to do. The ease with which he had knocked it to pieces disconcerted him somewhat, and to guard against that danger he set to work again, fixing bars of iron on the inside until he was satisfied with its strength; and then, not caring to try any more experiments with it, he passed it and adopted it as a helmet of the most perfect construction.
He next proceeded to inspect his hack, which, with more quartos than a real[1] and more blemishes than the steed of Gonela, that "tantum pellis et ossa fuit," surpassed in his eyes the Bucephalus of Alexander or the Babieca of the Cid. Four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was; for it was only reasonable that, his master taking a new character, he should take a new name, and that it should be a distinguished and full-sounding one, befitting the new order and calling he was about to follow. And so, after having composed, struck out, rejected, added to, unmade, and remade a multitude of names out of his memory and fancy, he decided upon calling him Rocinante, a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world.[2]
Having got a name for his horse so much to his taste, he was anxious to get one for himself, and he was eight days more pondering over this point, till at last he made up his mind to call himself Don Quixote,[3] whence, as has been
- ↑ An untranslatable pun on the word "quarto," which means a sand-crack in a horse's hoof, as well as the coin equal to one-eighth of the real. Gonela, or Gonnella, was a jester in the service of Borso, Duke of Ferrara (1450-1470). A book of the jests attributed to him was printed in 1568, the year before Cervantes went to Italy.
- ↑ "Rocin" is a horse employed in labor, as distinguished from one kept for pleasure, the chase, or personal use generally; the word therefore may fairly be translated "hack." " "Ante" is an old form of "Antes" = "before," whether in time or in order.
- ↑ Quixote—or, as it is now written, Quijote—means the piece of armor that protects the thigh (cuissan, cuish). Smollett's "Sir Lancelot Greaves" is a kind of parody on the name. Quixada and Quesada were both distinguished family names. The Governor of the Goletta, who was one of the passengers on board the unfortunate Sol galley, was a Quesada; and the faithful major-domo of Charles V. and guardian of Don John of Austria was a Qixada.
