local, phrase, now obsolete, but in use in his day in the sense I have given. ↩

731. Proverb 148. Sancho adapts the proverb to his argument. ↩

732. Triunfo envidado; “brag” would be a closer translation, but the game seems to have been more like “all fours.” ↩

733. Proverb 76. ↩

734. Proverbs 164, 84, and 232. ↩

735. I.e. Hernán (or Fernán) Núñez, of the noble family of the Guzmáns, professor of Greek at Alcalá and afterwards at Salamanca, and one of the greatest scholars of the sixteenth century. He made a collection of proverbs which was published in 1555, after his death. He was Commander of the Order of Santiago, and hence commonly called the Greek Commander, El Comendador Griego, a title absurdly translated “Greek commentator” by Jervas, Viardot, Damas Hinard, and others. ↩

736. The cry of La Alla ila Alla⁠—“there is no God but God.” ↩

737. In the carts described wheels and axle are all in one piece. They are in use to this day in the Asturias, and their creaking may be heard on a still evening miles away. The country folk there maintain it has the effect Cervantes mentions. ↩

738. Proverb 152. ↩

739. Disciplinante de luz: one in the costume of the disciplinants who used to walk in procession in Holy Week. ↩

740. For abrenuncio. ↩

741. That which holds back the string of the crossbow. ↩

742. Proverbs 17, 68, 85, and 227. ↩

743. Proverb 108; i.e. a perfectly natural accompaniment. ↩

744. Proverb 225. ↩

745. Proverb 58. ↩

746. Proverb 52. ↩

747. Properly the thick knotted ends of the cords forming the lashes of the scourge used by penitents. ↩

748. Proverb 127. ↩

749. The last clause of this paragraph was expunged by order of the Inquisition in 1619, and have not been since restored in any edition I am acquainted with. ↩

750. Proverb 29. A proverb that evidently had its origin in the words of some philosophical culprit after having been whipped through the streets mounted on an ass, according to custom. Sancho quotes it again in Chapter LXXII. ↩

751. Proverb 57. ↩

752. A reference to Proverbs 200 and 53. ↩

753. A popular phrase expressive of extreme eagerness. ↩

754. This date is obviously the date at which Cervantes was writing. ↩

755. Orégano, properly wild marjoram. See Proverb 160. ↩

756. Proverb 50. ↩

757. Trifaldi = Tres faldas, or three skirts. ↩

758. Proverb 204. ↩

759. Proverb 231. ↩

760. Proverb 137. ↩

761. Proverbs 39 and 95. ↩

762. Martos, a town of Andalusia to the southwest of Jaén, apparently famous for its garbanzo crops. ↩

763. From zorra, a fox. ↩

764. Perhaps an allusion to the story in Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo’s Diálogos of the pious young man who said if he had moustaches to his soul he did not care for any others. ↩

765. A translation from the Italian of Serafino Aquilano (1500). The original is interesting as an Italian imitation of Spanish redondillas. ↩

766. I.e. The old ballad, so often quoted. ↩

767. The first of three stanzas in redondillas by the Comendador Escriva, an old poet, some of whose verses appear in the Canciotiero of Fernando de Castillo (1511). The lines seem to have been extremely popular. Lope wrote a gloss upon them, and Calderón introduced them into two of his plays. From the use to which Cervantes puts them in this passage he does not seem to have admired them as much as his contemporaries. To his temperament, very likely, this sighing after death savoured of affectation. Probably to his robuster philosophy life was to be lived so long as it was left to us, and death met manfully when it came. ↩

768. See this note. ↩

769. I.e. desert islands⁠—a phrase from the Flores of Torquemada. ↩

770. Tibar, a river of Arabia. Panchaia, a district of Arabia Felix.

     “Totaqae thuriferis Panchaia pinguis arenis.”

     —⁠Virgil, Georgics II, 139

     ↩

771. For the story of Pierres and Magalona, see Part I, Chapter XLIX. ↩

772. Clavo, a nail or spike; leño, a log. ↩

773. Proverb 180. ↩

774. Proverb 86. ↩

775. We were told before that the peg was in the forehead, a very inconvenient position for the rider. In the magic horse in the Arabian Nights it was in the neck. In the case of Chaucer’s “Stede of bras,” to guide him⁠—

     “Ye moten trill a pin stont in his ere.”

