order of genius which lives in an atmosphere of power over mankind, but
that minor kind which, in its restlessness, seeks for a vivid
representative of its own wishes, and substitutes the movements of that
objective puppet for an exercise of actual power in and by itself. The
more wild and improbable these romances were, the more were they akin to
his will, which had been in the habit of acting as an unlimited monarch
over the creations of his fancy! Hence observe how the startling of the
remaining common sense, like a glimmering before its death, in the
notice of the impossible-improbable of Don Belianis, is dismissed by Don
Quixote as impertinent:--


'He had some doubt' [2] as to the dreadful wounds which Don Belianis
gave and received: for he imagined, that notwithstanding the most
expert surgeons had cured him, his face and whole body must still be
full of seams and scars. 'Nevertheless' [3] he commended in his author
the concluding his book with a promise of that unfinishable adventure!
C. 1.


Hence also his first intention to turn author; but who, with such a
restless struggle within him, could content himself with writing in a
remote village among apathists and ignorants? During his colloquies with
the village priest and the barber surgeon, in which the fervour of
critical controversy feeds the passion and gives reality to its
object--what more natural than that the mental striving should become an
eddy?--madness may perhaps be denned as the circling in a stream which
should be progressive and adaptive: Don Quixote grows at length to be a
man out of his wits; his understanding is deranged; and hence without
the least deviation from the truth of nature, without losing the least