cavalleyro; foy hum livro de vidas de Santos, sahio hum, grande Santo. Se lera cavallerias, sahiria Ignacio hum Cavelleyro da ardente espada; leo vidas de Santos sahio hum Santo da ardente tocha.—Vieyra, Sermam de S. Ignacio, t. i. 368.
See, says Vieyra, the importance of reading good books. If it had been a book of knight errantry, Ignacio would have become a great knight errant; it was the Lives of the Saints, and Ignatius became a great saint. If he had read about knights, he might have proved a Knight of the Burning Sword: he read about saints, and proved a saint of the burning torch.
Nothing could seem more probable than that Cervantes had this part of Loyola's history in his mind when he described the rise of Don Quixote's madness, if Cervantes had not shown himself in one of his dramas to be thoroughly imbued with the pestilent superstition of his country. El dichoso Rufian is one of those monstrous compositions which nothing but the anti-christian fables of the Romish church could have produced.
Landor, however, supposes that Cervantes intended to satirize a favourite dogma of the Spaniards. The passage occurs in his thirteenth conversation.
"The most dexterous attack ever made against the worship among catholics, which opens so many
