of modern analysis, and are revealing
hideous and melancholy meanings in the process. I have always believed
that Hudibras owes its chilly treatment at the hands of critics—with
the single and most genial exception of Sainte-Beuve—to the absolute
impossibility of twisting it into something serious. Strive as we may,
we cannot put a new construction on those vigorous old jokes, and to
be simply and barefacedly amusing is no longer considered a sufficient

    raison d'etre

   . It is the most significant token of our ever-
increasing "sense of moral responsibility in literature" that we
should be always trying to graft our own conscientious purposes upon
those authors who, happily for themselves, lived and died before
virtue, colliding desperately with cakes and ale, had imposed such
depressing obligations.

   "'Don Quixote,'" says Mr. Shorthouse with unctuous gravity, "will
come in time to be recognized as one of the saddest books ever
written"; and, if the critics keep on expounding it much longer, I
truly fear it will. It may be urged that Cervantes himself was low
enough to think it exceedingly funny; but then one advantage of our
new and keener insight into literature is to prove to us how
indifferently great authors understood their own masterpieces.
Shakespeare, we are told, knew comparatively little about "Hamlet,"
and he is to be congratulated on his limitations. Defoe would hardly
recognize "Robinson Crusoe" as "a picture of civilization," having
innocently supposed it to be quite the reverse; and he would be as
amazed as we are to learn from Mr. Frederic Harrison that his book
contains "more psychology, more political economy, and more
anthropology than are to be found in many elaborate treatises on
these especial subjects"—blighting words which I would not even
venture to quote if I thought that any boy would chance to read them
and so have one of the pleasures of his young life destroyed. As for
"Don Quixote," which its author persisted in regarding with such
misplaced levity, it has passed through many bewildering
vicissitudes. It has figured bravely as a satire on the Duke of
Lerma, on Charles V., on Philip II., on Ignatius Loyola-Cervantes was
the most devout of Catholics—and on the Inquisition, which,

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