With regard to Don Quixote, it need hardly be said that its object is satire upon the books of knight-errantry, which were so much used in the time of Cervantes, and especially by the Spanish. He conceived that these books were likely to give his countrymen false ideas of the world; to fill them all, but especially the young, with fanciful notions of life, and so make them unfit to meet its real difficulties and hardships. In order to exhibit the absurdity of such works (it must be remembered too, that the more famous books of knighthood had given rise to a host of spurious imitations, with all their faults and none of their beauties), the author of Don Quixote represents a worthy gentleman with his head turned by such reading, and then sallying forth and endeavouring to act in this plain matter-of-fact world (where there are windmills, and not giantsinns, and not castlesgood honest hosts and hostesses, and not lords and ladieschambermaids, and not peerless beautiesestates to be got by hard labour, and not islands to be given away to ones dependants as if by enchantment), endeavouring to act, we say, as if all that was said in Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of England, and Olivante de Laura, were really true.
En el volumen II se edita, con idéntico criterio didáctico, El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha, segunda parte de la novela cervantina. Si la primera parte, con sus narraciones intercaladas y sus multiples episodios, rinde culto a la poetica renacentista de la variedad, la continuacion de la novela resulta mas barroca y mas pesimista. Y, para hacer valer su probada maestria en el genero por el inventado, Cervantes ya se basta consigo mismo, prodigando referencias y alusiones a las dos primeras salidas de don Quijote en la primera parte y anudando ahora en la segunda cuanto habia anunciado o sugerido antes, hasta completar su magistral desnudamiento de almas en una asombrosa panoramica de la España de su tiempo.
