Mambrino's Helmet 



delusion of Mambrino's helmet. The scene being thus in 

 action, the continuation is easy enough. The barber runs 

 away ; Don Quixote rejoices over the helmet ; and Sancho, 

 with his practical eye to solid advantages, exchanges his 

 ass's shabby harness for that of the barber. 



The difficulty and the triumph of invention was to get 

 the copper shaving-dish reasonably on the barber's head ; 

 or rather to hit upon the incident of a barber so peculiarly 

 helmed. This appears to me to be so difficult a thing to 

 have imagined, that I should prefer the supposition that 

 Cervantes had actually seen some barber with his basin on 

 his head to keep his new hat from the rain ; and being 

 struck with some vague similitude of a helmet, his imagina- 

 tion fell to shaping circumstances in which such an incident 

 could be employed. As it must have been an imaginative 

 lunatic, full of strange ideas of knight-errantry, who could 

 be fairly carried av/ay by a belief in its being really a 

 helmet, it is possible that hence may have arisen the very 

 idea of a Don Quixote, Indeed, this apparently very 

 random theory is strengthened by the fact that on Don 

 Quixote's first appearance, his very earliest difficulty is with 

 the imperfect celada^ which was just defective in that part 

 (the morion^ I think) which the shaving-dish was destined 

 to supply. In imaginative minds there is no telling how 

 small a matter may be the nucleus round which materials 

 gather, that again suggest other and larger matters, so that 

 the original idea often becomes merely an episode in the 

 complete result. 



As we were ascending the long hill which rises from the 

 river up to the town, the sun went down over Jaen, and 

 the red sunset, slanting along the wide valley, lit up the 

 broad craggy shoulders of the mountain-range facing Baeza 

 to the south. Along the darkening plain a few winding 



253 



