Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/32

 xxii had introduced the taste for prose pastorals, which soon bore fruit in Montemayor's "Diana" and its successors; and as for the sonnet, it was spreading like the rabbit in Australia. As a set-off against this, the old historical and traditional ballads, and the true pastorals, the songs and ballads of peasant life, were being collected assiduously and printed in the cancioneros that succeeded one another with increasing rapidity. But the most notable consequence, perhaps, of the spread of printing was the flood of romances of chivalry that had continued to pour from the press ever since Garci Ordoñez de Montalvo had resuscitated "Amadis of Gaul" at the beginning of the century.

For a youth fond of reading, solid or light, there could have been no better spot in Spain than Alcalá de Henares in the middle of the sixteenth century. It was then a busy, populous university town, something more than the enterprising rival of Salamanca, and altogether a very different place from the melancholy, silent, deserted Alcalá the traveller sees now as he goes from Madrid to Saragossa. Theology and medicine may have been the strong points of the university, but the town itself seems to have inclined rather to the humanities and light literature, and as a producer of books Alcalá was already beginning to compete with the older presses of Toledo, Burgos, Salamanca, and Seville.

A pendant to the picture Cervantes has given us of his first playgoings might, no doubt, have been often seen in the street of Alcalá at that time; a bright, eager, tawny-haired boy peering into a bookshop where the latest volumes lay open to tempt the public, wondering, it may be, what that little book with the woodcut of the blind beggar and his boy, that called itself "Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, segunda impresion," could be about; or with eyes brimming over with merriment gazing at one of those preposterous portraits of a knight-errant in outrageous panoply and plumes with which the publishers of chivalry romances loved to embellish the titlepages of their folios. He had seen the Emperor's German ritters many a time, but they were slim pages in satin compared with this. What fun it would be to see such a figure come charging into the plaza! How he'd frighten the old women and scatter the turkeys! If the boy was the father of the man, the sense of the incongruous that was strong at fifty was lively at ten, and some such reflections as these may have been the true genesis of "Don Quixote."