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But from his service I retreat—, |
ON ROCINANTE.
I am that Rocinante fa—,
Great-grandson of great Babie—,[2]
Who, all for being lean and bon—,
Had one Don Quixote for an own—;
But if I matched him well in weak—,
I never took short commons meek—,
But kept myself in corn by steal—,
A trick I learned from Lazaril—,
When with a piece of straw so neat—
The blind man of his wine he cheat—.[3]
pains to extract a meaning from these lines. The truth is they have none, and were not meant to have any. If it were not profanity to apply the word to anything coming from Cervantes, they might be called mere pieces of buffoonery, mere idle freaks of the author's pen. The verse in which they are written is worthy of the matter. It is of the sort called in Spanish de piés cortados, its peculiarity being that each line ends with a word the last syllable of which has been lopped off. The invention has been attributed to Cervantes, but the honor is one which no admirer of his will be solicitous to claim for him, and in fact there are half a dozen specimens in the Picara Justina, a book published if anything earlier than Don Quixote. I have here imitated the tour de force as well as I could, an experiment never before attempted and certainly not worth repeating. The "Urganda" verses are written in the same fashion, but I did not feel bound to try the reader's patience—or my own—by a more extended reproduction of the puerility.
- ↑ Celestina, or Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibæa (1499), the first act of which is generally attributed to Rodrigo Cota, the remaining nineteen being by Fernando Rojas. There is no mention in it of "Villadiego the Silent;" the name only appears in the proverbial saying about "taking the breeches of Villadiego," i.e. beating a hasty retreat.
- ↑ Babieca, the famous charger of the Cid.
- ↑ An allusion to the charming little novel of Lazarillo de Tormes, and the trick by which the hero secured a share of his master's wine.
