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The extraordinary influence of the roh to account for the genesis of the book Soious development of this branch of literature in the sixteenth

century may be obtained from the scrutiny of Chapter VII, if the reader

bears into by far the

largest group are enumerated As to its effect upon the nation, there is

abundant evidence Frorow popular down to the very end of the century, there is a steady

stream of invective, froht to

their words, against the romances of chivalry and the infatuation of

their readers Ridicule was the only besom to sweep away that dust

That this was the task Cervantes set hie 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 ti 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 as done when

Granada fell, and as chivalry was essentially republican in its nature,