     ↩

776. Proverbs 222, 236. ↩

777. Proverb 206. ↩

778. Sancho in the original mistakes his master’s veridico for a diminutive of verde, green, and replies, “I’m not green but brown, but even if I was a mixture I’d keep my word.” ↩

779. Peralvillo, a small town near Ciudad Real, where the Holy Brotherhood used to execute their prisoners. ↩

780. Dr. Eugenio Torralva, tried in 1528 at Cuenca on various charges of dealing in magic. One was that he claimed to have made the journey from Madrid to Rome in one night riding on a stick. “Bourbon” is the Duke who was killed at the taking of Rome by the Imperialists in May 1527. ↩

781. Sancho in his trouble confuses Magalona with the great Portuguese navigator. ↩

782. I.e. the Pleiades. ↩

783. Literally, “saying nothing to nobody.” ↩

784. The cross prefixed to the alphabet in schoolbooks: no saber el Cristus, is to know nothing at all. ↩

785. I.e. Dionysius Cato, author of the Disticha. ↩

786. In allusion to the fable that the peacock’s pride in his tail is tempered when he contemplates his ugly feet. In Spanish the expanded tail of the peacock is called his wheel⁠—rueda. ↩

787. Proverb 213. ↩

788. Proverb 38. An allusion to the popular joke against the begging friars, who were said to make a pretence of refusing gifts; hinting, however, that they might be thrown into their hood. ↩

789. Suetonius: Julius Caesar, Chapter 45. ↩

790. Proverb 3. ↩

791. Proverb 54. ↩

792. That curious sixteenth-century manual of the manners of good society, the Gaiateo Español of Lucas Gracian Dantisco, very probably suggested this hint. ↩

793. Proverbs 41, 74, 200, and 71. ↩

794. Proverb 45. ↩

795. Proverb 234. ↩

796. Proverb 77. ↩

797. Proverb 146. ↩

798. Proverb 8. Seguro va a juicio⁠—“goes into court with an easy mind.” ↩

799. Proverb 124. ↩

800. Proverb 87. There is some uncertainty about this proverb; whether it is “his house is sweet to him,” or, “his house knows it,” or, “his hunting (caza) is successful.” In the text of the early editions it is in the first form. Hartzenbusch prefers the last. ↩

801. Proverb 205. ↩

802. Proverbs 139, 221, and 16. ↩

803. Proverb 214. Possibly a corruption of santo⁠—“holy;” another, and perhaps the older and more correct form, has “sage,” “prudent.” Garay gives it as in the text. ↩

804. Proverbs 142, 42, 34. ↩

805. Proverbs 140, 143, 43. ↩

806. Proverb 92. ↩

807. The original bringing a charge of misinterpretation against its translator, is a confusion of ideas that it would not be easy to match. With regard to Cid Hamete’s apology, see the Translator’s Preface. [This version of Don Quixote contains a different version of the Translator’s Preface that doesn’t include this reference. —⁠Ed.] ↩

808. There is, in fact, some difference of opinion as to the meaning of the phrase. The Academy Dictionary gives “instantly”⁠—“on the spot;” Covarrubias “suddenly.” ↩

809. “O Vida segura la mansa pobreza,
     Dadiva santa desagradecida.”

