reflex, its life in the powers, its imagination in the symbolic forms,
its moral instincts in the final causes, and its reason in the laws of
material nature: but--estranged from all the motives to observation from
self-interest--the persons that surround him too few and too familiar to
enter into any connection with his thoughts, or to require any
adaptation of his conduct to their particular characters or relations to
himself--his judgment lies fallow, with nothing to excite, nothing to
employ it. Yet,--and here is the point, where genius even of the most
perfect kind, allotted but to few in the course of many ages, does not
preclude the necessity in part, and in part counterbalance the craving
by sanity of judgment, without which genius either cannot be, or cannot
at least manifest itself,--the dependency of our nature asks for some
confirmation from without, though it be only from the shadows of other
men's fictions.

Too uninformed, and with too narrow a sphere of power and opportunity to
rise into the scientific artist, or to be himself a patron of art, and
with too deep a principle and too much innocence to become a mere
projector, Don Quixote has recourse to romances:--


His curiosity and extravagant fondness herein arrived at that pitch,
that he sold many acres of arable land to purchase books of
knight-errantry, and carried home all he could lay hands on of that
kind! (C.I.)


The more remote these romances were from the language of common life,
the more akin on that very account were they to the shapeless dreams and
strivings of his own mind;--a mind, which possessed not the highest