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To anyone who knew the country well, the ave the key to the author's ht's country and scene of his chivalries is of a piece

with the pasteboard helhthood conferred by a rascally ventero, convicts taken for victiruities between Don Quixote's world

and the world he lived in, between things as he saw thes as

they were

It is strange that this ele the whole

humour and purpose of the book, should have been so little heeded by the

majority of those who have undertaken to interpret "Don Quixote" It has

been completely overlooked, for exareat majority of the artists who illustrated "Don Quixote" knew

nothing whatever of Spain To them a venta conveyed no idea but the

abstract one of a roadside inn, and they could not therefore do full

justice to the hu it for a

castle, or perceive the remoteness of all its realities from his ideal

But even when better informed they seem to have no apprehension of the

full force of the discrepancy Take, for instance, Gustave Dore's drawing

of Don Quixote watching his armour in the inn-yard Whether or not the

Venta de Quesada on the Seville road is, as tradition maintains, the inn

described in "Don Quixote," beyond all question it was just such an

inn-yard as the one behind it that Cervantes had in his h as that beside the primitive

draell in the corner that he meant Don Quixote to deposit his armour

Gustave Dore makes it an elaborate fountain such as no arriero ever

watered his mules at in the corral of any venta in Spain, and thereby

entirely misses the point aimed at by Cervantes It is the s and circuil and the ceremony that