     —⁠Juan de Mena, El Laberinto, copla 227

     I suspect there is a touch of malice in the words “the great Cordovan poet.” To hear any other poet but Góngora so described would have made a Góngorist foam at the mouth. ↩

810. Cid Hamete has mixed up two passages⁠—1 Cor. 7:30, and 2 Cor. 6:10. ↩

811. The straits of the starving hidalgo were a favourite theme with the novelists and dramatists of the time. The difference of the treatment of the subject by the three great humourists, Mendoza in Lazarillo de Tormes, Cervantes here, and Quevedo in the Gran Tacaño, is very striking. ↩

812. Proverb 242. ↩

813. Shelton in a characteristic note apologises for this ballad and that in answer to it in Chapter XLVI by saying that “the verses are made to bee scurvy on purpose by the authour, so he observes neyther verse nor rime.” They are, of course, burlesque ballads, and the rhyme is the assonant which I have endeavoured to imitate. ↩

814. One of the pearls of the Spanish crown was called La Sola, being unmatched for size. ↩

815. Hartzenbusch thinks that this outburst is a caricature of a passage in some poem of the day, and that such imitations are not uncommon in Don Quixote. If so, we cannot wonder at it that Cervantes was not beloved by the high-flying poets of the period. ↩

816. Barato now means cheap, but in old Spanish it was also a substantive meaning a trick or a practical joke. According to Pellicer the “island” was Alcalá del Ebro, a village near Pedrola, on a peninsula formed by a bend of the Ebro. The critics have been much exercised by the identification of Barataria, which has always been with the Cervantistas a favourite hunting ground for political allusions. ↩

817. The title of Don, like that of Esquire in this country, was beginning to be assumed by persons who had no claim to it. Cervantes evidently had a strong opinion on the subject. ↩

818. In the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine there is a story resembling this of the two old men. ↩

819. Cervantes got this story from a very devout work, the Norte de los Estados of Francisco de Osuna, Burgos, 1550. ↩

820. In the original editions the case of the caps is placed first, but this shows that it should come last. ↩

821. In the original editions five or six lines are inserted here stating that the duchess despatched a page with Sancho’s letter to his wife; but they are repeated with some trifling changes in Chapter L, which is obviously their proper place, while they come in very awkwardly here. ↩

822. See this note. ↩

823. The reja or grating of a Spanish window usually bulges out somewhat at the lower part so as to form a sort of seat for the occupant of the chamber. The cats descending on the projecting part were thus enabled to make their way into the room. ↩

824. This sentence is very awkwardly constructed in the original; I have partly followed Hartzenbusch’s rearrangement of it. ↩

825. Peliagudo, furry, means also dangerous, in popular parlance. ↩

826. Olla podrida (properly rotten), a more savoury olla than the ordinary pot-au-feu, containing pigs’ feet, sausages, and a variety of other ingredients. ↩

827. Agüero means omen or augury; Tirteafuera (literally “take thyself off”) is a village of La Mancha situated just as the doctor describes. (V. map.) ↩

828. Proverb 157. ↩

829. Biscayans mustered strong in the royal service in the reigns of Charles V and Philip II. ↩

830. Proverb 75. ↩

831. Proverb 232. ↩

832. Perlesia, paralysis. ↩

833. This is Professor Juan Calderón’s explanation; but the passage is rather obscure. ↩

834. The distinction was necessary, as what is now the province of Santander was then called the Asturias of Santander. ↩

835. That is from the “Montaña,” the mountain region to the north of Castile and León which was the stronghold of the Spaniards in the earlier days of the great national struggle. Lope and Quevedo, who were also of the mountain stock, use much the same language. ↩

836. The Guadalajara gate was then very much what the Puerta del Sol is to modern Madrid. ↩

837. Proverb 161. ↩

838. Issues were, in fact, very much relied upon as preservatives of health in Spain, just as periodical bloodletting was in England somewhat later. ↩

839. Proverb 88. ↩

840. Proverb 51. ↩

841. Proverb 248. ↩

842. Proverb 35. A rather obscure proverb. Cantillana is a village to the northeast of Seville. One explanation is that it refers to the doings of one of Jofre Tenorio’s captains in suppressing the disturbances in the reign of Alfonso XI. ↩

843. Proverb 139. ↩

844. Cervantes forgets he had given Sancho his supper already. ↩

845. Played by men on horseback with reed javelins and light bucklers. ↩

846. Proverbs 148, 150, and 239. ↩

847. Issues are called fuentes, “fountains,” and the fountains of Aranjuez are as famous in Spain as those of Versailles in France. ↩

