"THE JEWS, more numerous in Poland than in any other country, multiply every day, and already form a very import ant part of the population of the country." Sober, economical, and industrious, they would have all the qualities essential in mercantile traffic, were their character free from the tarnish of craftiness, a want of good faith, and the trickery which they employ in their transactions. Having interest only for their guide, they are as yet far from meriting that consideration and confidence which is usually granted in commerce; and yet they have contrived to get possession of the principal share of the internal traffic, that great branch of national riches. They might thereby come to constitute one of the chief links of society, if their religion, their laws, and their customs, did not prescribe to them interests absolutely ecxlusive in their nature. It is this absolute insulation, spiritual and personal, if I may so speak, that makes them a se parate people in the very heart of Poland. Probably this is the source of that hatred and contempt with which they are treated, and which, instead of modifying by degrees all that is pernicious to society in their sttuation, only serves to concentrate them still more. The Jews have hitherto proved a stumbling-block to our legislators, and nothing has been done by the present sove reign relative to them. his prudence with experience. Their chief? abuses, however, have been in some degree repressed by placing checks upon the manufacture and sale of spirits by the Jews, who made this traffic a terrible engine in the corruption and ruin of the peasantry, of whose property they thus obtained the disposal. They have also, in general, been ejected by the country gentlemen, from the inns which they formerly tenanted, and which they kept in the state of desolation and discomfort we have already described, and which rendered it necessary to carry beds, kitchen utensils, and provisions on every journey. In this state of things, (which is now in a great measure done away,) it is pleasing to know that the deficiencies of the inns were counterbalanced by the hospitality of the gentry, where the traveller was sought for, and met with that welcome and attention, that affability and politeness, which have ever characterized the nation of Poland." We take leave of this little work by saying, that it is elegantly got up, both in typography and embellishments; that it is usefully and neatly put to gether, and that it contains ten times as much information as is generally to be found in such publications. "There have in the last two years (1819, 1820,) appeared many works dedicated to the improvement of this people. The counsellor Müller, a literary character of distinction, promises a work on this subject, which is eagerly expected by the public." + These observations apply to the Jews throughout the world; and, though charity would look forward with hope to an amendment as well of their faith and character, as of their condition in society, we behold with awe, in their present insulated, and, alas! detested situation, the accomplishment of prophecy, and the fulfilment of the curse which hangs over them. A NEW EDITION OF DON QUIXOTE. We have no intention or inclination to entertain our readers with any remarks of our own on the great masterpiece of Cervantes. Indeed nothing, we think, can be more sickening than the affectation, not uncommon among our modern reviewers, of entering up on long disquisitions concerning the merits of authors quite familiar to all the world-whose fame is settled whose works are immortal-to be ignorant of whom is to be ignorant of every thing. We cannot, however, omit the opportunity of calling attention to this new edition of Don Quixote-general attention, we are quite sure, it must, ere long, command, and general favour, we think, almost as certainly. We have had in England no less than four distinct translations of the best of all romances, and none of them bad ones; but it strikes us as something very strange, that until now we should never have had any edition whatever of any one of these translations, containing notes, to render the text intelligible. The few miserable scraps commonly found at the foot of the page, in the editions either of Smollett or Mot The History of that ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote de la Mancha; translated from the Spanish, by Motteux. A new Edition, with Copious Notes; and an Essay on the Life and Writings of Cervantes. In five volumes, 8vo; Hurst, Robinson, and Co. London; Censtable and Co. Edinburgh. VOL. XI. 40 teux, are not worth mentioning. The text of Don Quixote, full as it is of allusions to history and romance, remained, to all intents and purposes, without annotation, comment, or explanation; and of course, of the readers of Don Quixote, very few ever understood the meaning of Cervantes. A thousand of his happiest hits went for nothing and a Spanish reader, with a translation of the bare text of Shakespeare in his