Everyone, of course, has heard the tragic tale of Alonso Quixano, who was so unfortunately driven to madness and death by those ever-foolish "chivalric romances," which any man with half a mind despises as if they called his mother a whore. Many thanks are owed, of course, to Miguel Cervantes, to Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, and most of all to Sidi Hamid (Moor though he may have been), those noble biographers who preserved such a perfect specimen of the dangers of fantasy in their eternal...
