this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which some unmeaning
expression, striking on the first link of a chain of
associations, may have called up in their own minds--that they
have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they
admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every
school-boy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his
romance, and knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the
broad cheeks of the Squire, as well as the faces of his own
playfellows. The most experienced and fastidious judges are
amazed at the perfection of that art which extracts
inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human calamities
without once violating the reverence due to it; at that
discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character
exquisitely ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace,
or its dignity. In Don Quixote are several dissertations on the
principles of poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in the
whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour and attention; and no
passages in any work with which we are acquainted are more
worthless and puerile. In our time they would scarcely obtain
admittance into the literary department of the Morning Post.
Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the
veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to
himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the
presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of
his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same
line with the bombastic Statius. His admiration of Virgil is
absolute idolatry. If, indeed, it had been excited by the
elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman poet, it