DON QUIXOTE

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Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prim
regularity of its streets and houses; everything is ignoble; the very
windmills are the ugliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind.

To anyone who knew the country well, the mere style and title of "Don
Quixote of La Mancha" gave the key to the author's meaning at once. La
Mancha as the knight's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece
with the pasteboard helmet, the farm-labourer on ass-back for a squire,
knighthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victims of
oppression, and the rest of the incongruities between Don Quixote's world
and the world he lived in, between things as he saw them and things as
they were.

It is strange that this element of incongruity, underlying the whole
humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the
majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote." It has
been completely overlooked, for example, by the illustrators. To be sure,