Page:Don Quixote (Cervantes, Ormsby) Volume 1.djvu/92

COMMENDATORY VERSES.^[1]

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URGANDA THE UNKNOWN^[2]

TO THE BOOK OF DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA.

If to be welcomed by the good,

O Book! thou make thy steady aim,
No empty chatterer will dare
To question or dispute thy claim.
But if perchance thou hast a mind
To win of idiots approbation.
Lost labor will be thy reward,
Though they'll pretend appreciation.

They say a goodly shade he finds
Who shelters 'neath a goodly tree;^[3]
And such a one thy kindly star
In Béjar hath provided thee:
A royal tree whose spreading boughs
A show of princely fruit display;
A tree that bears a noble Duke,
The Alexander of his day.^[4]

1. All translators, I think, except Shelton and Mr. Duffield, have entirely omitted these preliminary pieces of verse, which, however, should be preserved—not for their poetical merits, which are of the slenderest sort, but because, being burlesques on the pompous, extravagant, laudatory verses usually prefixed to books in the time of Cervantes, they are in harmony with the aim and purpose of the work, and also a fulfilment of the promise held out in the Preface.
2. Or more strictly "the unrecognized;" a personage in Amadis of Gaul somewhat akin to Morgan la Fay and Vivien in the Arthur legend, though the part she plays is more like that of Merlin. She derived her title from the faculty which, like Merlin, she possessed of changing her form and appearance at will. The verses are assigned to her probably because she was the adviser of Amadis. They form a kind of appendix to the author's Preface.
3. Prov. 15.
4. The Duke of Béjar, to whom the book was dedicated. The Zuñiga family, of which the Duke was the head, claimed descent from the royal line of Navarre.