DON QUIXOTE

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grow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady
stream of invective, from men whose character and position lend weight to
their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of
their readers. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.

That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample
provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who
look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry
itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that,
thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no
greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In
the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's
chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when
Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature,
it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free
institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalry
but a degrading mockery of it.