Note 191 — Chapter XII

Los Rios, in his “Análisis,” prefixed to the edition of the Academy, 1780, undertakes to defend Cervantes on the authority of the ancients, as if the Don Quixote were a poem, written in imitation of the Odyssey. Pellicer, in the fourth section of his “Discurso Preliminar” to his edition of Don Quixote, 1797, follows much the same course; besides which, at the end of the fifth volume, he gives what he gravely calls a “Geographico-historical Description of the Travels of Don Quixote,” accompanied with a map; as if some of Cervantes’s geography were not impossible, and as if half his localities were to be found anywhere but in the imaginations of his readers. On the ground of such irregularities in his geography, and on other grounds equally absurd, Nicholas Perez, a Valencian, attacked Cervantes in the “Anti-Quixote,” the first volume of which was published in 1805, but was followed by none of the five that were intended to complete it; and received an answer, quite satisfactory, but more severe than was needful, in a pamphlet, published at Madrid in 1806, 12mo, by J. A. Pellicer, without his name, entitled “Exámen Crítico del Tomo Primero de el Anti-Quixote.” And finally, Don Antonio Eximeno, in his “Apología de Miguel de Cervantes,” (Madrid, 1806, 12mo), excuses or defends every thing in the Don Quixote, giving us a new chronological plan, (p. 60), with exact astronomical reckonings, (p. 129), and maintaining, among other wise positions, that Cervantes intentionally represented Don Quixote to have lived both in an earlier age and in his own time, in order that curious readers might be confounded, and, after all, only some imaginary period be assigned to his hero’s achievements (pp. 19, etc.). All this, I think, is eminently absurd; but it is the consequence of the blind admiration with which Cervantes was idolized in Spain during the latter part of the last century and the beginning of the present;—itself partly a result of the coldness with which he had been overlooked by the learned of his countrymen for nearly a century previous to that period. Don Quixote, Madrid, 1819, 8vo, Prólogo de la Academia, p. [3].