848. See this note. ↩

849. Argamasilla is almost the only village in La Mancha where such a sight could be seen; an arm of the Guadiana flows past it. ↩

850. A line from the old ballad, “A Calatrava la Vieja.” Docking the skirts was a punishment for misconduct in old times. ↩

851. Proverb 66. ↩

852. A graphic description of the dish as dressed in Spain, where the bacon and eggs are fried together. ↩

853. Proverb 31. ↩

854. Proverb 236. ↩

855. Proverb 184. ↩

856. Proverb 241. ↩

857. Proverb 224. ↩

858. This puzzle is very like one in Aulus Gellius, quoted also in Pedro Mexía’s Silva de Varia Leccion (L I, Chapter XVIII); a book of curiosities of literature on which Cervantes draws more than once. ↩

859. Proverb 168. ↩

860. Proverb 180. ↩

861. Proverb 207. ↩

862. A town in Aragón, between Teruel and Morella. ↩

863. So the passage stands in the original: and so no doubt Cervantes wrote it. ↩

864. Proverb 206. ↩

865. The favourite noontide mess of the Andalusian peasantry; consisting of cucumbers shred fine, breadcrumbs, oil, vinegar, and water fresh from the spring. ↩

866. Proverb 73. ↩

867. Proverb 118. ↩

868. Proverb 162. ↩

869. Proverb 187. ↩

870. A phrase for lying impudently. ↩

871. A line from the ballad of Mira Nero de Tarpeya, Duran No. 571. ↩

872. Proverb 208. ↩

873. The edict Ricote refers to was that published September 22, 1609, commanding the Moriscoes under pain of death to hold themselves in readiness to embark for Africa at three days’ notice. The date is significant. It was six months after the signature of the treaty that virtually recognised the independence of the United Provinces, and acknowledged the defeat of the Church in the struggle for domination in the Netherlands. The victory of the Netherlanders, in fact, recoiled upon the unhappy Moriscoes. The anti-Morisco movement had been hitherto confined to Valencia and the Valencian clergy; but now the priesthood throughout Spain, in their fury at the escape of the northern heretics, took it up and turned it into a popular agitation. Cervantes quotes here some of the stock arguments of the agitators, but in the novel of the Colloquy of the Dogs he gives them in fuller detail. The Church in this instance adopted the usual tactics of the demagogue, and appealed to the stupidity and the cupidity of the masses, frightening them with the bugbear of another Mohammedan invasion aided by these aliens, and pointing out that the Morisco by his industry, frugality, skill, and businesslike qualities was everywhere taking the bread out of the mouth of the Christian Spaniard. The real offence of the Moriscoes was, of course, that, in spite of all the Church could do, from baptism to burning, they still remained unsatisfactory Christians. As Cervantes with exquisite naivete says in the Colloquy, “It would be a miracle to find one of them that has a genuine belief in the holy Christian faith.” Very likely. It can hardly have gained fervour from the fires of the Inquisition with Moriscoes who remembered their own old faith that for seven centuries had respected Church and Synagogue, and left Jew and Christian to worship in peace. The king, a kindhearted man, bigot as he was, shrank from the wholesale cruelty of the Church proposals, but he was frightened into yielding. For Lerma resistance would have been an immediate fall from power. The opposition of the nobles was futile; the men who had made Spain a great nation were powerless now against the combined forces of stupidity and fanaticism that were undoing their work. The sufferings of the wretched Moriscoes, the massacres of those that resisted, the miseries of those that submitted, are a tale that has been told often enough; and as for the effects on Spain, to quote the words of Don Florencio Janer, who has written one of the ablest and most impartial books on the subject, “it may be said that from an Arabia Felix it was converted into an Arabia Deserta.” A sad story; and hardly less sad to find noble Cervantes lifting up his voice on the side of the silliest agitation, the stupidest policy, and the cruelest measure that ever history has had occasion to record. ↩

874. Proverb 22. ↩

875. This is historically true; in 1613 it was found necessary to order a second expulsion of returned Moriscoes. ↩

876. At first a certain amount of property was permitted to be carried away, but ultimately the deported Moriscoes were not allowed to carry anything with them. ↩

