Note 95 — Chapter X

Cervantes was evidently a person of great kindliness and generosity of disposition; but he never overcame a strong feeling of hatred against the Moors, inherited from his ancestors and exasperated by his own captivity. This feeling appears in both his plays, written at distant periods, on the subject of his life in Algiers; in the fifty-fourth chapter of the second part of Don Quixote; and elsewhere. But except this, and an occasional touch of satire against duennas,—in which Quevedo and Luis Vélez de Guevara are as sever as he is,—and a little bitterness about private chaplains that exercised a cunning influence in the houses of the great, I know nothing, in all his works, to impeach his universal good-nature. See Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Vol. V. p. 260, note, and p. 138, note.