Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/368

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CER—CES

been printed, either in the original or in translation, thus realizing the author s prediction that there would be no nation or language to which his book would not be carried. According to the interesting story told by the archbishop j of Toledo s secretary, in his approbation appended to the second part, dated February 1615, foreigners of distinc tion, when they visited Madrid, made it their first business to enquire after the author of Don Quixote. To a party of French gentlemen, members of the suite of the ambas sador, the Due de Mayenne, who were anxious to learn of the condition and mode of life of the celebrated writer, the secretary of the archbishop was obliged to respond that " he who had made all the world rich was poor and infirm, though a soldier and a gentleman." The man who was the delight of his age and destined to be the chief glory of his country was indeed still in great misery, depending on alms for his subsistence, and now in his sixty-ninth year stricken by a mortal disease. In the dedication of his second part of Don Quixote to the Count de Lemos, Cervantes speaks of his broken health and approaching end, still with unabated courage and cheerfulness. His last work, not published till after his death, was Pericles and fiigismunda, a romance of love and adventure after the model of Heliodorus, on which he bestowed great pains and singular affection, declaring that it would be either the best or the worst of his books. The dedication to the Count de Lemos is written with an astonishing gaiety and spirit, though it announces that the author had yesterday received extreme unction, and had " one foot in the stir rups," waiting for a summons. About this time must have occurred that adventure, which is so pleasantly told in the prologue, of the meeting with the student near Toledo, when our author, in a grievous state from dropsy, was re turning from a visit to his wife s family at Esquivias, at the close of which he wrote: "And so farewell, humours; farewell, my gay friends, for I feel myself dying, and have no desire but soon to see you happy in the other world." On the 4th of April he entered the order of the Franciscan Friars, whose habit, following the fashion of the period, he had assumed three years before, and on the 23d of that month he ended, in all serenity and cheerfulness, his life of many troubles. In the same year, and nominally on the same day, though really ten days later, allowance being made for the difference of calendars, died William Shakespeare in England. Cervantes s body was buried humbly at the expense of his religious order in the convent of the Trinitarian Nuns in the Calle de Humilladero, of which community his daughter Isabel was a professed member. In 1633 the nuns moved to a new site in the Calle de Cantarrenas, and having exhumed and brought away their dead with them, the bones of Cervantes were mingled with others in a common ossuary, so that Spain, who had shown herself so careless of him in life, has lost all trace of him in death. So closes a record as glorious and as calamitous as any in literary history, of one of the world s greatest benefactors, whom the world knew not of the best of all Spaniards, the very type and perfect embodiment of the highest Castilian nature, whom his

country starved and who has made her immortal.

The language of eulogy has been exhausted over that work of Miguel de Cervantes which for two hundred and fifty years has been the delight of mankind in a degree such as no other book has ever approached. There is nothing to add to the tribute which the critics of all countries have joined in paying to the wisest, tenderest, and deepest of humourists.


The popularity of Don Quixote is best attested by the extraordi nary number of editions and translations which have appeared in all languages. According to a computation made by Don Lope de Fabra, in his appendix to the Barcelona fac-simile of the first edition, there were published, up to 1874, 278 editions of Don Quixote, of which 87 appeared in Spain, and 191 in other countries. Of these, 136 are in the original. Translations have appeared in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and indeed in every European tongue, including Turkish. England, who of all foreign nations lias ever been foremost in recognizing the genius of Cer vantes, is entitled to the honour of having produced the first critical edition of the Spanish text, which is that of Dr John Bowie, pub lished at Salisbury in 1781. This has served as the basis of all the subsequent Spanish editions; for although the Royal Academy anticipated Bowie by a year in its magnificent edition printed by Ibarra, it was a knowledge of the Englishman s design, and to some extent of his labours, which prompted that undertaking. The other most important critical editions in Spanish are that of Pel- licer, published in 1797, who has borrowed largely, and not with due acknowledgment, from Bowie ; that of Clemencin, in 1833-39, with a very elaborate commentary, displaying much industry and learning but little taste or sympathy, and sadly lacking in reverence for the author ; and that in the complete edition of Cervantes s works printed at Argamasilla in 1864, under the editorship of Don Eugenio de Hartzenbusch and Don Cayetano Alberto de Resell, superb in type and paper, but otherwise of little value, with a text disfigured by wanton emendations. The principal English translations are the first, by Thomas Shelton, which is also the earliest version of Don Quixote in any foreign language, published in 1612-20, vigor ous, and of a spirit akin to the original, but rude and incorrect ; that of Motteux, absurdly over-praised by Lockhart, which is nothing more than a loose paraphrase of Cervantes s text, in a style con sciously comic and therefore of all the most unhappy for Don Quixote; that of Jarvis, which, with some trilling revisions, is the current accepted version correct and careful, but dull, commonplace, and destitute of humour ; and that of Smollett, which is the worst of all, being a piece of hack-work done for the booksellers, without knowledge of Spanish, or even such an insight into his author s meaning as his kindred genius should have suggested. By far the best life of Cervantes is that by Don Martin Fernandez de Navarrete, published in Madrid in 1819.

(h. e. w.)

CERVIA, an episcopal town of Italy, with a port on the Adriatic, in the district of Ravenna, and 12 miles S.E. of the city of that name. In the vicinity are the extensive salt-works of Valle di Cervia. Population about 5700.

CESARI, Giuseppe, called II Cavaliere d Arpino (being born in or about 1568 at Arpino, and created a " Cava liere di Cristo" by Pope Clement VIII.), also named II Giuseppino, an Italian painter, much encouraged at Rome and munificently rewarded. Cesari is stigmatized by Lanzi as not less the corrupterof taste in painting than Marino was in poetry ; indeed, another of the nicknames of Cesari is " II Marino de Pittori" (the pictorial Marino). There was spirit in Cesari s heads of men and horses, and his frescoes in the Capitol (story of Romulus and Remus, ifcc.), which occupied him at intervals during forty years, are well coloured.; but he drew the human form ill. His perspective is faulty, his extremities monotonous, and his chiaroscuro defective. He died in 1 640, at the age of seventy- two, or perhaps of eighty, at Rome. Cesari ranks as the head of the " Idealists" of his period, as opposed to the " Natural ists," of whom Michaelangelo da Caravagio was the leading champion, the so-called " idealism" consisting more in reckless facility, and disregard of the common facts and common-sense of nature, than in anything to which so lofty a name could be properly accorded. He was a man of touchy and irascible character, and rose from penury to the height of opulence.

CESAROTTI, Melchiore (1730-1808), an Italian

poet, born at Padua in 1730, of a noble but impoverished family. At the university of his native place his literary progress procured for him at a very early age the chair of rhetoric, and in 1768 the professorship of Greek and Hebrew. On the invasion of Italy by the French, he gave his pen to their cause, received a pension, and was made knight of the iron crown by Napoleon I., to whom, in consequence, he addressed a bombastic and extrava gantly flattering poem called Pronea. Cesarotti is best known as the translator of Homer and Ossian. Much praise cannot be given to his version of the Iliad, for he has not scrupled to add, omit, and modernize. Ossian,

which he held to be the finest of poems, he has, on the