hands, had just as good a chance to understand Shakespeare, as the English reader had to understand the author, who, though writing in a different form, is, perhaps more than any other the world has produced, entitled to be classed with Shakespeare. This great blank has now been ably and fully supplied; and the English reader is in possession of an edition of Don Quixote, not only infinitely superior to any that ever before appeared in England, but, so far as we are able to judge, much more complete and satisfactory than any one which exists in the literature of Spain herself. The merit of devising and proposing such an edition rests, we believe, with the late much regretted JOHN BALLANTYNE, who did not live to see the accomplishment of his favourite plan. Had John Ballantyne lived, we doubt not he would have endeavoured to proeure for the works of the author of Waverley a similar accompaniment of annotation and illustration-but we hope the publishers of that author will, ere long, think of doing so; for, in truth, we have no sort of doubt that many of those romances, abounding as they do in minute and careless allusions to old songs and old tales, are almost as imperfectly understood, at least out of Scotland, as the romance of Cervantes has hitherto been here and elsewhere. Mr Dunlop, who, in his his tory of fiction, has a most excellent chapter on Don Quixote, speaks as follows: "The great excellence, however, of the work of Cervantes, lies in the readiness with which the hero conceives, and the gravity with which he maintains, the most absurd and fantastic ideas, but which always bear some analogy to the adventures in romances of chivalry. In order to place particular incidents of these fables in a ludicrous point of view, they were most carefully perused and studied by Cervantes. The Spanish romances, however, seem chiefly to have engaged his attention, and Amadis de Gaul appears to have been used as his text. Indeed, there are so many allusions to romances of chivalry, and so much of the amusement arises from the happy imitation of these works, and the ridicu lous point of view in which the incidents that compose them are placed, that I cannot help attributing some affectation to those, who, unacquainted with the species of writing, pretend to possess a lively relish for the adventures of Don Quixote. It is not to be doubted, however, that a considerable por tion of the pleasure which we feel in the perusal of Don Quixote, is derived from the delineation of the scenery with which it abounds the magnificent sierras-romantic streams and delightful vallies of a land which seems as it were the peculiar. region of romance, from Cordoba to Roncesvalles. There is also in the work a happy mixture of the stories and names of the Moors, a people who, in a wonderful degree, impress the imagination and affect the heart, in consequence of their grandeur, gallantry, and misfortunes; and partly, perhaps, from the many plaintive ballads in which their achievements and fate are recorded." It has been apparently the object of this edition to render all these allusions, of which this intelligent critic speaks, intelligible; and we, in so far as a hasty perusal goes, are of opinion that its object has been completely accomplished. The text used is that of MOTTEUX, and this is, we think, out of all sight, the richest and best-although the editor himself seems to hinty now and then, something not unlike a partiality for the much older version of Shelton. Shelton's Quixote is undoubtedly well worthy of being stu died by the English scholar; but it is far too antiquated an affair to serve the purposes of the English reader. That of Motteux is, if not so literally accurate, quite as essentially and substantially so; and Motteux, the translator of Cervantes and Rabelais, possesses a native humour which no other translator that we ever met with has approached. It is only by extracts that we can hope to give any idea of the manner in which the present edition has been executed; and, therefore, we shall quote a few specimens without further preamble. The first volume contains an Essay on Cervantes' Life and Writings, in which the reader will meet with many particulars which must be new to him,-unless he happens to have seen the Spanish LIVES written by Pellicer and the Royal Academy, "Even had Cervantes died without writing Don Quixote, his plays, (above all, his Interludes and his Numancia ;) his Galatea, the beautiful dream of his youth; his Persiles, the last effort of his chastened and purified taste; and his fine poem of the Voyage of Parnassus, must have given him at least the second place in the most productive age of Spanish genius. In regard to all the graces of Castilian compo. sition, even these must have left him with out a rival, either in that, or in any other age of the literature of his country. For, while all the other great Spanish authors of the brilliant CENTURY of Spain, (from 1560 to 1656,) either deformed their writings by utter carelessness, or