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AN ESSAY IN REVIEWING.

We are obliged to “Beginner” for the proffered contribution to our collection of Book Reviews.  That is, however, a department of the paper our noble friend the BARON DE BOOK-WORMS reserves for his own pen.  But as Mr. Punch has never been known to discourage beginners, he finds room here for the interesting contribution, which perhaps should more appropriately have been addressed to his confrere at the office of the Athenaeum:—­

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Don Quixote.  By MIGUEL CERVANTES.  We have conscientiously plodded through this voluminous work, which is certainly not entirely without merit.  It purports to recount the daily doings of a resident in a village of La Mancha (Spain) who, accompanied by a clownish retainer, went forth in search of adventures.  He was not very happy, his day’s sport being invariably rounded oft by a sound drubbing, received either by himself, his Squire, or both.  We wish Lord MACAULAY had lived to see the publication of this work, and had with fuller leisure relieved us of the task of reviewing it.  Remembering his method of procedure as illustrated in his article on Dr. NARE’s Memoirs of Lord Burleigh, he would doubtless by careful enumeration have been able to show that from first to last Don Quixote had more ribs broken than any man has actually possessed since ADAM was privy to a diminution of their original number.  He seems also to have had a perpetual renewal of teeth, keeping pace with their frequent removal by brute force.  As for the number of legs and arms he had fractured, MACAULAY’s Schoolboy would have shrunk from the task of computing their aggregate.

These are blemishes upon a work that is, at least, well intentioned, and which might have been more successful had our author been inclined to give his hero credit for more acumen.  When he represents Don Quixote as running tilt at windmills under the impression that they are armed knights, and when he pictures him charging a flock of sheep in the belief that it is an ordered army, we think he too grossly trifles with the assumed credulity of his readers.  Exaggeration is, indeed, the bane of a work that, from first page to last, bears evidence of the drawback of extreme youth on the part of the author.  We have been pleased to notice some indications of humour in the conversation of Sancho Panza.  But it is the pennyworth of sack to an intolerably large quantity of bread.  What we have written has been without desire to discourage Mr. CERVANTES, whom we shall be glad to meet with again, bringing with him the fruits of unremitted practice and of maturer views of life.

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TO ARAMINTA.

(AFTER HEARING MR. SAMSON’S LECTURE.)

["To keep the family true, refined, affectionate, faithful, is the woman’s task—­a task that needs the entire energies and life of woman; and to mix up this sacred duty with the grosser occupation of politics and trade, is to unfit her for it as much as if a priest were to embark in the business of money-lender.”—­FREDERIC HARRISON.]

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