Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra [reading well .txt] 📗

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. ↩

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

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. ↩

Monjuich, the citadel of Barcelona. ↩

Rais = captain. ↩

Proverb 146. ↩

Proverb 76. ↩

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

Proverb 70. ↩

Proverb 226. ↩

Proverb 90. ↩

Proverb 97. ↩

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. ↩

Proverb 237. ↩

Proverb 217. ↩

Proverb 18. ↩

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. ↩

Proverb 37. ↩

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

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. ↩

The termination ona is augmentative. ↩

Proverb 171. ↩

Proverb 124. ↩

Proverb 46. ↩

Proverb 159. ↩

Proverb 212. ↩

Proverb 45. ↩

Proverb 215. ↩

Proverb 153. ↩

Proverb 229. ↩

Proverb 245. ↩

Proverb 123. ↩

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

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

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. ↩

Proverb 65. ↩

Proverb 183. ↩

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

Garcilaso, Eclogue I. ↩

Sancho’s version of Credat Judaeus. ↩

Proverb 122. ↩

Proverb 2. ↩

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

Proverb 164. ↩

Proverb 251. ↩

Proverb 19. ↩

Proverb 78. ↩

Proverbs 222, 85, 227, and 167. ↩

See this note. ↩

Avellaneda, Chapter IX. ↩

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

Proverb 29. ↩

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. ↩

Proverb 226. ↩

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

Proverb 7. ↩

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

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

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

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

Proverb 154. ↩

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. ↩

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. ↩

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. ↩

The bibliography of chivalry romance shows that this was