Crusades against the unbeliever,
even those more popular ones which combined the saving of souls with
the getting of gold, were long out of fashion. Lastly, the entire
ecclesiastical body--the formidable phalanx of the endowed, with their
patrons dependents, and dupes--though they were too dull to perceive
and too dense to feel the shafts aimed at obscurantism and superstition,
had something more than a suspicion that this book called _Don Quixote_
was a book to be discouraged.
In spite of the frowns and sneers of the quality, however, and the
ill-concealed disgust of the learned, _Don Quixote_ was received with
unbounded applause by the common people.[11] Those best critics in
every age and country, the honest readers, who were neither _bourgeois_
nor genteel, neither learned nor ignorant, welcomed the book with a
joyous enthusiasm, as a wholly new delight and source of entertainment.
Nothing like it had ever appeared before. It was an epoch-marking book,
if ever there was one.
[11] _Con general aplauso de las gentes_--he says in the Second
Part of _Don Quixote_, speaking through the mouth of the Duchess.
The legend, revived in the present age, that _Don Quixote_ hung
fire on the first publication, and that the author wrote
anonymously a tract called _El Buscapie_ (The Search-foot), in
order to explain his story and its object, rests only upon the
evidence of one Ruidiaz, and is contradicted by all the facts of
the case.
Pages:
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567