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we are left in doubt, he invests Don Quixote's worship of her virtues and

charives still e of the roreat merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that

have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the

most cosmopolitan of books, is its sih to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do

not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it

for granted that an allusion will be generally understood which is only

intelligible to a few For example, on many of his readers in Spain, and

nificance of his choice of a

country for his hero is co too far to say

that no one can thoroughly co seen

La Mancha, but undoubtedly even a gli of Cervantes such as no coions of Spain it is the last that would suggest the idea of

romance Of all the dull central plateau of the Peninsula it is the

dullest tract There is sorim solitudes of

Estremadura; and if the plains of Leon and Old Castile are bald and

dreary, they are studded with old cities renowned in history and rich in

relics of the past But there is no redeean

landscape; it has all the sanity; the

fens and villages that break itsvenerable about them, they have not even the

picturesqueness of poverty; indeed, Don Quixote's own village,

Argamasilla, has a sort of oppressive respectability in the prinoble; the very

windliest and shabbiest of the windmill kind