weakened them by a too studious imitation of foreign models, Cervantes alone seized the happy medium, and was almost from the begin ning of his career, Spanish without rude ness, and graceful without stiffness or affectation. As a master of Spanish style, he is now, both in and out of Spain, acknowledged to be first without a second; but this, which might have secured the immortality and satisfied the ambition of any man, is, after all, scarcely worthy of being mentioned in regard to the great creator of the only species of writing which can be considered as the peculiar property of mo dern genius. In that spacious field, of which Cervantes must be honoured as the first discoverer, the finest spirits of his own, and of every other European country, have since been happily and successfully employed. The whole body of modern romance and novel writers must be considered as his followers and imitators; but among them all, so varied and so splendid soever as have been their merits, it is, perhaps, not going too far to say, that, as yet, Cervantes has found but one rival. "The learned editor of the Spanish Academy's edition of 1781 has thought fit to occupy the space of a very considerable volume with an inquiry into the particular merits of Don Quixote. I refer to his laborious dissertation all those who are unwilling to admire any thing without knowing why they admire it or rather, why an erudite Doctor of Madrid deemed it wor thy of his admiration. In our own country, almost every thing that any sensible man would wish to hear said about Don Quixote has been said over and over again by writers, whose sentiments I should be sorry to repeat without their words-and whose words I should scarcely be pardoned for repeating. "Mr Spence, the author of a late ingenious tour in Spain, seems to believe, what I should have supposed was entirely exploded, that Cervantes wrote his books for the purpose of ridiculing knight-errantry; and that, unfortunately for his country, his satire put out of fashion, not merely the absurd misdirection of the spirit of heroism, but that sacred spirit itself. But the prac tice of knight-errantry, if ever there was such a thing, had, it is well known, been out of date long before the age in which Don Quixote appeared; and as for the spirit of heroism, I think few will sympa thize with the critic who deems it possible that an individual, to say nothing of a na tion, should have imbibed any contempt, either for that or any other elevating principle of our nature, from the manly page of Cervantes. One of the greatest triumphs of his skill is the success with which he continually prevents us from confounding the absurdities of the knight-errant with the generous aspirations of the cavalier. For the last, even in the midst of madness, we respect Don Quixote himself. We pity the delusion, we laugh at the situation, but we revere, in spite of every ludicrous accompaniment, and of every insane exertion, the noble spirit of the Castillian gentleman; and we feel in every page, that we are perusing the work, not of a heartless scoffer, a cold-blooded satirist, but of a calm and enlightened mind, in which true wisdom had grown up by the side of true experience, of one whose genius moved in a sphere too lofty for mere derision-of one who knew human nature too well not to respect it-of one, finally, who, beneath a mask of apparent lenity, aspired to commune with the noblest principles of humanity; and, above all, to give form and expression to the noblest feelings of the national character of Spain. The idea of giving a ludicrous picture of an imaginary personage, conceiving himself to be called upon, in the midst of modern manners and institutions, to exercise the perilous vocation of an Amadis or a Belianis, might perhaps have occurred to a hundred men as easily as to Cervantes. The same general idea has been at the root of many As a specimen of the style of his criticisms take this: he approves of the introduc tion of a Roque Guinart in Don Quixote, because in the Odyssey there is a Polyphe mus, and in the Eneid there is a Cacus. And yet this man must have at least read Cervantes' own preface to his work, in which that pedantic species of criticism is so powerfally ridiculed, "If thou namest any giant in the book, forget not Goliah of Gath," &c. subsequent works, written in derision of real or imaginary follies; but Cervantes is distinguished from the authors of all these works, not merely by the originality of his general conception and plan, but as strongly, and far more admirably, by the nature of the superstructure he has reared upon the basis of his initiatory fiction. "Others have been content with the display of wit, satire, eloquence and some of them have displayed all these with the most admirable skill and power; but he who rises from the perusal of Don Quixote, thinks of the wit, the satire, the eloquence of Cervantes, but as the accessories and lesser ornaments of a picture of national life and manners, by far