DON QUIXOTE

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at an auction, and a conventional language of gallantry and theory of
love came into being that in time permeated the literature of Southern
Europe, and bore fruit, in one direction in the transcendental worship of
Beatrice and Laura, and in another in the grotesque idolatry which found
exponents in writers like Feliciano de Silva. This is what Cervantes
deals with in Don Quixote's passion for Dulcinea, and in no instance has
he carried out the burlesque more happily. By keeping Dulcinea in the
background, and making her a vague shadowy being of whose very existence
we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues and
charms with an additional extravagance, and gives still more point to the
caricature of the sentiment and language of the romances.

One of the great merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that
have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the
most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course,
points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do
not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it