missed. It is enough in itself that the deranged brain which takes
windmills for giants, and carriers for knights, and Rosinante for a
Bucephalus, has fixed upon Sancho Panza--the crowning proof of its
mania--as the fitting squire of a knight-errant. To him--to this
compound of somnolence, shrewdness, and good nature--to this creature
with no more tincture of romantic idealism than a wine-skin, the
knight addresses, without misgiving, his lofty dissertations on the
glories and the duties of chivalry--the squire responding after
his fashion. And thus these two hold converse, contentedly
incomprehensible to each other, and with no suspicion that they are as
incapable of interchanging ideas as the inhabitants of two different
planets. With what heart-stirring mirth, and yet with what strangely
deeper feeling of the infinite variety of human nature, do we follow
their converse throughout! Yet Quixote and Sancho are not more
life-like and human, nor nearer together at one point and farther
apart at another, than are Walter Shandy and his brother. The squat
little Spanish peasant is not more gloriously incapable of following
the chivalric vagaries of his master than the simple soldier is of
grasping the philosophic crotchets of his brother. Both couples are
in sympathetic contact absolute and complete at one point; at another
they are "poles asunder" both of them. And in both contrasts there
is that sense of futility and failure, of alienation and
misunderstanding--that element of underlying pathos, in short, which
so strangely gives its keenest salt to humour. In both alike there is
the same suggestion of the Infinite of disparity bounding the finite
of resemblance--of the Incommensurable in man and nature, beside which
all minor uniformities sink into insignificance.

The pathetic element which underlies and deepens the humour is, of
course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways. In