--Can I but like the truly Catholic spirit? "Blame as thou mayest
the Papist's erring creed,"--which and other passages brought me back to
the old Anthology days and the admonitory lesson to "Dear George" on
"The Vesper Bell," a little poem which retains its first hold upon me
strangely.
The compliment to the translatress is daintily conceived. Nothing is
choicer in that sort of writing than to bring in some remote, impossible
parallel,--as between a great empress and the inobtrusive, quiet soul
who digged her noiseless way so perseveringly through that rugged
Paraguay mine. How she Dobrizhoffered it all out, it puzzles my slender
Latinity to conjecture. Why do you seem to sanction Landor's unfeeling
allegorizing away of honest Quixote? He may as well say Strap is meant
to symbolize the Scottish nation before the Union, and Random since that
Act of dubious issue; or that Partridge means the Mystical Man, and Lady
Bellaston typifies the Woman upon Many Waters. Gebir, indeed, may mean
the state of the hop markets last month, for anything I know to the
contrary. That all Spain overflowed with romancical books (as Madge
Newcastle calls them) was no reason that Cervantes should not smile at
the matter of them; nor even a reason that, in another mood, he might
not multiply them, deeply as he was tinctured with the essence of them.
Quixote is the father of gentle ridicule, and at the same time the very
depository and treasury of chivalry and highest notions.
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