Note 169 — Chapter XII

In the Prólogo to the First Part, he says, “No mira á mas que á deshacer la autoridad y cabida, que en el mundo y en el vulgo tienen los libros de Caballerías”; and he ends the Second Part, ten years afterwards, with these remarkable words: “No ha sido otro mi deseo, que poner en aborrecimiento de los hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de Caballerías, que por las de mi verdadero Don Quixote van ya tropezando, y han de caer del todo sin duda alguna. Vale.” It seems really hard that a great man’s word of honor should thus be called in question by the spirit of an over-refined criticism, two centuries after his death. D. Vicente Salvá has partly, but not wholly, avoided this difficulty in an ingenious and pleasant essay on the question, “Whether the Don Quixote has yet been judged according to its merits”;—in which he maintains, that Cervantes did not intend to satirize the substance and essence of books of chivalry, but only to purge away their absurdities and improbabilities; and that, after all, he has given us only another romance of the same class which has ruined the fortunes of all its predecessors by being itself immensely in advance of them all. Ochoa, Apuntes para una Biblioteca, Paris, 1842, 8vo, Tom. II. pp. 723-740.