DON QUIXOTE

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nothing in it to puzzle over; the children turn its leaves, the young
people read it, the grown men understand it, the old folk praise it; in a
word, it is so thumbed, and read, and got by heart by people of all
sorts, that the instant they see any lean hack, they say, 'There goes
Rocinante.' And those that are most given to reading it are the pages,
for there is not a lord's ante-chamber where there is not a 'Don Quixote'
to be found; one takes it up if another lays it down; this one pounces
upon it, and that begs for it. In short, the said history is the most
delightful and least injurious entertainment that has been hitherto seen,
for there is not to be found in the whole of it even the semblance of an
immodest word, or a thought that is other than Catholic."

"To write in any other way," said Don Quixote, "would not be to write
truth, but falsehood, and historians who have recourse to falsehood ought
to be burned, like those who coin false money; and I know not what could
have led the author to have recourse to novels and irrelevant stories,
when he had so much to write about in mine; no doubt he must have gone by