877. Sancho’s meaning is not very clear here. Sagittarius in the Germanía slang is one who is whipped through the streets. ↩

878. Proverb 24. ↩

879. Proverb 173. ↩

880. A Moorish princess, the remains of whose palace may still be seen, so the Toledans say, near the bridge of Alcántara at Toledo. ↩

881. Proverb 131. ↩

882. Proverb 89. ↩

883. Proverb 224. ↩

884. Proverb 5. ↩

885. Proverb 226. ↩

886. Proverb 195. ↩

887. Proverb 73. ↩

888. An allusion to a kind of game of leapfrog. ↩

889. See this note. ↩

890. Proverb 151. ↩

891. Proverb 73. ↩

892. Bireno, Duke of Zealand, who deserted Olimpia, daughter of the Count of Holland, very much as Theseus deserted Ariadne. Orlando Furioso, Cantos 9 and 10. There is a ballad on the subject, with a refrain which may have suggested that introduced here. ↩

893. Proverb 123. ↩

894. Proverb 34. ↩

895. The elaborate carved work that rises at the back of the altar in Spanish churches. ↩

896. Proverb 71. ↩

897. Proverb 90. ↩

898. According to Covarrubias, family superstitions were very common in Spain; Quevedo, always a valuable illustrator of Cervantes, in The Book of All Things refers to this of the Mendoza family. “If you upset the salt cellar,” he says, “and are a Mendoza, rise from table without dining, and the omen will be fulfilled; for as it is a misfortune not to dine, a misfortune will have befallen you.” ↩

899. Santiago y cierra España⁠—the old Spanish war-cry. ↩

900. Hartzenbusch thinks something has dropped out here; some sort of explanation of the words by Don Quixote. ↩

901. I.e., of the descendants of Hagar. ↩

902. A sort of kirtle worn by the peasant women. ↩

903. Hartzenbusch protests that Cervantes can never have written this; but his pen undoubtedly does sometimes indulge in a flourish of the kind. ↩

904. The river that joins the Tagus at Aranjuez. The bull that Gazul encountered in the ballad, Esiando toda la Corte, was “nacido en la ribera del celebrado Jarama.” ↩

905. Cabestros, employed to lead the bulls when driven in from the pastures. ↩

906. The phrase in Spanish is not “bullfight” but “bull-run”⁠—corrida de toros. ↩

907. Proverb 92. ↩

908. Condumio, meat dressed to be eaten with bread. ↩

909. Proverb 136. ↩

910. Proverb 145. ↩

911. Proverb 128. ↩

912. Avellaneda in Chapter II of his continuation makes Aldonza Lorenzo write to Don Quixote threatening him with a beating for calling her Princess and Dulcinea, and Don Quixote stung by her ingratitude resolves to look out for another mistress. ↩

913. In the first edition the passage runs, “con suavidad y sin hacerse fuerza alguna,” of which it is difficult to make sense. Hartzenbusch suggests “su vida” and “tuerto.” ↩

914. Proverb 164. ↩

915. Cervantes forgets that this blunder is of his own making. In Part I Chapter VII he calls Sancho’s wife “Juana Gutierrez,” and six lines afterwards “Mari Gutierrez,” and in Chapter LII “Juana Panza.” ↩

916. Proverbs 211 and 206. ↩

917. Hecho equis, i.e. with legs that show a tendency to form the letter X; a graphic description of a drunken man. ↩

918. In Chapter XI Avellaneda gives an account of Don Quixote’s tilting at the ring in the Coso at Saragossa, and so prolix and encumbered with details that his admirer M. Germond de Lavigne was forced to leave it out. ↩

919. Proverb 203. The words used by the page of Henry of Trastamara when he tripped up Pedro the Cruel as the two brothers were locked in the struggle that ended in the death of the latter. V. the ballad, Los Fieros Cuerpos Revueltos. ↩

920. The last lines of the fine ballad, A Cazar va Don Rodrigo, that tells how Mudarra avenged his brothers by slaying Rodrigo de Lara. (Cancionero, Antwerp, S.A. —⁠Duran, No. 691.) ↩