the most perfect and glowing that was ever embodied in one piece of composition,-a picture, the possession of which alone will be sufficient to preserve, in freshness and honour, the Spanish name and character, even after the last traces of that once noble character may have been obliterated, and perhaps that name itself forgotten among the fantastic innovations of a degenerated people. Don Quixote is thus the peculiar property, as well as the peculiar pride of the Spaniards. In another, and in a yet larger point of view, it is the property and pride of the whole of the cultivated world-for Don Quixote is not merely to be regarded as a Spanish cavalier, filled with a Spanish madness, and exhibiting that madness in the eyes of Spaniards of every condition and rank of life, from the peasant to the grandee, he is also the type of a more universal madness-he is the symbol of Imagination, continually struggling and contrasted with Reality he represents the eternal warfare between Enthusiasm and Necessity-the eternal discrepancy between the aspirations and the occupations of man -the omnipotence and the vanity of human dreams. And thus, perhaps, it is not too much to say, that Don Quixote, the wittiest and the most laughable of all books -a book which has made many a one, besides the young student on the banks of the Manzanares, look as if he were out of himself is a book, upon the whole, calculated to produce something very different from a merely mirthful impression. "The serious style of Don Quixote, in the original language, preserves the most perfect harmony with this seriousness of purpose. The solemn, eloquent, impassioned Don Quixote, the shrewd, earthseeking, yet affectionate Sancho, do not fill us with mirth, because they seem to be mirthful themselves. From the beginning of the book to the end, they are both intensely serious characters-the one never loses sight of the high destinies to which he has devoted himself the other wanders amidst sierras and moonlight forests, and glides on the beautiful stream of the Ebro, without forgetting for a moment the hope of pelf that has drawn him from his village-the insula which has been promised by his master to him-and which he does not think of the less, because he does not know what it is, and because he does know that it has been promised by a madman. The contrasts perpetually afforded by the characters of Quixote and Sancho, the contrasts not less remarkable between the secondary objects and individuals introduced-as these are in reality, and as they appear to the hero,-all the contrasts in a work where, more successfully than in any other, the art of contrast has been exhibited,-would be comparatively feeble and ineffectual, but for the never-failing contrast between the idea of the book, and the style in which it is written. Never was the fleeting essence of wit so richly embalmed for eternity. "In our time, it is certain, almost all' readers must be contented to lose a great part of the delight with which Don Quixote was read on its first appearance. The class of works, to parody and ridicule which it was Cervantes' first and most evident purpose, has long since passed into almost total oblivion; and therefore a thousand traits of felicitous satire must needs escape the notice even of those best able to seize the general scope, and appreciate the general merits of the history of The Ingenious Hidalgo. Mr Southey's admirable editions of Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of England, have indeed revived among us something of the once universal taste for the old and stately prose romance of chivalry ;but it must be had in mind that Cervantes wrote his book for the purpose not of satirizing these works-which are among the most interesting relics of the rich, fanciful, and lofty genius of the middle ages-but of extirpating the race of slavish imitators, who, in his day, were deluging all Europe, and more particularly Spain, with eternal caricatures of the venerable old romance. Of the Amadis, (the plan and outline of which he for the most part parodied merely because it was the best known work of its order,) Cervantes has been especially careful to record his own high admiration; and if the Canon of Toledo be introduced, as is generally supposed, to express the opinions of Cervantes himself, the author of Don Quixote had certainly, at one pe riod of his life, entertained some thoughts of writing, not a humorous parody, but a serious imitation, of the Amadis. "I shall conclude what I have to say of the author of Don Quixote with one remark-namely, that Cervantes was an old man when he wrote his masterpiece of comic romance; that nobody has ever written successful novels, when young, but Smollett; and that Humphrey Clinker, written in the last year of Smollett's life, is, in every particular of conception, execution, and purpose, as much superior to Roderick Random, as Don Quixote is to the Galatea. "It remains to say a few words concerning this new edition of the first of