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 Rh and their country, had only too much time for such pursuits under the rule of Charles V. and his successors. As Pedro Mexia, the chronicler of Charles V. puts it, there were many who had brought themselves to think in the very style of the books they read, books of which might often be said, and with far more truth, what Ascham said of the "Morte d'Arthur," that "the whole pleasure standeth in two speciall poyntes, in open manslaughter and bold bawdrye."

Ticknor, in his second volume, cited some of the most notable of these predecessors of Cervantes; but one not mentioned by him, or, so far as I am aware, by any other writer on the subject, may be quoted here as having been perhaps the immediate predecessor of, and using language curiously like that in, "Don Quixote." I mean Fray Juan de Tolosa, who says he wrote his fantastically entitled religious treatise, the "Aranjuez del Alma" (Saragossa, 1589), in order to "drive out of our Spain that dust-cloud of books of chivalries, as they call them (of knaveries, as I call them), that blind the eyes of all who, not reflecting upon the harm they are doing their souls, give themselves up to them, and waste the best part of the year in striving to learn whether Don Belianis of Greece took the enchanted castle, or whether Don Florisel de Niquea, after all his battles, celebrated the marriage he was bent upon." Good Fray Juan did not choose the right implement. Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust.

That this was the task Cervantes set himself, and that he had ample provocation to urge him to it, will be sufficiently clear to those who look into the evidence; as it will be also that it was not chivalry itself that he attacked and swept away. Of all the absurdities that, thanks to poetry, will be repeated to the end of time, there is no greater one than saying that "Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away." In the first place there was no chivalry for him to smile away. Spain's chivalry had been dead for more than a century. Its work was done when Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature, it could not live under the rule that Ferdinand substituted for the free institutions of mediaeval Spain. What he did smile away was not chivalry but a degrading mockery of it; it would be just as reasonable to say that England's chivalry was smiled away by the ridicule showered in "Punch" upon the men in block-tin who ride in the Lord Mayor's Show.

The true nature of the "right arm" and the "bright array,"