other wipes off each tear as it drops!

Don Quixote was neither fettered to the earth by want, nor holden in its
embraces by wealth;--of which, with the temperance natural to his
country, as a Spaniard, he had both far too little, and somewhat too
much, to be under any necessity of thinking about it. His age too,
fifty, may be well supposed to prevent his mind from being tempted out
of itself by any of the lower passions;--while his habits, as a very
early riser and a keen sportsman, were such as kept his spare body in
serviceable subjection to his will, and yet by the play of hope that
accompanies pursuit, not only permitted, but assisted, his fancy in
shaping what it would. Nor must we omit his meagerness and entire
featureliness, face and frame, which Cervantes gives us at once: "It is
said that his surname was 'Quixada' or 'Quesada,'" &c.--even in this
trifle showing an exquisite judgment;--just once insinuating the
association of 'lantern-jaws' into the reader's mind, yet not retaining
it obtrusively like the names in old farces and in the Pilgrim's
Progress,--but taking for the regular appellative one which had the no
meaning of a proper name in real life, and which yet was capable of
recalling a number of very different, but all pertinent, recollections,
as old armour, the precious metals hidden in the ore, &c. Don Quixote's
leanness and featureliness are happy exponents of the excess of the
formative or imaginative in him, contrasted with Sancho's plump
rotundity, and recipiency of external impression.

He has no knowledge of the sciences or scientific arts which give to the
meanest portions of matter an intellectual interest, and which enable
the mind to decypher in the world of the senses the invisible
agency--that alone, of which the world's phenomena are the effects and
manifestations,--and thus, as in a mirror, to contemplate its own