The adamantine steel! O shining light, O beacon, polestar, path and guide of all Who, scorning slumber and the lazy down, Adopt the toilsome life of bloodstained arms! To thee, great hero who all praise transcends, La Mancha’s lustre and Iberia’s star, Don Quixote, wise as brave, to thee I say⁠— For peerless Dulcinea del Toboso Her pristine form and beauty to regain, ’Tis needful that thy esquire Sancho shall, On his own sturdy buttocks bared to heaven, Three thousand and three hundred lashes lay, And that they smart and sting and hurt him well. Thus have the authors of her woe resolved. And this is, gentles, wherefore I have come.

“By all that’s good,” exclaimed Sancho at this, “I’ll just as soon give myself three stabs with a dagger as three, not to say three thousand, lashes. The devil take such a way of disenchanting! I don’t see what my backside has got to do with enchantments. By God, if Señor Merlin has not found out some other way of disenchanting the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, she may go to her grave enchanted.”