modern romances. The translation is that of Motteux-and this has been preferred, simply because, in spite of many defects and inaccuracies, it is by far the most spirited. Shelton, the oldest of all our translators, is the only one entitled to be compared with Motteux. Perhaps he is even more suc cessful in imitating the serious air' of Cervantes; but it is much to be doubted, whether the English reader of our time would not be more wearied with the obsolete turns of his phraseology, than delight ed with its occasional felicities. "In the Notes appended to these volumes, an attempt has been made to furnish a complete explanation of the numerous historical allusions in Don Quixote, as well as of the particular traits in romantic writing, which it was Cervantes' purpose to ridicule in the person of his hero. Without having access to such information as has now been thrown together, it may be doubted whether any English reader has ever been able thoroughly to seize and command the meaning of Cervantes throughout his inimitable fiction. From the Spanish editions of Bowle, Pellicer, and the Academy, the greater part of the materials has been extracted; but a very considerable portion, and perhaps not the least interesting, has been sought for in the old histories and chronicles, with which the Spaniards of the 16th century were familiar. Of the many old Spanish ballads, quoted or alluded to by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, metrical translations have uniformly been inserted in the Notes; and as by far the greater part of these compositions are altogether new to the English public, it is hoped this part of the work may afford some pleasure to those who delight in comparing the early literatures of the different nations of Christendom." We shall now proceed to give a few specimens of the notes appended to these volumes. They are very copious; commonly as much as 40 or 50 closely-printed pages to each of the five volumes of which the edition consists. The name of BERNARD DE CARPIO, appears continually in the text of Don Quixote; but, except the satisfactory nota bene, given at the foot of one page, viz. "This was an old Spanish Captain, much renowned in their ballads and chronicles," no attempt had ever been made to introduce the English reader into any acquaintance with him. Among these notes, we find a great many curious particulars concerning him, collected from chronicles and ballads. We shall quote part of the first note in which he is mentioned. "Bernardo del Carpio. Of this personage, we find little or nothing in the French romances of Charlemagne. He be longs exclusively to Spanish History, or rather to Spanish Romance; in which the honour is claimed for him of slaying the famous Orlando, or Roland, the nephew of Charlemagne, in the fatal field of Roncesvalles. His history is as follows: "The continence which procured for Alonzo, who succeeded to the precarious throne of the Christians, in the Asturias, about 795, the epithet of The Chaste, was not universal in his family. By an intrigue with Sancho, Count of Saldenha, Donna Ximena, sister of this virtuous prince, bore a son. Some historians attempt to gloss. over this incident by alleging that a private marriage had taken place betwixt the lovers; but King Alphonso, who was well nigh sainted for living only in platonic union with his own wife Bertha, took the scandal greatly to heart. He shut the peccant princess up in a cloister, and imprisoned her gallant in the Castle of Luna, where he caused him to be deprived of sight. Fortunately, his wrath did not extend to the offspring of their stolen affections, the famous Bernardo del Carpio. When the youth had grown up to manhood, Alphonso, according to the Spanish historians, invited the Emperor Charlemagne into Spain, and having neglected to raise up heirs for the kingdom of the Goths in the ordinary manner, he proposed the inheritance of his throne as the price of the alliance of Charles. But the nobility, headed by Bernardo del Carpio, remonstrated against the king's choice of a successor, and would on no account consent to receive a Frenchman as heir of their crown. phonso himself repented of the invitation he had given to Charlemagne, and when that champion of Christendom came to expel the Moors from Spain, he found the Al conscientious and chaste Alphonso had united with the infidels against him. An engagement took place in the renowned pass of Roncesvalles, in which the French were defeated, and the celebrated Roland, or Orlando, was slain. The victory was ascribed chiefly to the prowess of Bernardo del Carpio. "In several of the old ballads, which redo, his royal uncle is represented as having cord the real or imaginary feats of Bernarshewn but little gratitude, for the great champion's services, in the campaign king had not relented in favour of Don against Charlemagne. It appears that the Sancho, although he had come under some promise of that sort to his son, at the period when his (the son's) services were |