921. Printed “Osiris” in the first edition. The Busiris, who with Memphian chivalry and perfidious hate pursued the sojourners of Goshen. —⁠Paradise Lost, I 307 ↩

922. This Roque Guinart, properly Rochaquinarda, was a Catalan bandit who made some noise three or four years before this was written. He carried out the intention he expressed to Don Quixote, for he went to Naples in 1611 and seems to have died in peace there. He appears to have been a well-behaved freebooter, as Cervantes depicts him. ↩

923. Lladres, Catalan for thieves. ↩

924. Proverb 2. ↩

925. Reckoning by the dates of the letters written at the duke’s, St. John the Baptist’s day was past. Cervantes means the “Beheading of John the Baptist.” ↩

926. The Cadells and the Niarros were two Catalan clans, at feud at this time. ↩

927. Proverb 28. ↩

928. A dish composed of the breasts of fowls dressed with milk, sugar, and rice-flour. Don Antonio alludes to an incident in Avellaneda’s book. ↩

929. Proverb 236. ↩

930. Michael Escoto or Escotillo was a native of Parma, who had a great reputation in Flanders in the time of Alexander Farnese for his skill in judicial astrology, and was suspected of dealing in magic. Bowie absurdly confounds him with the more famous Michael Scot who flourished in the thirteenth century, though it is plain Cervantes is speaking of one who was his own contemporary. ↩

931. The dance referred to in Chapter XIX. ↩

932. Proverb 238. ↩

933. Perogrullo was a legendary personage who dealt in prophecies that were manifest truisms. Quevedo introduces him in the Visita de los Chistes. ↩

934. The translation of the Pastor Fido appeared in 1609. Cervantes had before this warmly praised Figueroa in the Viaje del Parnaso, notwithstanding which the year after his death Don Quixote and the Novelas were sneered at by Figueroa in his Pasagero, Madrid, 1617. There is no edition of Jáuregui’s Aminta known earlier than that of Seville 1618, so that this is a friendly advertisement. ↩

935. As Hartzenbusch points out, this leaves a margin altogether too narrow for the expenses. ↩

936. Luz del Alma, by Fr. Felipe Meneses, 1566. ↩

937. Avellaneda’s volume was called Segundo Tomo, not Second Part. It was hardly judicious in Cervantes to credit his enemy with a second edition, but he seems to lose his head whenever he thinks of Avellaneda and his insults; and from this on he apparently thinks of little else. From Chapter LIX to the end, indeed, there is a decided falling off. The story is at once hurried and spun out, and in the episodes of Claudia and Ana Félix he drops into the tawdry style of the novels in the First Part. It is only when he touches earth in Sancho Panza that he recovers anything like his old vigour. ↩

938. Proverb 193. Martinmas, i.e. killing day, that being the great day for pig-killing in Spain. ↩

939. An impudent attempt was made in Berlin in 1824 to insert two forged chapters here giving an account of Don Quixote’s adventures at a masked ball. The forgery was a very clumsy one, being full of Germanisms. ↩

940. Monjuich, the citadel of Barcelona. ↩

941. Rais = captain. ↩

942. Proverb 146. ↩

943. Proverb 76. ↩

944. There is an untranslatable pun here on the double meaning of deslocado⁠—out of joint, and cured of madness. ↩

945. Proverb 70. ↩

946. Proverb 226. ↩

947. Proverb 90. ↩

948. Proverb 97. ↩

949. Clemencín says this Don Bernardino de Velasco was famous for having one of the hardest hearts and ugliest faces in all Spain. He was specially charged with the expulsion of the Manchegan Moriscoes. ↩

950. Proverb 237. ↩

951. Proverb 217. ↩

952. Proverb 18. ↩

953. The story is in Alciati, but Cervantes no doubt got it from the great Spanish “Joe Miller,” the Floresta Española of Melchor de Santa Cruz. ↩

