DON QUIXOTE

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The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array," before which,
according to the poet, "the world gave ground," and which Cervantes'
single laugh demolished, may be gathered from the words of one of his own
countrymen, Don Felix Pacheco, as reported by Captain George Carleton, in
his "Military Memoirs from 1672 to 1713." "Before the appearance in the
world of that labour of Cervantes," he said, "it was next to an
impossibility for a man to walk the streets with any delight or without
danger. There were seen so many cavaliers prancing and curvetting before
the windows of their mistresses, that a stranger would have imagined the
whole nation to have been nothing less than a race of knight-errants. But
after the world became a little acquainted with that notable history, the
man that was seen in that once celebrated drapery was pointed at as a Don
Quixote, and found himself the jest of high and low. And I verily believe
that to this, and this only, we owe that dampness and poverty of spirit
which has run through all our councils for a century past, so little
agreeable to those nobler actions of our famous ancestors."