no previous Next next



 image pending 169

For the Literary Magazine.

don quixote.

DR. WARTON, in his Essay on
Pope, observes, that the dialogue in
the Essay on Criticism, between the
poet and the mad knight, is not
taken from the Don Quixote of
Cervantes, but from one that is
commonly called a continuation of
it, and which was, in fact, written

 image pending 170

after the publication of the first part,
and before the second part appear-
ed. For this reason, and some
others, this performance, though in-
ferior to the work of Cervantes,
deserves more attention than is
usually given to it. It is said to
have been written by a person nam-
ed Alonso Fernandes d'Avellanada;
but this is supposed to be a fictitious
name. This book was translated
into French by Le Sage, a proof
that he thought it not destitute of
merit: there is likewise an En-
glish version, by one Baker; and
Cervantes himself alludes to it, se-
veral times, in the second part of
his own Don Quixote, particularly
in chapters LIX and LXXII. One
circumstance, indeed, renders this
book a literary curiosity: the great
probability that it caused Cervantes
to make his Don Quixote a different
character, in his second part, from
what he was in the first. In the
first part, it is true, he is not drawn
as an absolute maniac, when not
discoursing of knight errantry; but
all his conversation is tinged with
singularity, and the pertinent things
he says are incoherently arranged,
and out of place, as his long speech
to the goat-herds on the golden age;
but, in the second part, he is made
a man of sound judgment, and ele-
gant literature, when the subject of
his madness is not immediately
touched on. Now this seems to
have risen from a desire of Cervan-
tes to show he could, in every mode
of writing, excel his rival, who had
made the character of his Don
Quixote a vehicle to convey his own
learning to the public, a circum-
stance, of which the passage quoted
by Pope is a striking instance. Cer-
vantes would not, perhaps, have
ever written a second part, had he
not been provoked to it, by finding
the subject taken out of his hands,
by one so much inferior in the art
of writing; and he certainly killed
his hero at last, for the same reason
which moved Addison to slay his sir
Roger de Coverly, that he might
not be made a fool of, by getting in-
to other hands.


no previous Next next