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The Semicentenary Celebration of the Founding of the University of California With an Account of the Conference on International Relations
The Semicentenary Celebration of the Founding of the University of California With an Account of the Conference on International Relations Author:University of California General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1919 Subjects: Education / Higher Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select... more » from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Posterity has decreed, and rightly so, that only his Exemplary Novels and Don Quixote may be placed among the world's master works. Few, indeed, today are the readers of his Numantia, his Persiles, his Galatea. On the other hand his Don Quixote has reached an incredibly large number of editions; it has been translated into more languages than any other book except the Bible; it has never been denied its unique place. What drew Cervantes out of a commonplace career and caused him to write in his old age a book that has delighted innumerable readers ? His literary ventures had not raised him above his associates, and without fame or income, he saw himself obliged to cope once more with prosaic realities, privation, suffering; to bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, which manifested itself in the insolence of office and in the spurning of patient merit. For many years he saw himself forced to fulfill tasks which to us at least could not be more uncongenial. As government employee with an insignificant daily wage he journeyed over Spain, and in his irksome rounds stored up those infinite details of the inner as well as the outer life of the men and women made immortal in his narrative. In Madrid he had remained more or less an imitator; in the great world he found himself without a model, and there matured in his brain not only a novel conception of the art of fiction, but a number of living creations, episodes, and descriptions which few have dared to imitate and none have equalled. But not all original works are enduring, nor ar...« less