The ingenuity of the story, the probability of its adventures, the unwearied fecundity of invention shown in devising and interlacing them, in giving variety to a single theme and to a plot so perfectly simple in its conception, are all wonderful. The narrative flows on as if unconsciously, and our fancies are floated along upon it. It is noticeable, too, in passing, what a hypæthral story it is, how much of it passes in the open air, how the sun shines, the birds sing, the brooks dance, and the leaves murmur in it. This is peculiarly touching when we recollect that it was written in prison. In the First Part Cervantes made the mistake (as he himself afterwards practically admits) of introducing unprofitable digressions, and in respect to the propriety and congruousness of the adventures which befall Don Quixote I must also make one exception. I mean the practical jokes played upon him at the Duke's castle, in which his delusion is forced upon him instead of adapting circumstances to itself or itself to circumstances, according to the necessity of the occasion. These tend to degrade him in the eyes of the reader, who resents rather than enjoys them, and feels the essential vulgarity of his tormentors through all their fine clothes. It is quite otherwise with the cheats put upon Sancho, for we feel that either he will be shrewd enough to be more than even with the framers of them, or that he is of too coarse a fibre to feel them keenly. But Don Quixote is a gentleman and a monomaniac,— qualities, the one of which renders such rudeness incongruous, and the other unfeeling. He is, more

over, a guest. It is curious that Shakespeare

makes the same mistake with Falstaff in the "Merry Wives of Windsor," and Fielding with Parson Adams, and in both cases to our discomfort. The late Mr. Edward Fitzgerald (quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus tam cari capitis !) preferred the Second Part to the First, and, but for these scenes, which always pain and anger me, I should agree with him. For it is plain that Cervantes became slowly conscious as he went on how rich was the vein he had hit upon, how full of various and profound suggestion were the two characters he had conceived and who together make a complete man. No doubt he at first proposed to himself a parody of the Romances of Chivalry, but his genius soon. broke away from the leading-strings of a plot that denied free scope to his deeper conception of life and men.

Cervantes is the father of the modern novel, in so far as it has become a study and delineation of character instead of being a narrative seeking to interest by situation and incident. He has also more or less directly given impulse and direction to all humoristic literature since his time. We see traces of him in Molière, in Swift, and still more clearly in Sterne and Richter. Fielding assimilated and Smollett copied him. Scott was his disciple in the "Antiquary," that most delightful of his delightful novels. Irving imitated him in his "Knickerbocker," and Dickens in his "Pickwick Papers." I do not mention this as detracting from their originality, but only as showing the wonderful

virility of his. The pedigrees of books are as interesting and instructive as those of men. It is also good for us to remember that this man whose life was outwardly a failure restored to Spain the universal empire she had lost.

ADDRESS

HARVARD ANNIVERSARY

DELIVERED IN SANDERS THEATRE, CAMBRIDGE, NOVEMBER 8, 1886, ON THE TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDATION OF

HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

It seems an odd anomaly that, while respect for age and deference to its opinions have diminished and are still sensibly diminishing among us, the relish of antiquity should be more pungent and the value set upon things merely because they are old should be greater in America than anywhere else. It is merely a sentimental relish, for ours is a new country in more senses than one, and, like children when they are fancying themselves this or that, we have to play very hard in order to believe that we are old. But we like the game none the worse, and multiply our anniversaries with honest zeal, as if we increased our centuries by the number of events we could congratulate on having happened a hundred years ago. There is something of instinct in this, and it is a wholesome instinct if it serve to quicken our consciousness of the forces that are gathered by duration and continuity; if it teach us that, ride fast and far as we may, we carry the Past on our crupper, as immovably seated there as the black Care of the Roman poet. The

generations of men are braided inextricably together, and the very trick of our gait may be countless generations older than we.

I have sometimes wondered whether, as the faith of men in a future existence grew less confident, they might not be seeking some equivalent in the feeling of a retrospective duration, if not their own, at least that of their race. Yet even this continuance is trifling and ephemeral. If the tablets unearthed and deciphered by Geology have forced us to push back incalculably the birthday of man, they have in like proportion impoverished his recorded annals, making even the Platonic year but as a single grain of the sand in Time's hour-glass, and the inscriptions of Egypt and Assyria modern as yesterday's newspaper. Fancy flutters over these vague wastes like a butterfly blown out to sea, and finds no foothold. It is true that, if we may put as much faith in heredity as seems reasonable to many of us, we are all in some transcendental sense the coevals of primitive man, and Pythagoras may well have been present in Euphorbus at the siege of Troy. Had Shakespeare's thought taken this turn when he said to Time

"Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight"?

But this imputed and vicarious longevity, though it may be obscurely operative in our lives and fortunes, is no valid offset for the shortness of our days, nor widens by a hair's breadth the horizon of our memories. Man and his monuments are of