954. Proverb 37. ↩

955. The Spanish duendes are, however, more akin to brownies than fairies. ↩

956. I.e. by Garcilaso in Eclogue I. (nemus = bosque); but Herrera, Garcilaso’s editor, says Antonio de Fonseca was meant; and Saa de Miranda, the Garcilaso of Portugal, who was a contemporary, holds that Nemoroso was Garcilaso himself. ↩

957. The termination ona is augmentative. ↩

958. Proverb 171. ↩

959. Proverb 124. ↩

960. Proverb 46. ↩

961. Proverb 159. ↩

962. Proverb 212. ↩

963. Proverb 45. ↩

964. Proverb 215. ↩

965. Proverb 153. ↩

966. Proverb 229. ↩

967. Proverb 245. ↩

968. Proverb 123. ↩

969. The dried palm branch preserved from Easter Sunday that may be seen in almost every Spanish house. ↩

970. I.e. that of Orpheus. The second stanza is Garcilaso’s; it is the second of his third Eclogue. ↩

971. Proverb 244. In full it is, “and did not leave green or dry.” Spanish, bledos, French blette; used in the South as a substitute for spinach. ↩

972. Proverb 65. ↩

973. Proverb 183. ↩

974. The cow that is to be killed for the wedding feast; the one that suffers. ↩

975. Garcilaso, Eclogue I. ↩

976. Sancho’s version of Credat Judaeus. ↩

977. Proverb 122. ↩

978. Proverb 2. ↩

979. Proverb 233. In full it is “with dry breeches.” ↩

980. Proverb 164. ↩

981. Proverb 251. ↩

982. Proverb 19. ↩

983. Proverb 78. ↩

984. Proverbs 222, 85, 227, and 167. ↩

985. See this note. ↩

986. Avellaneda, Chapter IX. ↩

987. A madhouse founded in 1483 by Francisco Ortiz, Canon of Toledo, and apostolic nuncio. Avellaneda concludes by depositing Don Quixote in it. ↩

988. Proverb 29. ↩

989. Alluding to the opening lines of the old fifteenth-century satire of Mingo Revulgo.

     Mingo Revulgo! What! It’s you!
     What have you done with your doublet blue?
     Your Sunday suit? Is this the way
     You walk abroad on the holy day?

     See this note. ↩

990. Proverb 226. ↩

991. The beginning of a ballad in the Cancionero of Francisco de Ocaña. ↩

992. Proverb 7. ↩

993. Jacopo Sannazaro, the Neapolitan poet (1458⁠–⁠1530), author of the Arcadia. ↩

994. Dadme albricias buenos señores. Albricias, from the Arabic al bashara, the reward claimed by one who brings good news. ↩

995. In the first chapter of the First Part, the reader may remember, the name is given as Quixana. ↩

996. Hacer pucheros refers rather to the working of the face that precedes a fit of weeping. ↩

997. Proverb 154. ↩

998. This piece of commonplace cynicism, so uncalled for and so inconsistent with what has gone before, is, I imagine, regretted by most of Cervantes’ readers. The conclusion of Don Quixote, it must be confessed, is not worthy of the book or of its author. After the quiet pathos and dignity of Don Quixote’s death, the shrill note of the scolding once more administered to the wretched Avellaneda falls like a discord on the reader’s ear, and Samson Carrasco’s doggerel does not tend to allay the irritation. ↩

999. Clemencín objects to these verses that if they are meant seriously they are poor, and if intended as a joke they are stupid. Cervantes no doubt meant them as an imitation of the ordinary epitaph style of the village poet, but even so they could have been very well spared. ↩

1000. The two last lines occur in one of the ballads on the death of Alonso de Aguilar in the Guerras Civiles de Granada, Part I Chapter XVII. ↩

1001. The bibliography of chivalry romance shows that this was no vainglorious boast on the part of Cervantes. All through the sixteenth century romances of chivalry, new or reprints, continued to pour from the press in a steady stream, but no new romance was produced after the appearance of Don Quixote, and only one or two of the swarm of old ones reprinted. V. Appendix⁠—Spanish Romances of Chivalry. [Available as page scans but not transcribed in this ebook⁠—Ed.] ↩