The persons of culture,
indeed, received the book coldly. The half-learned sneered at the title
as absurd and at the style as vulgar. Who was this _ingenio lego_--this
lay, unlearned wit--"a poor Latin-less author," which is what they said
of Shakespeare--outside of the _cultos_ proper, of no university
education--who had dared to parody the tastes of the higher circles?
The envy and malice of all his rivals--especially of those who found
themselves included in the satire--even the great Lope himself, the
phoenix of his age, then at the height of his glory--spoke out, with
open mouth, against the author. The chorus of dispraise was swelled by
all those, persons chiefly of high station, whose fashion of reading
had been ridiculed. A book, professing to be of entertainment, in which
knights and knightly exercises were made a jest of--in which peasants,
innkeepers, muleteers, and other vulgar people spoke their own language
and behaved after their own fashion--was a daring innovation, all the
more offensive because the laugh was directed at what was felt to be a
national infirmity. Who was the bold man who, being neither courtier
nor ecclesiastic, made sport for the world out of the weaknesses of
_caballeros_? An old soldier of Lepanto, indeed! Lepanto was a name
outworn. Spain was now in a new world.
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