DON QUIXOTE.

MIGUEL DE CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, a celebrated Spanish author, whose immortal Don Quixote has, for nearly three hundred years, been the delight of the reading world, was born at Alcalá de Henares, October 9, 1547, and died (on the same day as Shakespeare), April 23, 1616.

He was educated at the universities of Salamanca and Madrid; enlisted about 1570 in the papal army; was wounded at the famous naval battle of Lepanto in 1571; was captured by the Algerines about 1575 and detained in slavery, enduring great sufferings; was ransomed in 1580, and, after returning to Spain, he served several campaigns in the Spanish army.

The first work which he is known to have published was Galatea, a pastoral romance which appeared in 1584, the same year in which he married Catalina de Palacios Salazar y Vozmediano.

He subsequently wrote numerous dramas (among them Numanca, a tragedy), but, although some of them were successfully performed, they failed to relieve him from the severe poverty from which he is said to have suffered.

From about 1588 to 1600 he resided at Seville, and in Madrid from 1605 until his death. In 1605 he pub

ished the first part of his famous satirical work called Don Quixote de la Mancha, which was designed to rebuke and correct the tendency of his countrymen to delight in the extravagant romances of chivalry. It

immediately obtained immense popularity, but was not

followed by the second part until ten years later, in

recovery, and sent forth the bachelor Sampson Car. rasco to vanquish him with his own weapons, wherein he fails in his first encounter, as the Knight of the Mir rors, but ultimately succeeding as the Knight of the White Moon, vanquishes Don Quixote and exacts his knightly promise to return home.

As Sancho Panza's Government of the Island could not properly be omitted from "A Library of Wit and Humor," we have, in order to show how the "thing was brought about," and the fulfilment of the Don's repeated promise to that effect, related enough of their visit to the Duke's palace to explain the con firmation of this extravagance by the Duke and the Duchess. On the whole, we think that those who have already read Don Quixote will be amused at the short space in which we have preserved the tone of the story, and we believe that those who read our version for the first time, will be led to read the whole story.]

OF THE QUALITY AND MANNER OF LIFE OF OUR RENOWNED HERO.

Down in a village of La Mancha,* the name of which I have no desire to recollect, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old buckler, a lean horse, and a coursing greyhound. Soup, composed of somewhat more mutton than beef, the fragments served up cold on most nights, lentils on Fridays, collops and eggs on Saturdays, and a pigeon by way of addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his income; the remainder of it supplied him with a cloak of fine cloth, velvet breeches, with slippers of the same for holidays, and a suit of the best homespun, in which he adorned himof a housekeeper above forty, a niece not self on week days. His family consisted quite twenty, and a lad who served him both in the field and at home, who could saddle the horse or handle the pruning

Partly in the kingdom of Arragon, and partly in Castile. 1